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UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


GIFT   OF   CAPT.   AND    MRS. 
PAUL   MCBRIDE  PERIGORD 


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THE   MORAL   IDEAL. 


\V 


THE 


Moral  Ideal 


a  Ibietoric  Stub^ 


BY 


JULIA    WEDGWOOD 


n^^cc. 


tjfuv  TrdvTwv  xpVl^o.Tuyv  nirpov  ixv  et-q  fxd\i<XTa,  Kal  ttoXi)  fidWov 

ij  TTov  Tis,  ws  (paaLV,  dvdpunros 

Plato,  l^ges 


ScconU  dEUition 


LONDON 
T  R  ij  B N  E R    &    CO.,    L  U  D  G  A T  P:    HILL 

1889 
[AH  righls  resftfed] 


1 4  4  ;$ .  .i 


'SaQantjne  Jpresa 

BALLANTYNE,    HANSON    AND   CO. 
EDINBURGH  AND   LONDON 


•  •  • 


«  •  •  • 


0 

:0 


p. 


NOTE  TO   SECOND   EDITION. 


S^      The  only  change  made  In  this   edition  is,   that 

^       I  have  added  one  or  two  out  of  the  many  addi- 

gj      tional  references   I   should  have  wished  to  give, 

and   that   I   have   tried  to   make   clearer   one   or 

two    passages    which    had    either    been    thought 

obscure  or  misunderstood. 


TO   AN    OLD   FRIEND. 


The  following  pages,  little  as  they  justify  such 
a  description,  represent  the  thoughts  and  endea- 
vours of  more  than  twenty  years.  When,  after 
so  long  an  effort,  we  have  reached  a  stage  where 
we  are  forced  to  recognize,  with  however  little 
satisfaction  to  ourselves,  that  something  is  con- 
cluded which  must  stand  as  the  goal  of  endeavour, 
and  take  its  chance  as  a  chapter  of  achievement, 
we  look  around  for  some  sympathizing  spectator 
of  our  work,  some  criticism  tinged  with  the  desire 
to  approve.  You  will  not  wonder  that  at  such 
a  moment  I  turn  to  an  old  friend  ;  you  will  recog- 
nize it  as  natural  that  I  should  address  words 
meant  for  the  public,  in  the  first  instance  to  you. 

The  title  I  have  chosen,  though  I  can  find  none 
better,  does  not  cover  the  ground  I  have  sought 
to  explore.  I  should  better  have  described  my 
aim  had  I  called  the  book  a  History  of  Human 
Aspiration  ;  but  while   such    a  title  would  have 


viii  TO  AN  OLD  FRIEND. 

seemed  an  ironic  introduction  to  any  volume  of 
its  size  and  informal  character,  the  sketches  which 
follow  cannot  be  called    a   History  of  anything. 
To  an  ordinary  reader,  the  mere  list  of  headings 
will  suggest  the  debris  of  a  gigantic  scheme,  with- 
out a  centre  and  without  a  scale,  begun  at  inter- 
vals here  and    there,    and    abandoned    as    often. 
The  review  of  human  thought  which,  starting  from 
an  attempt  to  follow  the   moral  development  of 
the  Aryan  race  in  its  early  branches,  lingers  over 
the  utterance  of  an  individual,  or  quits  all  limi- 
tation of  race  and    nation    to    describe  the  feel- 
ings of  an  age  and    the    speculations  roused  by 
a   dawning   faith — such    a    review    may  well    be 
thought,  in  its  neglect  of  all  obvious  method,  to 
embody  the  mere  fancies   of   a  dreamer.      I  am 
not  afraid  that  it  will  bear  that  aspect  to  you.     In 
the  execution  of  my  design  you  will  certainly  find 
much  failure  and  probably  some  blunders,  while 
you  will  look  in  vain  for  a  suggestion  or  an  idea 
not  already  familiar  to  you ;  but  you  will  not  be 
offended   by  the    apparent    desultoriness    of  the 
scheme.     Where  the  space  given  to  description 
keeps  a   common    measure    with    the    period  of 
time  described,  there,  we  may  be  sure,  but  little 
of  the  inner  life  is    revealed   to  the  reader.     In 


TO  AN  OLD  FRIEND.  ix 

the   perspective  of  an   individual  memory,  years 
dwindle  to  a  point,  and  moments  expand  to  an 
age.     A    true  biography,  were    such   a  one  pos- 
sible, would  measure  its  progress  by  some  other 
standard    than    the    dates    which    mark   advance 
from  the  cradle  to  the  tomb  ;  and  the  historian 
can  hardly  more   than    the   biographer  afford  to 
forget   that,    as    it    has    been  finely   said,    "  God 
has  so  arranged   the  chronometry  of  our  spirits 
that  there  shall  be  thousands  of  silent  moments 
between  the  striking  hours."     The  criticism  that 
the  writer  of  a  moral  history  follows  no  obvious 
scale  and  respects  no  obvious  limits  is  in  fact  a 
recosfnition  that   he   has  is^nored  all   that  would 
shackle  him  in  recording  those  throbs  and  pul- 
sations which  make  up  the  true  life  of  Man. 

The  true  life  of  Man !  there  you  at  least  will 
be  with  me.  In  asserting  that  the  history  of 
aspiration  is  the  clue  to  all  history,  I  shall  not 
appear  to  you  to  make  any  extravagant  claim 
for  the  Unseen.  You  believe,  even  more  firmly 
than  I  do,  that  a  partial  and  incomplete  revelation 
of  what  men  have  sought  to  be,  tells  us  more  of 
their  true  nature,  than  does  the  most  exhaustive 
record  possible  of  what  they  have  accomplished. 
"The  word  outlasts  the  deed,"  sa)'s  a  singer  who 


X  TO  AN  OLD  FRIEND. 

saw  the  greatest  deeds  of  Greece.  The  member 
of  a  less  vocal  race  may  expand  that  saying  ;  the 
thought  outlasts  the  word.  Aspiration  exceeds 
utterance,  as  utterance  exceeds  achievement.  The 
endeavour  to  illustrate  this  truth  for  those  who 
believe  it,  to  set  beside  the  picture  of  human 
action  the  susfQfestion  of  those  feelings  in  which 
it  finds  its  spring — this  is  an  aim  in  which  I  have 
no  doubt  of  your  approval.  As  I  lay  down  the 
pen  I  find  that  conviction  Enough  for  me  ;  and 
although  your  sympathy  perchance  be  given 
rather  to  the  worker  than  the  work,  I  know  that 
if  you  can  care  for  what  I  have  written,  sooner 
or  later  one  or  two  others  will  feel  its  meaning, 
and  enter  into  the  vast  consolation  and  hope 
bound  up  in  the  thoughts  I  have  striven  to 
follow,  and  the  convictions  which  they  have 
strengthened,  deepened,  and  purified. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

PAGE 

INDIA  AND   THE  PRIMAL  UNITY I 

CHAPTER  n. 
PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION   OF   CONFLICT    ....        48 

CHAPTER  HI. 

GREECE,   AND  THE   HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES  .  .  .        81 

CHAPTER  IV. 

ROME  AND   THE  REIGN   OF   LAW '    IjO 

CHAPTER  V. 

THE  AGE  OF   DEATH 189 

CHAPTER  \T. 

THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA 239 

CHAPTER  Vn. 

THE   PROBLEM   OF   EVIL 277 

CHAPTER  \'ni. 
THE   FALL  OF   MAN 329 

CHAPTER  IX. 

THE   HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY 373 


The  moral  ideal. 


CHAPTER   I. 
INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY. 

No  deeper  cleft  divides  human   spirits  than   that  which 
separates  the  faith  possible  to  men  for  whom  Evil  means 
a  mere  negation,  a   mere  shadow,  a  form   of  ignorance, 
from   that  which  regards    it    as    an   actual    existence,   a 
real  antagonism   to  good.      A   clearer  light,  it  may  be, 
revealing  in  each  division   its   line  of  cleavage  from  its 
opposite,  will   show   each   alone  as   the  half  of  a   truth 
too  large  for  our  minds,  at   their  present  stage,  to  take 
in  ;   but  here  and   now   it  remains   true  that  almost  all 
other    antitheses    which    divide    human    spirits    either 
involve  or  spring  from   this    contrast.      So  far  as   men 
are   capable    of  logical    thought,    so   far  as   their    ideas 
are  combined   in   any  coherent  whole  (and   these  quali- 
fications  cover   many  apparent    exceptions),   those  who 
diverge  here  will  be  found  to  arrive  at  different  conclu- 
sions on  almost   all   the   important  questions  which  can 
exercise  the  mind   of  man.      Their  logical  and  obvious 
antagonism  will   prove  the  smallest  part  of  that  which 
is  actual ;  on  each  side  separate  assumptions  will  colour 
common  belief;   the  two  parties  will  draw  different  con- 

A 


2  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

elusions  from  premises  apparently  the  same,  and  dis- 
cover unconquerable  divergence,  where  both  seem  to  seek 
a  common  goal. 

The  issue,  as  it  is  one  of  the  deepest  by  which  human 
spirits  are  kept  apart,  so  it  is  apparently  one  of  the  oldest. 
Almost  the  earliest  event  discernible  to  the  straining 
eye  of  history  in  the  dim  twilight  of  the  world's  dawn 
is  the  schism  which  consummated  what  must  have  been 
the  long  experience  of  this  divergence — which  showed 
the  twin  children  of  young  humanity  that  their  paths 
lay  in  different  directions  and  led  them  to  part  company 
and  increase  their  remoteness  at  every  step.  The 
faiths  of  Persia  and  India,  in  their  complete  develop- 
ment, afford  typical  specimens,  respectively,  of  that 
which  looks  upon  Evil  as  an  antagonistic  principle  to 
good,  and  that  which  sees  it  as  a  mere  illusion ;  and 
during  the  centuries  which  the  twin  tribes  who  after- 
wards held  these  beliefs  spent  together  in  the  high- 
lands of  Western  Asia  they  must  have  discovered  the 
profound  and  far-reaching  character  of  the  moral  differ- 
ences which,  culminating  in  religion,  influence  the  whole 
of  life  and  thought.  The  Rig-Veda,^  the  oldest  sacred 
book  in  the  world,  appears  in  parts  at  all  events  a 
record  of  this   earlier  condition,  though   its  existence  as 


1  The  hymns  of  which  the  Rig-Veda  is  composed  were  collected  about  looo 
B.C.,  and  must,  of  course,  be  themselves  considerably  older.  Some  of  them 
are  even  supposed  to  express  the  beliefs  of  the  Indo-Persian  branch  of  the 
Aryan  race  before  the  separation  of  its  two  members,  a  view  which  would  take 
back  these  utterances  to  the  dim  dawn  of  civilization  on  our  planet.  Their  age 
is  brought  home  to  the  mind  by  the  fact  that  they  contain  not  a  single  allusion 
to  writing,  a  fact  the  significance  of  which,  as  Prof.  Max  Miiller  observes 
("  History  of  Sanscrit  Literature,"  p.  497),  will  be  obvious  to  the  reader  who 
recalls  the  frequent  allusions  to  writing,  ' '  the  book,"  &c. ,  in  the  Old  Testament. 
The  geographical  scene  of  these  hymns  is  the  Indus.  "  In  India,"  says  Dr. 
Roth  in  his  address  to  the  meeting  of  orientalists  at  Darmstadt,  1845  (translated 
by  John  Muir  and  published  at  Calcutta  by  Government),  "  the  Veda  occupies 
the  place  of  Homer."  This  comparison  gathers  up  the  whole  contrast  of 
Indian  and  Hellenic  life. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  3 

a  scripture  is  subsequent  to  the  separation.  It  depicts 
the  dawning  aspirations  of  young  humanity,  and  would 
not,  to  one  who  knew  no  further  development  of  the 
feehngs  there  chronicled,  suggest  any  latent  divergence 
among  those  whose  spiritual  life  it  expressed  ;  but  looking 
back  from  the  developed  faiths  of  a  later  day,  we  may 
find  them  both  here  in  germ,  though  not  with  equal 
distinctness.  If  we  take  our  stand  on  the  religion  of 
the  Veda,  we  may  regard  the  Pantheism  of  later  India 
as  the  plant  fully  developed  on  its  native  soil ;  while 
the  dualism  of  Persia  is  a  young  shoot  transplanted  to 
another  climate,  and  bearing  evidence  of  changed  circum- 
stance and  new  influences.  But  both  lay  in  embryo  in 
one  seed,  and  we  find  within  the  earliest  religion  of 
man  the  inchoate  expression  of  the  deepest  divergence 
of  these  two  ideals,  as  perchance  we  shall  find  in  the 
most  complete  and  perfected  religion  of  man  an  ex- 
pression of  their  fullest  harmony.  A  primeval  race 
finding  in  Light  the  symbol  of  all  that  is  Divine  was 
divided  by  the  development  of  these  tendencies  into  two 
branches,  one  of  which  found  in  Darkness  the  symbolic 
expression  of  evil,  while  the  other  saw  in  Darkness  no 
more  than  the  passing  shadow  which  symbolizes  man's 
weakness  and  illusion,  and  looked  upon  all  creation  as 
the  outcome  of  one  vast  Unity.  The  two  religions 
are  perennial  forms  of  human  faith,  but  the  symbolism 
by  which  they  were  expressed  belongs  to  the  circum- 
stances of  the  infant  race ;  and  for  us,  in  so  different 
a  condition,  it  is  not  to  be  entered  into  without  an  effort 
of  imagination. 

Light  and  darkness  form  the  great  contrast  of  the 
outward  world  for  all  races  and  all  generations,  but 
the  contrast,  as  it  is  exhibited  to  civilized  eyes  in  the 
rhythmic  succession  of  day  and  night,  is  no  contrast  of 
good   and   evil.      A    darkness   which    we   can    dispel   at 


4  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

will,  and  which  comes  upon  us  amid  the  safety  and  con- 
veniences of  modern  civiHzation,  is  a  type  rather  of  rest 
than  of  evil.      But  to  a  race  for  whom  darkness  meant 
helplessness  in  peril,  the  possible  approach  of  the  most 
dreaded  foe,  the  alternation  of  light  and  darkness  would 
repeat  the  familiar  imagery  of  conflict,  and  associate  the 
unseen  powers  of  nature  with  recollections  of  defeat  and 
victory.      The  dawn  of  a  new  day,  to  men  who  had  no 
light   but  daylight,   was   the  return   into   safety  from  a 
plunge   into   an    ab3'ss    of  peril ;    the  joy  which   hailed 
the   morning  must   have   gathered   up   into   itself  every 
association   of  deliverance,  and   become   the  t^^pe  of  all 
thankfulness    and    all    worship.      The    different    repre- 
sentations of  this  triumph  were,  by  their  very  variet}^, 
fitted  to  give,  breadth  and  solidity  to   the  impersonations 
which  they  created  ;   the  one  unique  daily  victory  of  light 
over  darkness  had  its  more  gradual,  more  variable  re- 
petition in  the  return  of  spring  ;    and    the    combat   was 
represented  before  the  imaginative  eyes  of  those  early 
races   in    a   still   more    vivid    form,    when    in    the    dark 
thunder-cloud  the  principle  of  light  seemed  imprisoned, 
and  then  burst   forth    with  dazzling   suddenness.      But 
the  typical  event  representing  the  triumph  of  beneficent 
power  was  the  dawn  of  day,  and  the  hymns  which  greet 
it  gather  up   all   that   a  young   and   vigorous    race   can 
express  of  thankfulness,  relief,  and  hope.^      They  breathe 
in    every    line    the    exuberant   gladness    of   young    life, 
unfettered    by   inherited   ills,  untrammelled  by  ancestral 
error,  free  to  delight  in  all  exercise  of  energetic  strength, 
and  abounding  in  effervescent  power  of  enjo3mient  and 
of  action.      The  vivid   sense  of  life  finds  its  exact  and 


^  The  translation  of  the  Rig- Veda  always  quoted  here  is  the  latest,  and  the 
only  complete  one  with  any  pretension  to  accuracy — "  Der  Rigveda,  oder  die 
heiligen  Hymnen  der  Brahmana,  zum  ersten  Male  vollstandig  ins  Deutsche 
iibersetzt  mit  Commentar  und  Einleitung  von  Alfred  Ludwig,  Prag,  1876." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  $ 

expressive  symbol  in  the  birth  of  every  new  day  out 
of  the  darkness,  and  seems  to  passo  ver  into  a  sort  of 
surprise  that  the  recall  into  activity  and  consciousness 
which  the  Dawn  brought  to  the  slumbering  earth  should 
not  penetrate  to  the  world  of  the  dead.  "  She  awakens 
to  movement  all  living,"  ^  and  that  wide  picture  of  rising 
activity  in  which  the  human  and  infra-human  worlds 
combine  reminds  the  singer  of  its  limitations.  "  Yet  the 
dead  she  revives  not."  "  How  expressive  of  eager  rever- 
ence is  that  exception !  Aurora,  it  seems,  might  be 
expected  to  have  called  back  to  life  the  inhabitants  of 
the  underworld.  She  is  invoked  by  men  to  whom  the 
distinction  between  sleep  and  death  is  not  sufficiently 
familiar  to  be  passed  over  in  silence.  She  wakens  the 
sleepers  on  earth — why  not  sleepers  below  earth  ?  Light 
pursues  its  orderly  and  periodic  victory  over  darkness  ; 
how  is  it  that  the  mysterious  principle  which  light 
symbolizes  is  baffled  in  the  encounter  with  Death  ? 
Why,  beside  the  transient  shadow  from  which  life 
emerges  refreshed  and  reinvigorated,  have  we  this 
supreme  darkness  from  which  there  is  no  dawn  ? 
These  thoughts,  or  others  allied  to  them,  repeat  them- 
selves in  dreams,  and  the  Dawn  is  invoked  to  banish 
them,^  along  with  the  other  terrors  of  the  night.  The 
gladness  of  her  approach  is  symbolized  by  the  kindling 
of  the  morning  sacrifice,  and  to  the  imaginative  ear  of 
the  worshipper*  the  crackling  flames  greeted  her  with 
a  joyous  song,  the  flaming  altar  seeming  to  mirror  and 
concentrate  the  flaming  East ;  Agni,  the  god  of  Fire,  is 
a  divinity  equal  in  importance  to  Ushas,  the  goddess  of 
Dawn.  Her  healing,  reviving  power  associated  itself 
at  once  with  the  images  of  homcl}'-,  naive  enjoyment, 
natural  to   a  pastoral  people,   and    the  ideas  of  radiant 

1  Ludwig,  4,  9.  2  liid.,  5,  8. 

»   /a J..  125,  i8.  *  Ibid.,  18,  2. 


6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

beauty  belonging  to  awakening  powers  in  an  unspoilt 
earth.  The  white  radiance  streams  upon  a  world  palpi- 
tating with  welcome  as  the  milk  ^  is  poured  from  the  cow, 
while  the  bold  image,  "  with  her  advent  the  eye  is  born,"  ^ 
sets  before  us  the  recurrent  vision  of  beauty  which  she 
seems  almost  as  much  to  create  as  to  reveal.  Her  ap- 
proach is  hymned  in  strains  of  glowing  richness,  which 
suggests  Guide's  well-known  picture  of  the  classic 
Aurora.^  Other  associations,  equally  familiar,  touch  on 
her  moral  aspect ;  the  prayer  to  become  the  "  Sons  of  the 
Dawn "  ^  reminds  us  that  from  the  first  the  expression 
"  children  of  light "  had  its  present  typical  significance. 
For  the  most  part,  however,  the  desires  of  the  young  race 
were  child-like  and  unmoral ;  their  prayer  to  the  new  day 
was  for  "joy  in  heroes,  cattle,  steeds ; "  ^  their  desire  for 
wealth  is  expressed  with  a  fearless  confidence  impossible 
to  a  race  familiarized  by  long  inheritance  with  the  tempta- 
tions and  abuses  of  wealth.  It  had  then  none  but  pure 
and  healthful  associations,  and  seems  always  connected 
with  desire  for  a  numerous  posterity.  Earth  had  a 
welcome  for  each  new-comer,  and  the  hopes  of  new 
life  balanced  and  compensated  for  the  terrors  of  death. 
All  images  of  child-like  enjoyment,  of  manly  hope,  of 
moral  inspiration  and  picturesque  beauty,  are  united 
in  the  hymn  to  the  new  Day ;  ®  and  the  association  of 
the  light  with  all  that  is  most  worthy  of  reverence  has 
remained  ever  since  indelibly  impressed  upon  the  very 
structure  of  language.  Heaven  means  both  the  world 
of  light  above  us   and   the  world   of  hope  within  us,  and 


1  Ludwig,  9,  8.  2  Jhiif^^  i6,  i. 

3  Ibid.,  i8,  4,  "  Betreten  hat  sie  den  Wagen,  den  leicht  angefiigte  Rosse 
fiihren."  ^  Ibid.,  21,  4. 

*  e.g.,  15,  8  ;  but  the  expression  recurs  often. 

®  See  especially  the  whole  of  5.  Ver.  9  shows  the  mutual  relations  of  gods 
and  men,  "  als  du"  (Ushas)  "die  Menschen,  die  opfern  sollten,  wecktest, 
thatest  du  den  Gottern  damit  ein  gutes  Werk." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  y 

the  earliest  name  ^  of  the  Divine  beings  is  simply  "  the 
bright  ones."  Such  names  are  more  than  metaphors. 
But  if  they  were  simply  metaphors  they  would  show 
how  closely  the  world  without  is  adapted  to  express  and 
render  definite  the  yearnings  and  the  fears  of  the  world 
within. 

The  antagonism  between  Light  and  Darkness,  though 
it  was  adopted  later  by  the  Persian  faith  as  the  symbol 
of  that  between  Good  and  Evil,  does  not  truly  lend  itself 
to  a  principle  of  dualism.  Light  is  a  full  and  adequate 
type  of  all  that  is  felt  as  desirable  by  the  spirit  of  man, 
so  full  and  adequate,  that  it  seems  something  more  than 
a  type  ;  it  would  appear  rather  the  common  expression 
of  the  needs  of  our  dual  nature  than  the  description  of 
any  bodily  need  or  satisfaction  transferred  to  the  realm 
of  spirit.  But  the  opposite  of  all  this  is  not  true  of 
Darkness.  However  vividly  the  return  of  day  brought 
back  the  sense  of  safet}^,  however  close  was  the  asso- 
ciation of  darkness  and  peril,  still  it  remains  that  the 
difference  between  light  and  darkness,  as  far  as  ordinary 
experience  extends,  is  a  difference  only  of  degree.  Abso- 
lute darkness  is  known  only  to  the  artificial  arrangements 
of  man  and  the  ideal  of  the  supernatural,  it  is  a  part  of 
the  horror  of  the  dungeon,  it  is  a  characteristic  of  the 
imaginary  underworld  ;  it  has  no  part  in  the  whole  realm 
of  nature.  The  symbolism  of  Light  and  Darkness,  in  a 
genial  clime,  measures  truly  the  ideal  of  good  and  evil 
in  the  later  Indian  creed.  But  the  Vcdic  belief  took 
in  instincts  and  emotions  which  later  seem  to  have 
withered  away,  and  uttered  aspirations  and  desires  be- 
longing to  the  realm  of  the  Conscience.  We  find  our- 
selves here  in  contact  with  a  race  that  felt  the  antagonism 

1  Deva,  from  the  root  div,  to  sliine,  meant  originally  bright.  "The  same 
word  lives  on  in  the  Latin  deus"  (Professor  Max  Miiller,  "Lectures  on  the 
Origin  and  Growth  of  Religion  as  illustrated  by  the  Religions  of  India"). 


8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  duty,  a  race  to  whom  Sin  was  a  reality  sufficiently 
definite  to  associate  the  Divine  power  with  the  idea  of 
Redemption,  The  prayer  for  long  life  passes  naturally 
into  the  entreaty/  "  extinguish  our  sins,"  as  though  sin 
and  death  were  already  connected  ;  we  find  even  that 
mysterious  idea  of  inherited  guilt  ^  which  is  so  per- 
plexing to  the  moral  sense.  But  the  yearning  thoughts 
which  turn  to  God  ^  "  as  kine  move  on  to  their  pas- 
tures "  are  speedily  delivered  from  all  that  is  oppressive 
in  that  yearning.  The  pain  of  unsatisfied  desire,  already 
familiar,  is  recognised  as  a  mere  subjective  delusion.* 
"Thirst  came  upon  the  worshipper,  though  he  stood 
in  the  midst  of  the  waters."  ^  Nothing  was  needed  for 
his  satisfaction  but  the  removal  of  his  own  blindness. 
The  doubt  which  interrupts  prayer  is  transient,^  the  God 
reveals  himself  at  once — "  Here  am  I,  behold  me  !  in 
might  I  surpass  all  things."  "  Did  I  see  the  God  who 
is   to  be   seen   by  all  ?  "  exclaims   the  worshipper,"^  with 


1  "  Laszt  fortdauern  unser  Leben,  loscht  aus  unser  Gebrechen "  (32,  4 
Ludwig).  These  expressions  are  found  mainly  in  the  prayers  to  Varuna,  81-90 
Ludwig. 

2  "  Die  Verschuldungen,  die  ich  mir  zugezogen,  sende  weithin,  nicht,  mog' 
ich  biiszen,  was  ein  anderer  gethan  hat  "  (83,  9).  "  Lasz  uns  nach,  was  unsere 
Viiter  Untreues  gethan  und  was  wir  selber  in  eigner  Person"  (85,  5).  This  last 
hymn  appears  in  an  English  version  by  Max  Miiller,  in  the  lecture  on  the  Vedas 
republished  in  the  Selected  Essays  already  quoted.  M.  Ludwig's  translations 
appear  crabbed  and  often  barely  intelligible  after  the  graceful  rendering  of  his 
countryman,  to  which,  it  must  be  added,  he  has  always  enabled  the  reader  to 
refer  them,  by  a  double  index. 

3  MIM.  Rv.  i.  25,  16  ;  Ludwig,  82,  16.  The  meaning  is  much  more  defined 
in  the  former. 

4  MM.  Rv.  i.  41,  4 ;  Ludwig,  88,  4. 

5  Ludwig,  88,  4. 

6  MM.  Rv.  viii.  100,  3  ;  Ludwig,  983,  3.  Here  the  German  seems  to  me  the 
more  expressive — •"  Es  gibt  keinen  Indra,  so  hat  der  eine  und  der  andere  gesagt, 
wer  hat  ihn  gesehn?"  There  is  something  very  striking  in  the  modern  form 
which  doubt  here  assumes.  The  answer  comes  immediately,  ver.  4 — "  Hier  bin 
ich,  o  Sanger,  schau  mich  an  hier,  alles  Geborene  iibertreff  ich  an  Grosze." 

7  MM.  i.  25,  18  ;  Ludwig,  82,  18,  "  Dasz  man  sehe  den  Allsichtbaren,  sehe 
den  Wagen  iiber  die  Erde  hin,  finde  er  Gefallen  an  diesen  Liedern  mein." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  9 

joyous  triumph.  "  Did  I  see  his  chariot  above  the  earth  ? 
He  must  have  accepted  my  prayer."  The  prayer  of  the 
transgressor  ascends  with  a  sense  of  confidence  to  a  God 
eager  to  forgive  and  awaiting  only  the  justification  of 
humble  entreaty;  while  the  human  expiation  is  no  arduous 
penance,  onl}'  the  trustful  utterance  of  the  psalm  in  which 
penitence  is  found  as  a  mere  parenthesis.  We  feel  in 
perusing  it  as  though  listening  to  the  confessions  of 
children,  with  whom  the  penitent  tear  is  forgotten  almost 
before  it  is  dry.  The  few  chords  in  the  plaintive  minor 
succeed,  and  are  followed  by,  a  strain  of  which  its  inter- 
ruption only  enhances  the  vivid  hopefulness ;  and  the 
dread  of  evil  seems  only  just  enough  to  intensify  the 
leaning  on  supernatural  power,  to  bind  man  to  God. 
Life  is  strong,  joyous,  hopeful,  full  of  activity,  full  of 
scope  for  activity ;  all  natural  desire  is  innocent,  the 
object  of  Divine  sympathy,  or  indeed,  for  a  great  part,  of 
Divine  participation.  The  Gods  delight  in  the  Soma 
drink,  the  psalms  of  the  worshippers  soothe  them  with 
placid  enjoyment ;  ^  they  hear  without  scorn  the  eager 
petitions  for  wealth,  for  children,  for  cattle ;  they  show 
at  moments  the  severity  of  the  wise  father  to  the  erring 
son,  but  never  the  alienation  of  the  monarch  towards  the 
rebel,  never  the  blank  hostility  of  the  ruler  towards  the 
traitor.  The  sense  of  sin  in  these  scriptures  is  fitful, 
evanescent,  fragmentary ;  it  finds  no  large  consistent 
symbol,  it  is  the  expression  of  a  small  part  of  the 
nature,  and  it  threw  no  dark  shadow  into  the  unseen. 
Evil  appeared  as  an  exceptional,  fragmentary,  fitful 
influence,  the  Gods  could  make  it  as  though  it  had  not 
been.^      Man  looked  to  the  world  of  supernatural  power 

1  "  Wie  der  Wagenlenker  das  angebundene  Ross,  so  losen  wir  zur  Gnade 
Varuna  dcinen  Sinn  mit  Liedcrn"  (Ludwig,  82,  3).  Prayer  is  welcome  to  the 
god  as  rest  to  the  weary  steed. 

2  "  •  Deos  fecit  timor'  dit  le  poete  latin.  Cast  une  assertion  que  rhistoire  ne 
confirmc  pas.  ...   II  est  possible  de  trouver  une  religion  sans  terreurs ;  telle 


ro  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

as  wholly  one  of  deliverance  from  evil.  Varuna  is  able 
to  deliver  man  even  from  the  sins  which  he  has  com- 
mitted. The  earliest  litany  of  the  human  race  ^  that  has 
come  down  to  us  confesses  transgressions,  but  pleads 
with  the  "  strong  and  bright  God "  that  through  want 
of  strength  his  worshipper  has  gone  astray.  "  If  I 
move  along  trembling,  like  a  cloud  driven  by  the  wind 
— have  mercy,  Varuna,  have  mercy."  "  It  was  not  our 
doing,  Varuna,"  pleads  the  worshipper ;  "  it  was  a  slip, 
an  intoxicating  draught,  thoughtlessness " — never  the 
prompting  of  a  mighty  rival.  Human  frailty  was  subject 
to  error,  but  all  that  was  strong  was  elevating. 

It  is  interesting  to  trace  this  feeling  in  the  symbolism 
of  Light  and  Darkness.  While  day  was  an  object  of 
rapturous  welcome,  night  was  not  an  object  of  unmixed 
horror.  Side  by  side  with  the  sense  of  peril  in  dark- 
ness we  find  certain  inconsistent  indications  of  what  we 
may  call  a  more  modern  feeling  towards  it.^  Though 
sometimes  the  foe,  it  appears  often  as  the  sister  of 
Dawn  ;  a  sister  whose  dark  steeds  prepare  ^  the  pathway 
for  the  glowing  chariot  of  the  Day ;  and  who  has,  more- 
over, her  own  revelation  of  light.  Her  coming  unveils 
the  stars  which  fly  away  "as  a  thief"  at  the  return  of 
morning.^  "  These  constellations  which  are  placed  on 
high,  by  night  alone  may  we  discern  them  ;   whither  have 

a  €i6  la  religion  de  nos  ancetres  Aryans  "  (Emile  Burnouf,  "  Essai  sur  le  Veda  "). 
The  allusion  to  a  future  hell  is  so  rare  in  the  Rig-Veda  that  it  has  been  found 
possible  to  deny,  erroneously  I  believe,  the  existence  of  such  an  idea. 

1  Given  in  Max  Miiller's  Lecture  on  the  Vedas,  republished  in  his  Selected 
Essays.     Rv.  i.  41,  9  ;  Ludwig,  88,  2. 

2  "  Usas  kommt  mit  dem  Lichte,  .  .  .  wegdrangend  alle  unheilvolle  Fins- 
ternisz"  (Ludwig,  18,  2).  But  Night  and  Dawn  are  associated,  55,  i,  "  Weg 
von  ihrer  Schwester  Usas  geht  die  Nacht  ;"  236,  i,  "  Usas  und  Nacht,  die 
beiden  Hohen,  Schonen  ; "  and  they  are  often  named  together  as  mutually 
friendly  powers. 

3  ■'  Weg  von  ihrer  Schwester  Usas  geht  die  Nacht,  es  macht  frei  die  Schwarze 
der  Rothen  die  Bahn  "  (Ludwig,  55,  i). 

*  Ludwig,  127,  2. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  ii 

they  fled  by  day."  ^  Varuna  commands  the  darkness  as 
well  as  the  light  in  Heaven.^  Night  is  invoked  as 
the  bringer  of  rest.^  Even  the  awful  last  night  from 
which  the  welcomers  of  the  Dawn  turned  in  terror  was 
not  wholly  devoid  of  gentle  and  gracious  associations. 
Night  was  the  bringer  of  rest ;  might  it  not  be  that  Death 
was  also  ?  ■*  The  beloved  Dead  was  laid  in  the  arms  of 
Earth  as  a  child  on  the  mother's  breast ;  she  is  entreated 
to  make  room  for  him  with  an  embrace,  to  enfold  him  in 
her  garment  with  the  tenderness  with  which  the  mother 
enwraps  the  child.  There  is  supreme  desire  in  the 
living  to  live,  but  there  is  no  horror  in  the  thought  of 
death.  Darkness,  and  all  that  darkness  symbolized, 
was  a  transitory  phenomenon  ;  the  light  seemed  the  great 
reality  ;  it  was  positive,  actual ;  where  it  was  interrupted 
it  was  not  opposed  by  any  antithetic  influence,  only 
checked  and  hindered  by  something  that  was  little  more 
than  a  symbol  of  the  imperfection,  the  failure,  the  doubts 
of  humanity.  If  we  seem  to  make  inconsistent  asser- 
tions, it  is  because  we  are  speaking  of  a  state  of  mind 
not  perfectly  consistent,  of  the  rich  confusion  of  an 
awakening  civilization,  as  yet  uncommitted  to  definite 
exclusions  and  distinct  alternatives.  The  Vedic  faith 
embodied  two  divergent  ideas — the  sense  of  conflict  and 
the  sense  of  order ; — the  moral  life  which  centres  in  the 
conscience  and  confronts  an  antagonism  of  being — the 
spiritual  life  which  finds  its  counterpart  in  nature,  and 
feels  everywhere  after  one  vast   Unity.       But  the  two 

1  Ludwig,  8i,  lo.  2  /iid.,  87,  2. 

3  mj.,  131,  1,  "Ich  mfe  zum  Heile  Ratri  (die  Nacht)  die  das  Lebende  zur 
Ruhc  bringt." 

■4  "  Begib  dich  bin  zur  Mutter  Erde  da,  der  wcit  gerauniigcn,  hcilbringen- 
den,  wcich  wie  WoUe.  .  .  .  Spring  auf,  o  Erde.  press  dich  nicht  niedcr,  gib 
leichten  Zutritt  diesem,  frcundlich  hieran  dich  kriiminend,  wic  die  Mutter  don 
Sohn  mit  dcm  Saume  so,  o  Erde,  bedecke  diesen  "  (943.  10,  11).  M.  lUirnouf 
gives  a  more  graceful  translation  of  this  hymn  in  his  "  Essai  sur  le  Veda,"  p.  92  ; 
it  is  perhaps  the  best  known  in  the  whole  collection. 


12  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

ideals  were  not  equivalent.  Tlie  joyous  spirit  of  the 
young  race  gave  to  the  one  a  hasty,  passing  recognition, 
and  lingered  over  the  other,  as  expressing  its  deepest 
thought.  The  sense  of  Evil,  though  it  was  distinct,  was 
faint,  and  occupied  but  a  small  space  in  thought  and 
utterance ;  we  somewhat  exaggerate  the  general  impres- 
sion when  we  speak  of  it  as  a  sense  of  Sin. 

Perhaps  it  was  the  development  of  civilization  which 
strengthened  the  belief  in  Evil.  Certainly  there  is  some- 
thing in  the  mere  evolution  of  industrial  activity  to  bring 
forward  the  part  of  life  that  belongs  to  disaster.  As 
nomad  tribes  became  stationary  and  herdsmen  tillers  of  the 
soil,  the  passage  into  a  more  arduous  form  of  civilization 
brings  with  it  a  greater  sense  of  all  the  opposition  that 
nature  sets  up  to  the  careful  toil  of  man,  and  a  wider 
illustration  of  all  that  thwarts  and  disappoints  patient 
effort.  Even  to  a  pastoral  people  the  order  of  nature 
cannot  have  been  entirely  beneficent.  In  the  return  of 
the  seasons  there  must  have  been  many  a  misfit  between 
anticipation  and  result ;  the  visits  of  the  celestial  herds 
whom  the  storm  gods  drove  onwards  to  yield  their  milk 
to  the  thirsty  earth  would  not  be  so  regular  as  the  need 
for  their  presence ;  the  earthly  herds  sometimes  failed 
to  find  their  pasture  because  the  heavenly  ones  failed 
to  visit  the  empty  sky.^  In  this  earlier  condition  order 
would  be  felt  as  infinitely  greater  than  disorder ;  but 
agriculture  must  always  bring  a  different  element  into 
the  feeling  with  which  man  regards  nature.  He  has, 
as  it  were,  entered  into  partnership  with  the  powers  of 
the  earth  and  sky,  he  regards  their  doings  with  a  keener 
interest ;    the  general  order,  which  was  almost  enough 

1  "The  Iranians,"  says  Dr.  Martin  Haug,  "  forsaking  thepastoral  life  of  their 
ancestors,  became  agriculturists.  Hence  inevitable  feuds  between  these  tribes, 
for  the  settled  agricultural  races  would  be  the  sure  mark  for  the  freebooters 
among  these  nomads"  (Haug's  "  Essays  on  the  Sacred  Language,  &c.,  of  the 
Parsis,"  second  edition,  1878,  edited  by  E.  W.  West). 


INDIA  AXD  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  13 

while  he  had  made  no  effort  to  modify  the  face  of  the 
land,  discovers  grievous  want  of  adjustment  of  anticipation 
to  event,  when  once  he  had  embarked  on  this  endeavour. 
The  storm  which  would  only  have  refreshed  the  pastures 
la3's  the  crops  low ;  the  drought  of  which  a  wandering 
people  could  have  escaped  the  worst  effects  makes  the 
harvest  a  melancholy  record  of  wasted  effort.  Nor  would 
this  change  take  effect  in  the  world  of  nature  alone ;  the 
mere  growth  of  agriculture  brings  out  the  ideas  of  pro- 
perty and  right,  and  with  them  gives  occasion  for  new 
offences,  of  which  an  earlier  civilization  knows  nothing. 
It  is  a  far  more  advanced  stage  of  honesty  which  respects 
the  waving  crops,  their  near  and  similar  kindred  the 
growing  pastures  being  still  accepted  public  property, 
than  that  which  refrains  from  driving  off  the  half-personal 
beings  so  closely  associated  with  the  home,  and,  as  is 
evident  in  all  early  legends,  playing  a  large  part  in 
mythic  representations  of  orderly  power  in  conflict  with 
lawless  power.  The  inconstant  Heavens  and  the  hostile 
brethren  would  thus  become  agencies  of  evil  together. 
And  thus  the  sense  of  conflict  which  had  been  there 
from  the  first,  finding  a  developed  symbolism  in  the 
world  of  nature,  and  a  more  frequent  illustration  in  the 
world  of  m,an,  passed  into  the  sense  of  wrong. 

We  are  thus  driven  to  recognize  in  this  early  faith 
two  ideas  which,  in  their  full  development,  are  mutually 
hostile.  No  idea  is  more  characteristic  of  the  Veda  than 
the  conception  of  the  Order  of  Nature  as  a  Holy  Order. 
The  expression  recurs  constantly.  The  Gods  are  the 
"  increasers  and  guardians  of  the  holy  order,"  ^  a  signi- 
ficant expression ;  they  are  not  its  originators.  The 
worshipper  prays    that    he   may   share   with    them    this 

1  The  A<;vina  are  addressed  as  "  Mchrer  dcr  hciligen  Ordnung"  (Ludwis;, 
63,  5).  The  reader  is  reminded  of  the  "  Mehrer  des  Reichs"  of  tlie  Holy 
Roman  Empire.     So  Milra  and  Varuna  are  "  Behuter  der  Ordnung,"  100,  i. 


14  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Divine  work.^  Variina,  the  god  who  stands  in  the 
nearest  connection  to  moral  ideas,  is  the  leader  of  the 
Holy  Order.  These  passages,  and  many  in  harmony 
with  them,  breathe  the  spirit  of  an  elevated  monotheism. 
If  it  be  not  literally  true  in  human  affairs  that  one  law 
implies  one  law-giver,  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  be 
otherwise  in  the  Divine  world.  The  law  may  be,  as  we 
often  see  in  our  own  day,  a  more  ultimate  conception 
than  the  law-giver;  in  fact,  it  was  so  in  this  dawn  of 
thought  to  which  we  recur.  But  a  universal  law  and 
a  perennial  conflict  are  inconsistent  ideas.  Yet  the 
Vedic  belief  embodies  the  idea  of  an  original  Unity,  ex- 
pressed in  the  Holy  Order,  and  also  dwells  constantly 
on  the  fact  of  a  great  continuous  conflict,  a  strife 
between  the  God  of  Light  and  some  hostile  power  which 
opposes  itself  to  all  the  beneficent  action  of  the  warrior 
god,  Indra,  who  is  Supreme  God  of  the  Vedic  period. 
The  thunder  is  his  voice,  his  aid  is  sought  in  the  din  of 
war.  Images  of  conflict  are  always  associated  with  him  ; 
it  is  by  his  darts  that  the  black  clouds  which  collect 
before  the  annual  rains  are  forced  to  let  loose  their 
flow  of  longed-for  water  ;  and  while  the  growling  thunder 
would  seem  his  shout  of  victory,  the  flashing  of  the 
lightning  would  express  in  some  confused  way  the 
triumphant  principle  of  Light,  wresting  the  treasure  from 
the  dark  power  which  was,  by  a  S3'mbolism  not  very  com- 
prehensible to  our  mind,  represented  as  the  withholder 
of  the  precious  floods  which  we  should  more  naturally 
regard  as  its  gift.  This  power  seemed  to  hold  the 
water-bag ;  Indra's  flashing  spear  rent  it  open,  and  gave 
the  thirsty  land  its  need,  and  the  event  most  desired 
by  a  people  of  shepherds  and  herdsmen  was  always 
associated   with  images  of  conflict.      In   these   latitudes 

1  "  Mogen  wir  mehren,  Variina,  des  Gesetzes  Brunnen"  (Ludwig,  83,  5). 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  15 

Heaven  gave  its  longed-for   boon  only  with  the,  storm. 
The    blessed   gift   of  nature,   the  life-giving  rain,   never 
known    to    India    except    with    the    accompaniment    of 
thunder,  seemed  wrung  from   some  reluctant  and  hostile 
power,  of  whose  overthrow  the  re-emergence  of  the  sun 
was  a  witness,  the  antithesis  of  light  as  good  and  dark- 
ness as  evil  being  thus  retained  even  under  those  aspects 
where  to  us  it  appears  unnatural.     The  idea  of  a  conflict 
thus  inherent  within  the  very  being  of  nature  is  funda- 
mentally inconsistent  with  that  of  a  Holy  Order,  and  the 
symbolism  of  nature  expresses   the  development  of  the 
inward  life.      The  progress  of  thought  was  towards  the 
idea  of  the  Unity  of  the  Divine,  and  there  can  be  no  wor- 
ship further  in  its  spirit  from  monotheism  than  that  of  a 
warrior  god.    A  prolonged  struggle  implies  an  adversary 
— not  a  mere  disorderly  mob  of  vague  mutinous  beings 
— but  a  rival.      And   so   far  as   this   idea  was  logically 
carried  out,  the  conflict  in  the  Heavens  would  change  its 
character  from  the  incessant  triumph  of  a  mighty  monarch 
over  the  mutiny  of  a  rebel  crowd,  to  the  duel  between 
two  great  potentates  equal  in  distinctness  and  analogous 
in  claim.      The   Persian  element  in  Vedism  would   thus 
detach  itself  from  the  parent  stem.      The  halving  of  the 
Divine  kingdom   between   hostile  powers  was  abhorrent 
to  the  spirit  which  sought  for  Unity,  and  it  would  seem 
as  though  it  were  in  the  recoil  produced  by  the  discovery 
of  this  tendency  within   itself,   that   India  plunged   into 
the  mystic   Pantheism  which   belongs  to  her  completed 
thought.      History  shows   us  Aryan  faith  in  its  infancy 
as   an   eager  personification  of  the  variety  of  nature,  a 
glad,  reverent  recognition   of  the   Powers  expressed   in 
nature  as  harmonious  and   convergent   in   their  action  ; 
and   then,   again,   it   shows   Indian   thought  in   its  com- 
pleteness as  recoiling  from   the  idea  of  any  multiplicity, 
any  variety,  and,  above  all,  from  any  dualism,  not  only 


1 6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

in  the  Divine  Being,  but  in  any  being  at  all.  We 
cannot  but  believe  that  in  the  interval  something  has 
rendered  this  particular  branch  of  the  Aryan  race  more 
a  unity  within  itself,  detaching  from  it  some  foreign 
element,  and  intensifying  all  that  remained  with  a  sense 
of  contrast.  We  know,  at  all  events,  that  in  the  interval 
the  creed  which  ranges  all  Being  under  two  heads  had 
taken  its  rise,  and  when  we  add  that  the  creed  of  India 
embodies  a  latent  protest  against  this  ethical  antithesis, 
we  do  little  more  than  interpret  the  hints  that  remain 
of  remote  events  by  the  experience  of  all  time. 

For  it  is,  after  all,  this  interpretation  which  forms  our 
chief  material.  We  can  know  but  little  of  the  ethical 
development  of  the  races  that  precede  history,  we 
could  know  nothing  of  it  if  it  were  a  process  confined 
to  the  experience  of  the  infant  world.  But  perennial 
experience  lights  up  the  dim  records  of  the  past,  and  the 
process  here  suggested  by  history  is  always  going  on 
among  the  human  beings  we  know.  A  man  may  repeat 
the  words  of  a  creed  with  unhesitating  sincerity,  he 
would  say  at  a  certain  stage  that  it  expressed  his  entire 
conviction.  Then  suddenly  its  influence  on  another 
character  flashes  upon  him  its  true  meaning,  and  he 
repudiates  it.  He  sees  side  by  side  his  inconsistent 
admissions  and  his  characteristic  beliefs,  and  learning 
what  it  is  that  he  denies,  he  first  knows  what  it  is 
that  he  asserts.  To  others  he  seems  to  have  undergone 
a  violent  change.  He  himself,  perhaps,  is  not  conscious 
of  any  change,  only  of  learning  to  know  his  own  mind. 
But  he  is  changed,  a  shock  has  influenced  his  direc- 
tion ;  he  diverges  from  his  old  path,  though  often 
unawares.  The  shock  has  precipitated  some  element 
dissolved  in  his  unconscious  thought,  and  that  which  is 
left  is  a  new  thing,  though  it  may  seem  to  him  only 
the  old  purified.      The  moral  evolution  is  twofold.      It  is 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  17 

not  only  that  the  new  faith  is  different  from  the  old,  but 
antagonism  to  it  makes  the  old  faith  different  from  what 
it  has  been.  Because  the  one  party  turns  to  the  right, 
the  other  will  turn  to  the  left ;  latent  tendencies  become 
distinct,  protest  changes  the  proportion  of  belief,  denial 
gives  new  meaning  to  assertion,  and  thus  the  varying 
aspects  of  a  single  creed  become  hostile  faiths  opposed 
at  every  point,  and  moulding  life,  where  life  shows  no 
obvious  connection  with  faith. 

The  primeval  Aryan  faith  held  in  solution  the  religion 
of  the  conscience,  and  that  of  nature,  combined  in  a 
seemingly  homogeneous  unity.  The  religion  of  nature 
recognized  imperfection,  the  religion  of  conscience  did 
not  emphasize  sin.  But  the  union  was  an  unstable  one, 
and  while  one  race  awoke  to  the  energetic  definite- 
ness  of  organized  conflict,  the  other  plunged  deeper  and 
deeper  into  the  mystic  repose  of  a  vast  unity  accepted 
as  the  ground  of  all  Being,  and  therefore  as  the  har- 
mony of  all  opposites  and  the  end  of  all  strife.  The 
religion  of  nature  was  not  Pantheistic  in  its  origin,  but 
as  it  recoiled  from  Dualism  it  moved  towards  Pantheism. 
The  religion  of  conscience  was  not  dualistic  in  its  origin, 
but  as  it  recoiled  from  Pantheism  it  moved  towards 
Dualism.  The  latent  Pantheism  of  the  earlier  creed 
would  seem  idolatry  to  those  who  believed  that  the  rule 
of  the  supernatural  was  shared  by  a  Power  which  it 
was  a  sin  to  adore,  a  Power  which  in  all  its  manifesta- 
tions should  be  the  object  of  unfading  hostility  and  pro- 
test. The  definite  dualism  of  the  new  creed  would 
seem  deadly  heresy  to  those  who  believed  that  a  Divine 
world  surrounded  and  interpenetrated  the  human  world, 
and  that  all  good  and  evil  were  mere  phenomenal  dis- 
tinctions, destined  to  fade  in  the  light  of  a  new  know- 
ledge.      We    can    imagine    how,^    to    the    more   ethical 

1  This  view,  brought  forward  in  the  most  definite  and  historic  form  by 

13 


l8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

believers  of  the  new  creed,  the  faint  distinction  of  good 
and  evil  which  marked  the  old,  roused  a  fierce  Puritan 
zeal,  while  to  the  defenders  of  the  old  Faith  this  ignoring 
of  the  Holy  Order  as  the  one  ultimate  reality  would 
seem  the  worst  impiety  and  the  most  fatal  heresy.  We 
know  that  the  twin  tribes  separated  ;  the  relation  between 
their  separation  and  their  difference  of  religion  is  a  matter 
of  controversy.  It  is  asserted  by  some  students,  and 
strongly  denied  by  others,  that  this  separation  was  the 
result  of  an  impulse  towards  religious  reform  on  the 
part  of  the  Persian  race.  The  claim  to  arbitrate  between 
these  two  parties,  as  far  as  their  difference  is  grounded 
in  questions  of  scholarship,  is  here  emphatically  abjured. 
But  in  all  historic  questions  a  religion  must  be  its  own 
best  witness,  and  in  default  of  overwhelming  external 
evidence,  it  is  enough  to  say  that  we  most  naturally 
explain  the  change  between  the  earliest  and  latest 
form  of  the  Indian  faith  if  we  suppose  that  when  the 
early  hymns  which  compose  the  Veda  were  first  sung — 
though  not  when  they  were  written  down — the  ancestors 
of  the  Puritans  of  a  later  age  dwelt   still   among  their 


Dr.  Martin  Hauq^,  and  generally  accepted  up  to  a  recent  period,  is  vehemently 
opposed  by  M.  James  Darmesteter,  an  elegant  writer  and  ripe  scholar,  whose 
verdict  on  such  a  question  it  seems  presumptuous  to  dispute.  "Dans  cette 
pretendue  revolution  religieuse,"  he  says,  "  il  n'y  a  qu'un  accident  de  langage," 
and  he  tries  to  explain  away,  in  a  dissertation,  which  is  to  my  mind  the  only  un- 
satisfactory passage  in  his  brilliant  work,  ''  Ormazd  et  Ahriman,"  the  facts 
that  the  dcvas  of  India  become  the  divs  or  devils  of  Persia,  that  the  great  deity 
of  India,  Indra,  becomes  the  demon  Andra,  and  that  the  great  Ahitra,  who  is 
Ormazd,  is  one  of  the  Indian  group  Asura,  in  the  Brahmanic  period  the  official 
name  of  demons.  The  latter  fact,  he  thinks,  loses  all  significance  when  we  dis- 
cover that  at  the  Vedic  period  Asura  was  the  most  august  name  of  the  Divinity  ; 
a  discovery  which  appears  to  me  only  to  confirm,  in  its  most  rational 
form,  the  theory  against  which  he  contends — i.e.,  that  the  evolution  of  Indian 
thought  produced  the  revolution  of  Persian  thought.  This  view  surely  depends 
not  on  a  few  etymologies  (though  even  these  can  be  got  rid  of  only  by  very 
forced  reasoning),  -.but  on  the  whole  spirit  of  the  Persian  religion,  deeply 
stamped  as  it  is  with  the  character  of  reaction  and  protest,  and  moulded  on 
an  ideal  wholly  antagonistic  to  that  of  India. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  19 

Pantheistic   brethren,  and   that   these  early  psalms   held 
the  germ  of  hostile  creeds. 

This  view  serves  to  render  explicable  the  change 
which  came  over  the  spirit  of  the  Indian  faith.  The 
early  Aryans  saw  God  in  the  sunny  and  starry  sky, 
in  the  dawn,  in  the  thunderstorm,  in  all  the  various 
manifestations  of  Light  that  revealed  the  world  in  its 
new  wonderful  beauty  to  the  eyes  of  an  infant  race. 
Their  Indian  sons,  mindful  perhaps  of  their  severance 
from  the  race  which  had  discovered  Ahriman  as  a  sharer 
with  Ormazd,  turned  from  all  the  variety  of  the  outward 
to  the  sense  of  oneness  within  as  the  interpreter  of  the 
Divine.^  Indra,  Ushas,  Agni,  what  were  they  all  but 
the  varied  hues  that  tinged  and  disguised  the  one  white 
ray?  What  was  the  multiplicity  of  sense,  the  con- 
tinually varying  manifestation  of  the  world  revealed  b}^ 
e3'e  or  ear,  but  the  veil  of  that  great  central  Unity  to 
which  consciousness  was  the  clue  and  of  which  it  was 
interpreter  ?  For  man  only  reaches  the  idea  of  com- 
plete oneness  when  he  says  "  I."  Nothing  in  the  life- 
less world,  so  far  as  we  come  in  contact  with  it  on  our 
earth,  can  be  called  truly  one.  Wherever  we  contem- 
plate any  external  object  as  a  unity  we  either  see  or 
imagine  the  principle  of  life.     A  stone  has   no   unity  ; 

1  This  is  the  central  doctrine  of  the  Upnnishnds,  a  collection  of  theologic 
or  theosophic  treatises  of  great  antiquity  "  which  close  the  canon  of  Vedic 
revelation"  ("  Philosophy  of  the  Upanishads,"  A.  E.  Gough).  It  is  by  theni, 
says  Prof.  Max  Miiller,  that  his  love  for  Sanscrit  literature  was  first  kindled, 
and  he  has  enabled  all  English  readers  to  enjoy  them  in  his  own  lucid  English 
in  the  "  Sacred  Books  of  the  East."  He  is  not  the  first  of  his  countrymen  whom 
they  have  thus  impressed.  Schopenhauer,  though  making  acquaintance  with 
them  only  at  third  hand,  was  profoundly  impressed  by  them.  They  had  been, 
he  said,  the  solace  of  his  life,  and  would  be  of  his  death  ;  and  he  anticipitcd  for 
the  Sanscrit  literature  which  they  represented  to  his  mind  an  influence  not  less 
profound  than  that  of  Greek  at  the  revival  of  learning.  I  have  given  a  few 
references  to  th(!Se  volumes,  always  numbering  them  (the  Indian  division 
being  so  elaborate)  merely  by  their  position  in  Professor  Miillcr's  translation, 
(and  sometimes  omitting  a  few  words. 


20  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

break  it  and  the  two  halves  are  each  as  much  one  as 
it  was  itself.  Fire  has  no  unity ;  a  hundred  candles 
may  be  lighted  from  it  and  leave  it  undiminished.  A 
tree  has  a  certain  partial  unity ;  but  the  typical  unity, 
that  which  gives  meaning  to  every  other,  is  only  to  be 
found  in  the  personal  world.  Apart  from  life  oneness 
is  something  imposed  from  without,  like  the  oneness  of 
a  constellation.  There  is  no  principle  of  affinity  in 
brick  and  slate  and  timber  whereby  these  constitute 
a  house ;  they  become  a  unity  only  in  relation  to  the 
aim  of  the  architect.  Nothing  in  all  the  outward  world 
is  one  as  a  man  is  one ;  but  only  in  so  far  as  any 
object  is  the  result  of  human  purpose,  or  partakes 
in  the  principle  of  life,  can  it  be  said  to  be  a  unity 
in  any  sense.  And  when  we  would  understand  even 
the  lifeless  world  we  are  driven  to  conceptions  which 
belong  to  the  realm  of  purpose  and  will.  Force,  the 
elemental  material  of  science,  has  no  meaning  to  us 
except  in  so  far  as  we  construe  it  by  our  own  experi- 
ence of  muscular  exertion  ;  that  is  to  say,  of  something 
associated  with  all  the  attempts  of  the  self  to  impress 
the  world  around.^  We  find  the  many  in  the  world 
without  only  by  finding  the  one  in  consciousness  within, 
and  then  the  one  within  leads  us  to  a  One  that  is  both 
within  and  without,  a  Being  who  is  at  once  the  centre 
and  the  ground  of  all  personal  being.  The  unity  of 
spirit,   as    we    know    it,    is    combined    with    a   plurality. 

1  "  Our  notion  of  force  is  a  generalisation  of  those  muscular  sensations 
which  we  have  when  we  are  ourselves  the  producers  of  changes  in  outward 
things.  .  ,  .  The  liberty  we  have  to  think  of  light,  heat,  sound,  &c. ,  as  in 
themselves  different  from  our  sensations  of  them  is  due  to  our  possession  of 
other  sensations  by  which  to  symbolize  them — namely,  those  of  mechanical 
force.  But  if  we  endeavour  to  think  of  mechanical  force  itself  as  different  from 
our  impression  of  it,  there  arises  the  unsurmountable  difficulty  that  there  is  no 
remaining  species  of  impression  to  represent  it.  All  other  experiences  being 
represented  to  the  mind  in  terms  of  this  experience,  this  experience  cannot  be 
represented  in  any  terms  but  its  own  "  (Herbert  Spencer,  "  Psychology  "). 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  21 

Consciousness  reveals  the  One,  but  experience  reveals 
a  plurality  of  conscious  beings.  "  La  pluralite  des  con- 
sciences," says  an  acute  thinker,  "  est  un  postulat  que 
Ton  pent  considerer  comme  acquis  a  la  science  sans 
demonstration."^  The  most  consistent  sceptic  does  not 
doubt  the  existence  of  other  men.  He  feels  a  unity 
within  ;  he  comes  in  contact  with  an  assemblage  of 
phenomena  which  suggest  a  similar  unity  without  ;  he 
does  not  question  this  testimony.  We  do  not  realize 
how  much  of  what  we  mean  by  Faith  is  involved  in  this 
acceptance  unless  we  discern  that  it  is  a  step  towards  a 
larger  faith.  Is  there  no  central  unit}'',  only  a  succession 
of  partial  ephemeral  unities  ?  Surely  all  these  partial 
selves  are  but  fragments  of  a  deeper  self; — /lie  one,  of 
which  all  other  ones  are  but  varied  and  partial  manifesta- 
tions. Nor  can  the  lesser  self  attain  a  true  unity  until 
it  finds  its  place  in  the  greater  self,  or  rather  these  two 
achievements  are  one.^  It  is  incomplete  till  it  know  its 
incompleteness,  it  is  a  prey  to  inward  conflict  till  it  find 
itself  part  of  a  larger  whole. 

1  Paul  Janet,  "  Problemes  du  XIX^  Siecle,"  p.  313. 

2  "  As  one  finds  lost  cattle  by  following  their  steps,  thus  one  finds  out 
everything  if  one  has  found  out  the  Self"  (Upanishads,  ii.  86).  .  .  . 
"  He  who  dwells  in  the  earth,  whom  the  earth  does  not  know,  wliose  body 
the  earth  is,  ke  is  thy  Self,  the  puller  within  "  (ii,  128).  "When  the  sun  has 
set,  and  the  moon  has  set,  and  the  fire  is  gone  out,  and  the  sound  hushed,  what 
is  then  the  light  of  man?  .  .  .  The  Self  indeed  is  his  light"  (ii.  163).  .  .  . 
"The  wise,  who  by  meditation  on  his  Self  recognizes  the  Ancient  who  is 
difficult  to  see,  who  has  entered  into  the  dark,  who  dwells  in  the  abyss,  who  is 
hidden  in  the  cave  as  God,  he  indeed  leaves  joy  and  sorrow  far  behind  " 
("Secret  of  Death,"  in  vol.  ii.)  .  .  .  "That  Self  is  hidden  in  all  beings,  and 
does  not  shine  forth,  but  is  seen  by  subtle  seers"  {Ibid.)  ..."  The  wise,  when 
he  knows  that  that  by  which  he  perceives  all  objects  is  the  great  omnipresent  Self, 
grieves  no  more.  lie  who  knows  this  living  soul  as  being  the  Self,  always  near 
the  Lord  of  the  past  and  future,  henceforward  fears  no  more"  (Ibid.)  .  .  . 
"  As  the  arrow  becomes  one  with  the  target,  so  shall  a  man  become  one  with 
Brahman,  .  .  .  know  him  alone  as  the  Self"  (ii.  37).  "To  him  who  is  con- 
scious of  llie  true  Self  within,  all  desires  vanish  even  here  on  earth"  (ii.  40). 
.  .  .  "That  Self  is  Agni  (fire),  it  is  Aditya  (the  sun),  it  is  Kandranias  (the 
moon) "  (ii.  248). 


22  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  course  of  thought  here  suggested  is  essentially 
the  same,  whether  it  guide  the  thinker  from  the  many 
human  personaHties  to  one  Divine  ground  of  all  person- 
ality, or,  as  in  the  order  of  History,  from  the  many  Divine 
impersonations  to  the  one  Divine  Being  who  is  the 
ground  of  all  that  is.  For  the  Indian  mind,  indeed,  the 
difference  between  gods  and  men  was  one  of  very  little 
distinctness  or  importance.  The  earlier  gods  were  not 
denied,  they  were  accepted  as  all  manifestations  of  the 
One.  The  discovery  of  the  one  in  the  many  marks  the 
glad  awakening  of  a  national  genius  to  the  consciousness 
of  its  true  direction,  the  forward  bound  with  which  the 
traveller  enters  upon  the  path  which,  after  long  wander- 
ings, he  recognizes  as  that  which  leads  him  home. 

The  best  interpreter  of  Hindu  religion  is  nineteenth 
century  science  ;  the  scientific  movement  of  our  own  day 
presents  us  with  a  type  of  that  change  by  which  the 
many  gods  of  the  Vedas  were  absorbed  in  God.  Our 
lathers  studied  what  they  called  the  imponderable 
agencies — light,  heat,  electricity,  magnetism  ;  they  dealt 
with  them  as  ultimate  forces  of  nature,  separate  indivi- 
dualities, the  results  of  which  might  be  registered  and 
brought  into  orderly  sequence,  but  which  themselves 
Ibrmed  ultimate  objects  of  intellectual  attention,  and  were 
regarded  as  resting-places  of  all  analysis.  Then  arose 
on  the  horizon  the  great  idea  of  the  correlation  of  force. 
Light,  heat,  electricity,  were  seen  to  differ  only  as  varied 
manifestations  of  the  first  great  unity  which  we  know  as 
force,  the  mystic  agency  which  seemed  to  link  the  worlds 
of  matter  and  of  spirit,  the  tyrannous  power  which 
brings  anthropomorphism  into  Science,  and  bids  her 
import  into  the  world  of  things  the  impulses  and  efforts 
of  the  personal  world. 

We  have  seen  the  wondrous  stimulus  which  has 
come  to  all    scientific    thought    with   the    dawn   of  this 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  23 

unit}^  the  strange  charm  which  invested  all  the  revela- 
tions of  nature,  from  the  time  that  nature  was  dis- 
cerned to  be  One,  To  be  shown  a  single  actual  being 
as  the  explanation  of  a  multitude  of  phenomena,  to 
recognize  one  permanent  entity  amid  many  shifting 
forms,  one  element  through  all  its  various  modifica- 
tions— this  is  the  fundamental  craving  of  the  human 
intellect.  In  our  day,  as  in  Newton's  da}^  Science  has 
exhibited  on  a  grand  scale  that  triumphant  substitution 
of  the  one  for  the  many  which  at  all  times  she  is  labour- 
ing to  achieve  on  some  scale ;  and  the  world  has  drunk 
in  her  teaching  with  something  like  intoxication  in  its 
delight.  But  that  delight  must  be  a  feeble  image  of 
what  was  felt  by  our  forefathers  when,  some  2500  years 
ago,  they  awoke  up  to  discover  that  where  they  had 
imagined  themselves  to  see  many  gods  they  had  merely 
discerned  the  aspects,  the  different  attributes,  through 
which  God  appears  to  man.  It  is  impossible  for  us  to 
recover  the  sense  of  originality  with  which  this  idea 
must  have  come  upon  the  world  for  the  first  time.  We 
cannot  divest  ourselves  of  the  peculiar  message  of 
the  Semitic  race  that  God  is  one.  But  to  our  Indian 
ancestors  it  was  a  discovery,  just  as  the  correlation  of 
force  is  a  discovery.  No  traditions  brought  them  the 
message,  "  These  many  gods  whom  you  adore  are  but 
the  different  manifestations  of  the  one  Power,  just  as  the 
various  hues  of  the  rainbow  mark  successively  the  partial 
obscurations  of  the  one  white  ray  ;  "  it  was  a  revelation 
to  the  children  of  the  dawn.  The  prismatic  hues  of 
the  Outward  melted,  before  their  vision,  into  the  pure 
white  ray  of  the  Divine. 

It  is  possible  that  a  change  in  the  circumstances 
of  the  Indian  tribes  gave  this  inward  change  its  ex- 
pression in  the  development  of  a  new  symbolism. 
In   the  centuries  which   elapse  between  the  composition 


24  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  the  Rig- Veda  and   any  subsequent  record   they  were 
advancing  farther   into  the   peninsula  of  Hindustan,  and 
becoming  more   famihar  with   the   Ocean,  of  which  the 
earher    mentions    are    slight.       Several    expressions    in  , 
their  later  philosophy  would  lead  us   to  believe  that   the  \ 
spectacle  of  the  rivers  swallowed  up  in  the  sea,  yet  never  '. 
over-filling  it,  was  to  them  an  impressive  sight,  pregnant  ; 
with  a  symbolic  meaning.'^      It  presented  to  them  a  kind 
of  parable    of  the    many  and    the    One — the    continual 
change  of  the  ideas  of  sense,  the  unchangeable  calm  of 
the  reality  of  consciousness,  receiving  all,  yet  still  itself   , 
unaffected  by  the  abundant  variety.     The  Ganges  poured    i 
its  ceaseless  floods  into  the  Ocean,  yet   the  Ocean  never 
overflowed  its  shore ;   the  unpausing  hurry  of  the  river, 
the  unchanging  fulness  of  the  vast  expanse  in  which  it\ 
was  swallowed  up,  might  well   become  the  t3'pe  of  that 
contrast  between  the  vicissitude  of  the  world  of  percep- 
tion   and    the    oneness    felt    by  all  who    turned    to    the 
inward  world.     But  whether  or  not  the  changed  circum- 
stances   of  the   Hindus    gave    them    a    new  symbolism, 
their    thoughts    on^  the    Divine    certainty    took    a    new 
channel ;   their  attention  was   diverted  from  the  religion 
of   its    earlier    activity,   the    discernment    that   God   was 
One  was  the  discovery  that  He  must   be  sought  not  in 
the  variety  of  nature,  but  within  the  soul  of  man. 

Hitherto  we  have  been  only  tracing  the  universal 
thought  of  humanity  in  a  particular  example.  In  pro- 
portion as  men  believe  in  the  spiritual  world  they  tend 
to  give  it  a  centre,  whether  they  call  its  inhabitants 
human  or  divine.  But  to  regard  God  as  the  One  is  not 
necessarily  to  regard  Him  as  the  All.  If  logic  seem 
to   demand   the  inference,  it  is  possible  to  disregard   it 

1  e.g.  Mababharata,  xii.  7971^,  pp.  249,  250: — "Just  as  all  rivers  vhen 
they  reach  the  ocean  lose  their  individualities  and  their  names,  and  the  larger 
rivers  swallow  up  the  smaller,  so  are  beings  absorbed." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  2; 

as  an  invader  when  we  are  considering  the  Infinite. 
Logic,  we  may  believe,  is  a  law  of  men's  thought  con- 
cerning objects  of  thought  which  can  be  expressed  in 
adequate  nomenclature ;  a  guide,  therefore,  which  must 
be  regarded  as  fallacious  when  we  deal  with  that  con- 
cerning which  all  language  is  not  only  inadequate,  but 
to  a  certain  extent  misleading.  Considerations  such  as 
these  enable  us  to  make  room  for  the  Not-God  beside 
God — to  regard  Him  as  in  some  special  sense  the 
One,  and  3-et  to  believe  the  Universe  of  Being  contains 
that  which  is  heterogeneous  with  Him.  But  to  the  more 
logical  and  less  moral  Eastern  mind  this  was  impossible. 
If  He  were  the  One,  He  must  be  the  All.  There  could 
be  no  discontinuity  of  Being  between  Him  and  any  part 
of  Being.  A  man  was  an  exclusive  unity.  Oneness 
was  in  him  combined  with  negation,  he  was  this  and 
not  that.  But  in  God  the  unity  was  absolute.  He  was 
all  of  Being.  The  seeming  antagonism  which  separated 
from  Him  any  part  of  true  existence  was  as  fallacious 
as  some  turn  in  a  river  by  which  it  should  seem  to 
flow  away  from  the  sea.  "  Thou,"  exclaims  the  Indian 
seer,  overwhelmed  with  the  spectacle  of  the  Divine  in 
the  Universe — "Thou  art  youth,  thou  art  maiden,  thou 
art  woman,  thou  art  man,  thou  as  an  old  man  totterest 
along  on  thy  staff.  Thou  art  the  dark  blue  bee,  thou 
art  the  green  parrot  with  red  eyes,  thou  art  the  thunder- 
cloud, the  seasons,  the  seas."  ^  There  is  something 
wonderfully  expressive  in  this  stammering  hurry  of 
enumeration,  this  gathering  up  of  the  great  All  in 
some  hap-chosen  specimens  as  they  struck  the  keen, 
eager  fancy  of  one  who,  as  much  as  Spinoza,  might  be 
called  a  God-intoxicated  man.  He  feels  that  all  these 
things  conceal  God  as  much  as  tlicy  reveal  Him  ;  we 
must    not    look    without   for    any  manifestations   of   His 

^  Upanishads,  ii.  249,  250. 


25  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

presence.  "There  is  no  image  of  Him  whose  name 
is  great  Glory ;  no  one  perceives  Him  with  the  eye."  ^ 
"  He  is  the  ruler  of  many  who  seem  to  act,  but  do 
not  act ;  He  makes  the  one  seed  manifold."  "  He  is  the 
hidden  light,  of  whom  all  other  light  is  but  the  shadow ; 
"  like  the  fire  of  the  sun  that  is  set  in  the  Ocean,"  ^  the 
suffused  glow  that  lights  up  the  world,  but  has  no 
visible  centre.  Or  again,  He  is  symbolized  by  that  fiery 
principle  which  converted  all  to  its  own  essence,  and 
which  seems  to  have  been  contemplated  also  as  the 
principle  of  growth  so  inseparably  united  with  heat. 
But  the  difference  in  these  varied  manifestations  of  the 
one  is  only  seeming ;  the  identity  is  actual.  All  that 
seems  to  separate  man  from  God  belongs  to  the  realm 
of  illusion  ;  in  proportion  as  man  approaches  the  True 
he  recognizes  his  own  being  as  embraced  and  inter- 
penetrated by  the  Divine,  and  sees  that,  so  far  as  he 
truly  is,  he  is  one  with  God.  "  There  is  one  eternal 
thinker,  thinking  non-eternal  thoughts ;  He,  though 
One,  fulfils  the  desires  of  many.  The  wise  who  per- 
ceive Him  within  their  Self,  to  them  belongs  eternal 
peace.  "  '^  This,  in  truth,  is  the  escape  from  all  the  per- 
turbation of  our  deceptive  phehomenal  existence — this 
is  the  secret  of  true  wisdom.  "  In  that  vast  Brahma 
wheel,"  the  outward  creation,  "in  which  all  things  live 
and  rest,  the  bird  (the  soul)  flutters  about  so  long  as 
he  thinks  that  the  self  in  him  is  different  from  the 
mover.  .  .  .  But  when  that  God  is  known  all  fetters 
fall  off",  all  sufferings  are  destroyed."  ^  The  conflict  is 
ended.  Man  is  one  with  himself,  and  unsatisfied  desire 
is  at  an  end. 

The  intellectual  attractions  of  Pantheism   are  equally 
strong  at  all  times.      It  must  always  be  a  temptation  to 

1  Upanishads,  ii.  253.  2  /bid.,  ii.  264.  s  jtid.,  ii,  265. 

4  Ibid.,  ii.  19.  ^  Ibid.,  ii,  236,  repeated,  243, 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  27 

explain  the  universe  of  Being  by  a  single  principle ; 
by  setting  all  that  exists  on  one  level  of  claim,  to  make  a 
clean  sweep  of  all  preliminary  distinctions  of  a  )'ighi  to  be. 
But  as  a  doctrine  satisfying  to  the  moral  nature,  it  will 
appear  in  very  different  aspects  according  as  it  is  viewed 
in  different  states  of  society.  For  an  inhabitant  of 
London  or  Paris,  familiar  with  the  development  of  poverty 
and  crime  which  our  modern  civilization  forces  on  the 
attention  of  every  one,  the  thought  that  God  is  all  can 
surely  never  come  as  a  gospel.  Nor  is  it  easy  to  imagine 
human  beings  so  different  from  those  we  see  around  us 
as  to  delight  in  the  thought  that  the  Divine  meant  no 
more  than  the  sum  of  all  their  own  impulse  and  desire 
and  all  the  circumstances  which  surrounded  them.  But 
perhaps  this  is  partly  due  to  the  weakness  of  our  ima- 
gination. Where  nature  is  more  genial  and  the  needs 
of  man  are  simpler  and  fewer,  life  is  much  less  full 
of  struggle,  and  there  the  circumstances  of  average 
humanity  contain  less  to  make  it  a  mockery  to  regard 
the  All  as  Divine.^  "  As  the  sun,  the  e3^e  of  the  world, 
is  not  contaminated  by  the  external  impurities  seen  by 
the  eye,  thus  the  one  Self  within  all  things  is  never  con- 
taminated by  the  suffering  of  the  w^orld,  being  Himself 
apart." "  To  imagine  the  Divine  Being  contemplating 
unmoved  "  the  sufferings  of  the  world  "  w'ould  seem  to 
transport  into  the  Divine  the  worst  attributes  of  humanit3^ 
But  it  depends  partly  on  what  the  suflcrings  of  the  world 
are.  And  however  we  explain  it,  we  must  accept  the 
fact  that  this  belief  in  Pantheism  came  upon  the  early 
race  as  a  great  gospel   for  humanity.      There  was  a  sort 

1  "In  India,"  says  Max  Miiller,  "the  earth  without  much  labour  supplied 
all  that  was  wanted,  and  the  climate  was  such  that  life  in  the  forest  was  not 
only  easy  but  delightful.  Several  of  the  names  given  to  the  forest  by  the  Aryans 
meant  originally  delight  or  bliss"  ("  Lectures  on  the  Origin  and  Growth  of 
Religions  as  illustrated  by  the  Religions  of  India,"  1882), 

-  L'panishads,  ii.  19. 


28  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  rapture  of  repose  in  their  belief  that  God  was  All,  and 
to  the  Hindu  repose  was  joy.  After  severance  from  the 
active  Persian  race,  the  delight  in  activity  so  marked  in 
the  earlier  Scriptures  seems  to  have  gradually  dried  up. 
Perhaps  a  tropical  climate  opposed  itself  to  all  delight  in 
activity.  But  though  the  world  without  might  strengthen 
the  delight  in  repose,  this  feeling  had  its  source  in  the 
world  within.  It  was  the  characteristic  of  a  race  that 
sought  above  all  things  the  unity  of  the  absolute,  and 
turned  from  the  various,  the  eventful,  the  multiform,  as 
from  the  realm  of  illusion,  the  realm  in  which  sojourn  was 
inevitable,  but  in  which  it  was  impossible  to  find  a  home. 
We  can  trace  the  association  of  this  delight  in  repose 
— partly  as  cause  and  partly  as  effect,  or  rather  perhaps 
in  that  deeper  correlation  which  lies  below  the  idea  of 
causation — with  all  cosmic  theory,  and  through  cosmic 
theory  on  all  moral  aim.  For  the  Indian  mind  there 
must  be  no  event  of  transcendent  importance  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  Universe.  God  is  no  Creator.  The  world 
is  not  a  creation,  but  a  growth.  It  has  not  been  made, 
it  commemorates  no  act  of  conscious  will,  no  exertion 
of  definitely  directed  power.  Its  origin  is  indistinct,  a 
subject  for  vague  surmise,  for  a  confession  of  perplexity, 
for  merely  negative  statement.  The  Hindu  gazed  back- 
wards into  the  dim  dawn  of  the  Universe,  and  saw  that 
"  Being  was  not  yet,  nor  Not-Being  ;  the  atmosphere  did 
not  exist,  nor  the  firmament  above  it.  Where,  then,  was 
the  world  ?  Where  were  the  waters,  the  gulf  which  no 
plummet  may  sound  ?  ^  Death  was  not  yet,  nor  therefore 
could  there  be  immortality  ;  night  and  day  "  (their  earthly 
types)  "  were  indistinguishable."  Only  one  belief  was 
positive — the  primal  unity  must  have  been  there  already. 

1  This  hymn  (Rigveda,  x.  129),  which  has  been  frequently  quoted,  is  given  from 
M.  Darmesteter's  "  Essais  Orientaux,"  p.  205.  He  says  that  in  the  writer, 
•'  Pascal  eCit  reconnu  un  frere,  Spinoza  lui  eiit  tendu  la  main." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  29 

"  A  breath  arose  self-moved  ;  it  was  the  One  ;  there  was 
nothing  beside  that  One,  nor  above  it.  All  was  dark- 
ness. Enveloped  in  night,  the  Universe  was  but  an 
indistinct  wave.  Whence  came  the  ray  which  gave 
shape  to  the  world  ?  .  .  .  Who  knows  ?  Who  can  say 
whence  issued  this  creation  ?  The  gods  are  younger ; 
who,  then,  can  declare  its  birth,  or  say  whether  it  had  a 
Creator  ?  He  who  from  the  height  of  the  world  surveys 
the  world.  He  knows  ;  or  perhaps  even  He  knows  it 
not."  Nothing  in  the  whole  range  of  human  speculation  is 
more  sublimely  consistent  than  this  audacious  agnosticism. 
God  is  so  far  from  being  the  Creator  that  He  is  not  even 
cognizant  of  the  fact  of  Creation.  Sometimes  Creation 
and  dissolution  are  represented  as  the  breathing  of  God, 
the  coming  forth  and  drawing  back  of  His  life  in  orderly 
and  harmonious  exchange  of  expansion  and  contraction. 
"When  this  God  awakens,  the  universe  accomplishes  its 
acts  ;  when  He  slumbers,  plunged  in  a  profound  repose, 
the  world  is  dissolved."  ^  The  differences  of  such  views 
are,  from  our  point  of  view,  unimportant ;  their  common 
element — the  negation  of  all  Will  in  the  origin  of  the 
Universe — is  that  upon  which  the  moral  influence  of 
belief  turns.  There  is  no  stamp  of  Divine  sympathy 
upon  work.  The  world  of  incident  lacks  the  one  ini- 
tial event  which  associated  God  in  the  activity  of  man. 
No  Indian  teacher  could  ever  say  or  feel,  "  My  Fatlier 
worketh  hitherto,  and  I  work."  His  aim  was  rather 
to  attain  the  eternal  repose  of  the  Divine — a  repose  not 
alternating  with  and  dependent  on  labour,  as  all  repose 
which  is  actually  known  by  man,  but  something  deeper — a 
sort  of  sublime  passivity,  which  knows  no  intermittence. 
Creative  impulse  was  no  part  of  the  Divine  character, 
and  therefore  work  was  no  part  of  ideal  humanity. 
There  was   no  Divine  sanction   on   effort,  no  sacred  sig- 

1  "  Institutes  of  Munu,"  i.  51,  5:"."^ 


so  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

nificance  in  labour.  It  was  associated  with  servitude, 
with  social  scorn  and  rehgious  contempt.  And  then 
again  history  lost  its  importance,  events  had  no  Divine 
significance.  "  There  is,"  says  Professor  Max  Miiller,^ 
"  no  taste  for  history  in  India,  still  less  for  bio- 
graphy. Home  life  is  shrouded  in  a  veil  which  no 
one  ventures  to  lift,  while  public  life  has  no  existence. 
On  the  other  hand,  fable  and  myth  are  marvellously 
busy  in  the  East,  and  though  Rammohun  Roy  has  been 
dead  only  fifty  years,  several  stories  are  told  of  him 
which  have  clearly  a  mythical  character."  Here  we  see 
the  indifference  to  fact  which  is  a  result,  indirect  indeed, 
but  not  remote,  of  the  belief  that  the  One  is  the  All. 
The  realm  of  difference  becomes  insignificant,  unworthy 
of  careful  attention.  What  matters  accuracy  in  reference 
to  the  world  of  illusion  ?  All  event  is  unreal,  myth  has 
a  deeper  truth  than  fact.  A  transcript  from  experience 
can  have  none  but  unimportant  truthfulness,  but  myth  ex- 
presses wisdom.  The  truth  of  thought  is  so  exclusively  the 
Hindu  ideal  that  it  shuts  out  all  care  for  accuracy  of  fact. 
"  There  is  in  all  national  morality  something  that 
illustrates  that  law  by  which  the  image  of  some  bright 
object  is  impressed  on  the  closed  eye  in  reversed  light 
and  shade.  The  life  of  India  reveals  this  Protestant 
tendency  in  more  than  one  direction  ;  the  spirit  of  a  true 
unity  seems  continually  to  bear  witness  against  an  ex- 
clusive and  monotonous  unity.  "  They  who  believe  not 
in  the  identity  of  Being  have  fallen  into  a  deep  night, 
but  they  who  believe  only  in  its  identit}'  have  fallen 
into  one  yet  deeper.  There  is  a  recompense  for  those 
who  believe  in  the  identity  of  beings  ;  there  is  another  for 
those  who   believe  in  their  difference." "      This  striking 

^  In  an  article,  I  think,  in  the  Contemporary  Review,  March  1885. 

2  This  passage  is  quoted  by  M.  Adolphe  Francke,  in  his  very  interesting 
"  Etudes  Orientales,"  1S61,  as  a  quotation  from  the  Veda,  translated  by  B.  St. 
Hilaire,  but  I  have  not  been  able  to  idcntifv  it. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  31 

passage  is  an  instance  of  most  rare  union  of  insight 
at  once  into  a  truth  and  into  its  opposite  ;  the  Indian 
was  apt  to  forget  that  "  those  who  beheve  only  the 
identity  of  Being  have  fallen  into  a  deep  night ; "  what 
we  find  for  the  most  part  is  a  protest  against  all 
diversity.  "  The  rivers  in  the  sea  do  not  know  I  am 
this  or  that  river ;  "  ^  in  like  manner,  man  has  as  his 
aim  to  escape  all  that  is  individual,  to  be  "  merged  in 
the  true,"  i.e.,  lost  in  an  Ocean  of  Being  wherein  all 
difference  shall  be  swallowed  up.  "  There  is  no  bliss 
in  anything  finite," "  and  so  it  would  seem  there  is  no 
reality  in  it.  B3'  a  subtle  development  of  this  passive 
spirit  the  idea  of  conflict  is  exchanged  for  the  idea  of 
endurance ;  courage  stiffens  into  asceticism.  The  con- 
trast of  good  and  evil,  only  dimly  present  at  any  stage  of 
this  religion,  wholl}'  vanishes,  and  its  place  is  taken  by  the 
contrast  of  the  real  and  the  unreal.  The  world  of  sense 
is  seen  as  a  fleeting  vision  ;  only  what  lies  beyond  it  is 
worthy  of  the  attention  of  man.  But  the  religion  which 
confuses  God  and  man  sets  up  lines  of  ineffaceable  dis- 
tinction between  man  and  man.  This  harsh  separateness 
of  the  Hindu  system  of  caste  is  not  so  much  an  exception 
to  this  unifying  tendency  as  a  natural  recoil  from  it. 
Truth  neglected  in  one  direction  must  be  exaggerated 
in  another,  and  a  tendency  which,  carried  to  its  logical 
outcome,  becomes  destructive  to  society  is  always  liable 
to  sudden  and  complete  inversion.  In  the  very  first 
glance  at  Indian  literature  we  are  struck  by  the  confusion 
between  the  human  and  divine  worlds.  We  remember 
with  difficulty  in  any  legend  or  myth  which  of  the 
personages  are  divine,  which  human  ;  there  is  no  clear 
dividing    line    between    the    natural    and    supernatural 

1  Upanishads,  i.  102. 

-  Ibid.,  i.  123.    The  definition  of  the  Infinite  follows : — "  Wlicn  one  hears  nnd 
sees  nothing  else"  (when  all  sense  of  diversity  is  lost),  "  that  is  the  Infinite." 


32  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

sphere.  The  divine  combatant  is  revealed  by  hfs 
superhuman  strength,  but  awakens  no  surprise  by  his 
supernatural  nature.  It  is  a  part  of  the  same  ideal  that 
there  should  be  so  ineffaceable  a  difference  between  the 
Brahman  and  the  Sudra.  The  Divine  oneness  satisfied 
the  instinct  which  seeks  unity,  the  human  world  was 
given  up  to  an  opposite  principle.  The  whole  system 
of  things  in  which  we  live  is  a  mere  fleeting  phenomenon, 
a  ripple  on  the  Ocean  of  Being,  a  rainbow  in  the  eternal 
light ;  within  this  system  the  Indian  sought  no  unity ; 
that  could  only  be  discerned  from  a  point  beyond  it. 
The  world  of  event  was  the  v/orld  of  illusion.  "  If  the 
slayer  think  that  he  sla3's,  if  his  victim  think  that  he 
is  slain,  they  are  both  of  them  in  error."  ^  The  insigni- 
ficance, the  transitoriness  of  life  suited  well  with  the 
hopeless  division  of  the  caste  system.  .  The  only  thing 
of  value  in  it  was  the  recognition  of  the  Divine,  and 
the  sacred  caste  set  apart  to  bear  witness  to  this  was 
naturally  separated  from  all  others  by  an  impassable 
chasm. 

The  caste  system  of  Brahmanism  is  an  emphatic  asser- 
tion of  Predestination  in  its  most  absolute  form.  Birth 
fixes  the  whole  of  life ;  to  be  born  a  priest,  a  warrior, 
an  artisan,  a  labourer,  is  to  have  marked  out  the  whole 
of  fate  and  the  bent  of  character.  The  Sudra  who  sets 
before  himself  the  virtues  of  the  Brahman  commits  deadly 
sin,  he  disturbs  the  order  of  the  universe.  The  distinc- 
tion of  "the  elect"  and  "the  reprobate"  lies  at  the  base 
of  this  system.  The  lowest  class  is  born  and  must 
remain  in  sin  ;  its  members  have  no  right  to  share  in  the 
common  rites  of  the  superior  castes ;  the  Brahman  is 
even  forbidden  to  accept  their  offerings.  If  a  Brahman 
marry  a  Sudra  "he  sinks  into  the  regions  of  torture;" 

1  Upanishads,  ii.  ii.     The  passage  has  been  versified  by  Mr.  Muir  in  his 
metrical  translations  from  Sanscrit  texts. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  33 

hell  is  the  penalty  for  an   unlawful  condescension   from 
the  high   to  the   low.^      "  The  self-existent  created   the 
Sudra  merely  for  the  sake  of  the  Brahman  ;   servitude 
is  innate  in  him  (the  Sudra) ;  who,  then,  can  take  it  from 
him  ?  "  "      His  whole  duty  is  comprised  in  obedience  to 
the  higher   class.      He   has   no   concern   with   religion ; 
the  Brahman  may  take  any  of  the  Sudra's   propert}'-  if 
he  need  it  for  sacrifice,  but  must  not  accept  it ;  ^  if  it  be 
contributed  to  ritual  observance,  it  must  be  involuntarily. 
The  arrogance  of  the  priestly  caste   is   not  left  to  take 
care   of  itself,   but   is  ensured   by  a  number  of  minute 
precepts,  enjoining  on  men  who   live  only  to  teach  the 
meaning  of  holiness  the  mingled   scorn   of  the  Pharisee 
and  the  Ancien  Regime — the  hateful  pride  of  righteous- 
ness combined  with  the  vulgar  pride  of  birth.*      Scorn 
was  needed  for  the  defence  of  their  pre-eminence  ;  it  was 
the  buttress   of  their  virtue.      "  Better  one's   own   duty 
performed  ill  than  the  duty  of  another  performed  well,"  ^ 
is  a  sentence  w^hich  occurs  more  than  once  in  the  sacred 
Indian  code.      In  the  sense  in  which  we  read  the  words 
there  is  a  truth  for  all  time.     Better  that  a  parent  should 
perform   the   duties   of  a    parent   very  imperfectly  than 
that  he  or  she  should  allow  a  child  to  govern.      Better 
a  very  poor  piece  of  handiwork   than  hands  set   to   do 
the  work   of  feet.      But  whenever  we  can   say  this  we 
must  feel  duty  rooted  in  the  deep  part  of  the  nature.     It 
must  be  either  a  claim  resting  on  a  broad  human  basis, 
like  that  of  human   kindred,  or  else  on   a  deep  inward 
vocation,  like  that  of  character.      In  the  mere  distinction 
of  class  the  better  mind  of  modern  Europe  sees  nothing 
to   be   emphasized,  nothing  which  natural   endowments 
may  not  traverse.      English  aristocracy  itself  is  a  record 
of  continuous  infusion  of  a  new  element,  it  lives  by  that 

1  "Institutes  of  Menu,"  iii.  17.  -  Ibid.^  viii.  413,  414. 

'  Ibid.,  viii.  417.  *  e.g..  Ibid.,  ii.  119.  '  Ibid.,  x.  97. 


34  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

very  receptivity  which  Brahmanism  abhors.  Our  Peerage 
is  powerful  because  we  open  its  doors  to  every  form  of 
capacity,  because,  in  a  word,  it  is  not  an  Order.  In 
India  a  member  of  the  priestly  caste  was  separate  from 
a  member  of  the  servile  caste  by  a  chasm  that  could  be 
bridged  by  no  extremity  of  virtue,  since  the  only  pos- 
sible virtue  for  the  servile  class  was  that  spirit  of  docile 
submission,  which,  in  attempting  to  quit  this  caste,  he 
must  lose.  The  Sudra  who  set  before  himself  the  virtues 
of  the  Brahman  committed  deadly  sin,  he  disturbed  the 
order  of  the  universe — that  order  of  human  separateness 
which  has  succeeded  to  the  Holy  Order  of  Nature,  and  to 
which  an  equal  loyalty  was  due.  , 

We  need  no  more  emphatic  testimony  to  the  sacred- 
ness  of  the  caste  system  in  Indian  feeling  than  the  fact 
that  India  rejected  Buddhism.  What  is  Buddhism  ?  It 
is,  if  we  leave  out  its  protest  against  the  caste  system, 
the  completed  development  of  all  those  impulses  and 
instincts  which  we  have  endeavoured  to  set  forth  as 
characteristic  of  Indian  thought.'^  It  is  the  yearning  for 
an  escape  from  the  bondage  of  desire  carried  out  to  a 
hope  of  escape  from  the  trammels  of  existence.  How- 
ever we  explain  Nirvana^ — whether  or  not  we  contrive 
to  avoid,  in  interpreting  it,  the  idea  of  absolute  annihi- 
lation— still  we  must  feel  it  a  consummation  of  that 
negative  ideal  of  life  of  which  every  utterance  of  the 
Indian  is  an  expression.      It  is  a  gathering  up  of  all  the 

1  It  is  a  striking  testimony  to  this  spirit  that  it  is  nowhere  more  evident  than 
in  this  very  Code  of  Menu,  which  contains  so  much  that  is  directly  hostile  to  it. 
The  idea  of  Renunciation  shines  through  the  harshest  assertion  of  privilege ; 
^•^•)  "•  95'  "Resignation  of  all  pleasures  is  far  better  than  attainment  of 
them  ;  "  and  there  are  several  passages  which  equal  the  Christian  Scriptures  in 
the  ideal  of  forbearance  and  forgiveness. 

2  "Le  Nirvana,"  says  Eugene  Burnouf,  the  great  authority  on  Buddhism, 
"  est  pour  les  Th^istes  I'absorption  de  la  vie  individuelle  en  Dieu,  et  pour  les 
Ath^es  I'absorption  de  cette  vie  individuelle  dans  le  ndant.  Mais  pour  les  uns 
et  pour  les  autres  le  Nirvana  c'est  affranchissement  supreme  "  ("  Introduction  k 
I'Histoire  du  Buddhisme  Indien").     It  is  literally  "blown-out-ness." 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  35 

longing  for  rest,  for  silence,  for  escape  from  individual 
limit  into  the  desire  to  escape  from  all  that  we  can 
recognize  as  life.  "  Even  in  heavenly  pleasures  the 
awakened  finds  no  satisfaction,  the  disciple  who  is  fully 
awakened  delights  only  in  the  destruction  of  all  desires."  ^ 
Victory  "  breeds  hatred,  for  the  conquered  is  unhappy. 
He  who  has  given  up  victory  is  happy."  ^  "  Those  who 
love  nothing  and  hate  nothing  have  no  fetters."  ^  Ever}^- 
where  the  Desire  is  \ht  fetter.  Freedom  is  found  not  in 
enjoyment,  but  in  renunciation.  The  deliverance  from 
Self  is  the  sole  aim  for  the  enlightened  soul ;  all  else  is 
worthy  of  effort  only  in  so  far  as  it  furthers  this.  The 
Indian  ideal  of  negation  is  here  at  its  height.  The  life  of 
Cakya-Muni,  the  Indian  prince  who  gives  this  ideal  its 
concrete  illustration,  sets  forth  this  aim  in  its  fullest  accom- 
plishment ;  he  leaves  the  joys  of  home,  of  marriage,  of 
paternity,  to  wander  forth  as  a  homeless  mendicant ;  he 
has  all  this  world  can  give,  and  he  renounces  all,  trans- 
lating into  a  splendid  abdication  the  theory  of  surrender, 
which,  in  its  degree,  must  be  the  aim  of  each  one  who 
knows  the  secret  of  blessedness.  His  reward  is  to 
teach  suffering  humanity  the  path  of  a  true  redemption — 
the  path  to  Nirvana.  However  hard  for  a  Western  reader 
to  conceive  that  Heaven  should  mean  the  extinction  from 
which  it  seems  to  us  hardly  less  natural  to  shrink  than 
from  pain,  yet  we  cannot  but  feel  Nirvana  the  consumma- 
tion of  all  those  aspirations  which  we  have  endeavoured  to 
trace  in  following  the  development  of  Indian  philosophy. 
Buddhism  is  the  essence  of  all  that  gives  its  moral  interest 
to  Brahmanism.  Whence,  then,  was  it  treated  by  Brah- 
manism  as  its  deadly  foe  ?  How  comes  it  that,  though 
Indian   in    origin    and    in    feeling,   Buddhism    has    been 

1  Dhammapada,  187.     Some  pr^rt  of  this  sacred  book  of  the  Buddhists  is 
believed  to  be  the  utterance  of  the  Buddha  himself. 

2  Ibid.,  201.  »  Ibid.,  210. 


36  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

driven  from  India  to  find  its  home  among  men  of  another 
race  ?  There  can  be  but  one  answer — its  attack  on  the 
cherished  caste  system  of  India.  In  all  else  the  two 
religions  are  at  one.  In  the  position  of  (^akya-Muni 
there  was  nothing  original/  he  was  but  one  of  those 
ascetics  who  had  from  immemorial  time  wandered  home- 
less in  India ;  his  belief  in  transmigration,  the  basis  of 
his  gospel  of  Nirvana,  was  shared  by  him  with  other 
Indian  teachers ;  the  only  novelty  in  his  position  was 
that  he  was  a  preacher,  and  by  that  fact  alone  an  enemy 
to  the  caste  system.  "  My  law  is  a  law  of  grace  for  all,"  ^ 
he  answered  when  taunted  with  the  wretchedness  of  his 
converts.  "  Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  are  weary  and 
heavy  laden,"  seems  to  have  been  the  animating  spirit 
of  his  attitude  towards  all.  In  the  Order  founded  by 
him,  or,  at  all  events,  which  grew  up  out  of  the  crowd  of 
disciples  attracted  by  his  preaching,  the  most  wretched 
and  despised  slave  could  find  a  home,  so  that  the  aspira- 
tions nourished  by  the  caste  system  were  satisfied  while 
all  their  limits  were  defied,  the  outcast  found  his  place 
in  an  organic  system,  the  human  atom  was  the  member 
of  an  Order.  But  this  order  was  essentially  a  creation 
of  spirit ;  the  outward  order  was  defied.  "  Is  there," 
asks  one  of  the  lower  caste,  in  a  Buddhist  legend  ^ — 
"  Is  there  between  a  Brahman  and  another  man  the 
difference  of  gold  from  stone  ?  He  has  not  issued  from 
the  ether  or  the  wind,  he   has   not   burst  forth   from  the 

1  "  II  se  presentait  comme  un  de  ces  ascetes  qui  depuis  les  temps  les  plus 
anciens  parcourent  I'lnde  en  prechant  la  morale,  d'autant  jilus  respectfe  de  la 
socidt^  qu'ils  affectent  de  la  m^priser  d'avantage  "  ("  Introduction  k  I'Histoire 
du  Buddhisme  Indien,"  par  Eugene  Burnouf,  184^). 

-  Ibid.,  p.  199. 

3  Given  in  Burnouf.  The  Tchandala  (one  of  the  lowest  caste)  has  asked  the 
daughter  of  a  BraViman  in  marriage,  and  provokes  an  outburst  of  rage  and  hate 
from  the  Brahman,  "  Comment  oses-tu  demander  I'union  du  plus  noble  avcc 
I'etre  le  plus  vil?"  The  answer  of  the  Tchandala  has  some  pa3sages  curiously 
recalling  the  denunciations  of  the  Pharisees  by  Christ. 


IXDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  37 

earth,  he  is  born  of  woman,  as  is  the  member  of  the  caste 
he  most  despises."  It  was  the  declaration  of  this  truth, 
and  this  alone,  that  made  Buddhism  a  heresy. 

In  truth,  no  doctrine  ever  provokes  a  deadlier  hatred 
than  that  which  opposes  itself  to  the  spirit  of  caste.  It 
thereby  offends  at  once  the  low  and  the  high  impulses  of 
humanity.  For  the  instincts  which  entrench  themselves 
within  this  rampart  are  not  by  any  means  altogether  evil, 
they  are  wrought  up  with  the  profoundly  moral  conviction 
that  "  we  are  members  one  of  another."  The  ideal  of  caste 
is  closely  bound  up  with  that  organic  character  of  virtue 
which  our  own  day,  with  its  worship  of  equality,  is  but 
too  ready  to  overlook,  but  which  can  never  be  neglected 
without  a  general  lowering  of  all  arduous  ideals  of 
virtue.  Nothing  can  be  more  elevating  than  the  exposi- 
tion of  the  duties  of  the  warrior  caste  as  given  in  the 
Code  of  Menu,  though  it  is  streaked  here  and  there  with 
strangely  contrasting  precepts  : — "  No  one  should  in  battle 
slay  enemies  with  concealed  or  poisoned  weapons ; "  ^ 
"  The  warrior  is  bound  to  respect  weakness,  to  pity  even 
cowardice ;  "  "  That  king  is  dead  from  whose  kingdom 
the  people  crying  out  are  carried  off  by  savages ;  " 
The  chief  duty  of  a  warrior  is  the  protection  of  the 
people  ; "  "That  king  goes  to  hell  who  in  exercise  of  his 
sovereign  power  will  not  meekly  bear  reviling."  ^  The 
ascetic  Brahman  in  like  manner  must  bear  a  reproachful 
spirit  with  patience,  must  speak  reproachfully  to  no  man  ; 
abused,  he  must  answer  mildly,  he  must  be  to  all  the 
pattern  of  patience,  high-mindedness,  and  spiritual  devo- 
tion. The  high  castes  are  appointed  to  set  forth  the 
excellence  of  their  special  virtues,  they  are  to  be  to  all 
below  them  a  luminous  illustration  of  the  meaning  and 
beauty  of  goodness.      This  is  the  aspect   of  caste  to  all 

1  "Institutes  of  .Menu,"  vii.  90;  rf.  91-93.  -  /did,,  vii.  1.13,  i.;.}. 

3  Ibid.,  viii.  313. 


14  43  "l  2 


38  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

who  find  it  attract  the  nobler  part  of  their  nature,  an 
aspect  without  which  it  could  not  gain  any  permanent 
hold  on  the  spirit  of  man.  For  nothing,  we  may  be 
sure,  that  appeals  wholly  to  the  vulgar  and  self-centred 
elements  in  humanity  keeps  its  hold  on  the  human  heart 
from  generation  to  generation.  The  temptations  that 
assail  the  mere  self  in  each  one  of  us  are  permanent  only 
in  their  hostility  to  what  is  highest,  in  themselves  is 
nothing  enduring,  they  change  their  character  from  age 
to  age,  nay,  from  hour  to  hour.  The  institutions  which 
human  beings  cherish  and  defend  have  pushed  their 
roots  into  a  part  of  the  being  below  the  limits  of  selfish- 
ness, though  they  may  owe  some  nourishment  also  to 
this  surface  stratum  of  life.  They  could  not  obviously 
and  irresistibly  sway  human  desire  if  they  had  no  con- 
nection with  its  vulgarest  source,  they  could  not  retain 
their  hold  of  a  Nation,  if  this  were  all. 

Of  all  the  various  forms  taken  by  the  spirit  that 
identifies  the  one  with  the  man}^,  but  not  with  the  All, 
the  family  and  the  nation  alone  escape  the  baser  tempta- 
tions which  creep  in  with  the  association  of  self.  Hardly 
can  it  ever  have  happened  in  the  whole  course  of  the 
world's  history  that  it  might  truly  be  said  of  a  man's 
love  for  his  country,  "  He  loved  not  wisely  but  too  well." 
In  the  literal  sense  of  the  words  they  cannot  indeed  be 
applied  to  any  love ;  but  even  in  that  sense  in  which 
they  are  consecrated  by  the  pathetic  utterance  of  a  jealous 
love  suddenly  revealed  to  itself  as  ignorant  and  erring, 
they  have  no  place  with  reference  to  patriotism.  A 
nation  is  indeed  a  limited  being ;  it  is  conceivably 
possible  to  make  the  love  of  one  the  hate  of  more.  But 
the  love  of  the  nation  is  the  love  of  the  neighbour.  It 
is  the  love  of  all  whom  we  have,  in  ordinary  life,  any 
power  to  help  or  hurt.  It  turns  all  beneficent  effort  into 
the  same  channel  with   knowledge  and  power,  it  leaves 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  39 

outside  of  interest  those  only  whom  interest  would  not 
profit.  Such  feeling  is  in  its  nature  expansive.  It  finds 
within  its  scope  the  greatest  possible  variety ;  it  can 
permit  itself  to  grow  rigid  in  no  single  attitude,  it  must 
look  down,  it  must  look  up,  it  must  accustom  itself  to 
the  level  gaze  of  equal  right,  to  reverence  for  authority, 
to  pity  for  weakness,  to  indignation  against  crime.  All 
these  things  are  found  within  the  sacred  enclosure  of  a 
Nation,  all  these  feelings  must  be  associated  with  the 
fervour  of  patriotism,  and  we  may  ^'surely  conclude  that 
the  character  in  which  they  have  found  their  fullest 
exercise  must  be  ready  for  all  new  attachment,  must 
have  become  responsive  to  every  claim  and  sensitive  to 
every  appeal.  The  love  of  the  Nation  is  the  love  of 
humanity  in  germ.  But  nothing  of  this  holds  good  of 
the  class.  Here  the  limit  is  the  most  conspicuous  fact 
in  the  enclosure.  The  love  of  the  Nation,  we  have  said, 
is  love  of  the  neighbour  ;  the  love  of  the  class  is  often 
scorn  and  hate  of  the  neighbour.  "  He  who  declares  the 
law  to  a  servile  man  and  instructs  him  in  the  mode 
of  expiating  sin  sinks  with  that  very  man  into  hell."  ^ 
Where  could  hatred  breathe  a  deadlier  spirit  than  in 
that  declaration  from  the  sacred  Indian  code  ?  Here 
we  see  in  ambush  the  fiercest  spirit  of  persecution  ; 
here,  long  before  the  appearance  of  the  Buddha,  we  come 
in  contact  with  denunciation  of  all  that  was  holy  and 
beneficent  and  potent  in  the  preaching  of  Buddha.  It 
is  as  if  the  Indian  worship  of  Unity  had  foreseen  and 
denounced,  as  a  fatal  misconception,  that  spirit  of  unity 
which  sought  the  redemption  of  all  mankind.  And  with 
the  hatred  of  baffled  privilege  and  defeated  arrogance 
there  yet  mingled,  we  may  be  sure,  some  element  of 
the  nobler  feeling  that  comes  in  wherever  men  have 
learned  to  say  "  We  "  instead  of  "  I,"  and  to  exchange 

1  "  Institutes  of  Menu,"  iv.  81. 


40  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  narrowest  forms  of  selfishness  for  something  wider. 
There  was  the  feeling  that  the  break  up  of  caste  obli- 
gation "  would  cause  the  universe  to  shake,"  ^  that  Order 
must  perish,  if  the  limits  of  the  high  and  low  were  con- 
founded. And  hence,  though  Buddhism  was,  in  all  but 
its  neglect  of  the  caste  system,  a  mere  carrying  out  of 
what  is  most  characteristic  of  Indian  thought,  yet  this 
one  exception  made  it  the  object  of  deadly  hostility  to 
Brahmanism,  and  though  the  religion  of  a  third  of  the 
human  race,  it  is  now  the  religion  of  a  minority  in  India. 
Buddhism  is,  in  fact,  no  more  than  the  purely  spiritual 
half  of  Brahmanism,  purified  from  that  reactionary  ten- 
dency which  shows  itself  in  the  distinction  of  caste. 
It  is  the  reassertion  of  the  primal  unity,  against  that 
element  of  rigid  distinction  which  arose  partly  as  a 
kind  of  guarantee  to  the  practical  side  of  human  nature 
against  the  all-obliterating  wave  of  the  Infinite,  partly 
as  a  protest  against  that  ultimate  antithesis  of  good 
and  evil  which  is  always  the  most  dangerous  foe  of 
Pantheism.  The  condition  of  things  in  this  world  is 
a  mere  fleeting  phenomenon,  a  ripple  on  the  great  Ocean 
of  Being,  a  rainbow  in  eternal  light.  Within  this  cycle 
of  fugitive  phenomena  no  great  distinction  must  be 
introduced  dividing  the  actual  from  the  conventional, 
the  transient  from  the  eternal,  because  that  has  been 
done  once  for  all  in  recognizing  the  whole  of  life  as 
transient  and  illusory.  The  substitution  of  virtues  for 
virtue  which  marks  the  spirit  of  caste  is  the  ally  of  the 
spirit  of  Pantheism.  Virtue  thus  becomes  something 
relative,  temporary,  earthly.  The  virtue  of  the  warrior 
is  one  thing,  that  of  the  labourer  another  ;  the  slave  has 
no  other  virtue  than  docility  and  obedience.  Goodness 
thus  broken  up  and  divided  loses  its  distinctness  as 
part  of  a  great  antithesis ;   there  is   no  idea  of  a  con- 

i  "  Institutes  of  Menu,"  viii.  418. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  41 

flict  of  good   and   evil.      And  it   is   this  idea  of  conflict 
which  forms  the  stumbling-block  to  Pantheism. 

The  antagonist  of  this  spirit  of  unity  is  not  the  belief 
in  multiplicity,  but  the  belief  in  dualism.  It  is  not 
difficult  for  the  many  to  be  absorbed  in  the  one ;  this 
process  is  a  very  natural  one.  That  which  resists  it  is 
the  antithesis  suggested  by  desire  and  fear,  more  espe- 
cially by  the  desires  and  fears  which  belong  to  the 
realm  of  the  conscience.  All  desire,  it  is  true,  is  not 
moral ;  the  larger  part  is  not.  But  all  desire  is  the 
material  of  morality,  all  suggests  the  antagonism  of  good 
and  evil.  The  Indian  clearly  recognized  this  antagonism 
in  all  desire  to  the  mystic  Unity  in  which  he  found  his 
life,  and  treated  it  consistently  as  a  danger.  The  "  pairs 
of  opposites  "  are  the  object  of  continual  warning  in  the 
"  Divine  lay  "  ^  which  embodies  the  more  dramatic  form  of 
Indian  wisdom  ;  all  wish  and  aversion  are  there  treated 
as  the  opponents  of  truth.  And  so  in  a  very  important 
sense  they  are.  To  a  Being  of  pure  intellect  Evil  would 
be  inconceivable.  So  far  as  man  is  purely  intellectual 
he  desires  truth,  but  it  would  be  a  very  forced  and 
unnatural  way  of  expressing  this  to  say  that  he  dreads 
error  or  ignorance.      Ignorance  is  to  him  a  mere  ncga- 

1  The  Bhagavadgita,  or  "  The  Lord's  Lay  "  (to  give  it  the  name  chosen  by  its 
latest  translator),  is  an  episode  in  the  Mahabharata,  the  Iliad  of  India,  and 
has  the  special  interest  for  an  English  reader  of  having  been  the  medium  in  an 
English  translation  (1785)  of  awakening  interest  in  Sanscrit  literature.  It  is 
an  address  from  the  Divine  Being  to  Arjuna,  a  warrior  prince,  who  in  the  hour 
of  battle  shrinks  back  from  the  duty  of  slaughter  and  needs  the  Divine  warning, 
impressing  on  him  the  insignificance  and  illusory  nature  of  all  event,  before  he 
can  rouse  himself  to  take  his  place  as  a  Kschatriyia  at  the  head  of  his  battahons. 
It  is  an  interesting  and  impressive  illustration  of  the  close  connection  between 
the  caste  system  and  Pantheism.  A  comparison  between  this  lengthy  discourse 
spoken  on  the  field  of  battle  and  the  gleaming  Thcophanies  of  Homer  brings 
out  strongly  the  undramatic  character  of  Indian  thought,  drama  melting  into 
philosophy  on  the  one  hand,  as  philosophy  melts  into  drama  on  ilu-  other. 
The  warnings  against  the  "pairs  of  opposites"  occur  constantly,  e.s;.,  iv.  23. 
The  work  is  translated  in  the  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East."  I  have  also  con- 
sulted what  appears  an  admirable  translation  by  John  Davies  (1882). 


42  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tion,  and  just  so  far  as  his  mind  becomes  wholly  intel- 
lectual he  loses  the  sense  of  any  difference  between 
ignorance  and  error.  This  is  the  explanation  of  the 
fierce  antagonism  exhibited  at  all  times,  and  so  conspicu- 
ous in  our  day,  between  the  love  of  truth  and  the  love 
of  a  truth.  "  I  cannot  conceive,"  said  a  celebrated  man 
of  science  of  our  day,  when  he  was  speaking  to  a  person 
who  expressed  a  dislike  to  his  theories — "  I  cannot  con- 
ceive feeling  either  like  or  dislike  to  any  theory  what- 
ever." Perhaps  it  was  not  literally  true  either  of  the 
speaker  or  of  any  actual  man,  but  it  would  be  true  of 
any  one  who  dwelt  in  the  region  of  pure  intellect.  Is  a 
theory  true  ?  let  us  believe  it.  Is  it  untrue  ?  let  us  leave 
it  alone.  There  is  no  antagonism  here.  If  the  hatred 
of  error  appear  side  by  side  of  the  love  of  truth,  then 
assuredly  we  have  entered  on  a  moral  region.  We 
thus  enter  a  territory  where  the  right  borders  on  the 
wrong,  not  on  one  in  which  the  True  is  the  whole  of 
reality,  and  the  False  a  mere  vacuum.  And  to  a  people 
whose  whole  life  was  in  the  latter  region,  the  spirit  of 
Desire  was  the  one  antagonist  to  be  dreaded ;  it  was 
opposed  by  a  fierce  asceticism,  which  strove  boldly  to 
conquer  by  inverting  this  antithesis  of  hope  and  fear ;  it 
turned  the  earlier  courage  of  conflict  into  the  channel  of 
endurance,  and  strove  to  demonstrate,  by  exhibiting  this 
eager  pursuit  of  what  was  hated,  that  desire  and  fear 
were  mere  temporal  accidents,  interchangeable  at  will — 
incidents  of  the  temporary,  the  transitory,  and  therefore 
misleading  as  guides  to  the  Eternal. 

Thus  it  was  that  the  ideal  of  India,  though  it  started 
in  the  worship  of  the  Light,  seems  to  attain  its  develop- 
ment rather  in  the  worship  of  the  Night,^  for  thus  surely 

1  "  TrKeicTTois  SauroTs  eXvai  \6yovs  irepi  toD  davarov"  said  Megasthenes, 
the  Greek  who  was  sent  on  a  mission  to  India  (cir.  300),  in  describing  tlie 
Indians  (Strabo,  xv.  59).  Such  a  contrast  to  the  Hellenic  spirit  would  impress 
a  Greek, 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  43 

we  may  most  truly  symbolize  that  mystic  yearning  which 
seeks  the  revelation  of  the  Divine  not  in  the  daylight 
of  reason,  but  in  the  pause  of  an  entire  silence  and 
passivity  throughout  the  whole  being.  Unity  becomes 
conscious  of  itself,  it  quits  the  world  of  appearance,  it 
enters  into  the  background  of  reality  behind  appearances. 
We  have  cited  a  text  from  the  earlier  scriptures  in 
which  the  disappearance  of  a  constellation  at  the  return 
of  morning  is  mentioned  with  a  kind  of  surprise.^  The 
discovery  that  "  Light  can  thus  deceive  "  seems  to  have 
dawned  on  the  mind  of  the  Aryan  with  something  of 
the  sense  of  a  mystery  that  is  so  finely  expanded  in 
the  sonnet  from  which  we  take  these  words."  It  would 
be  altogether  out  of  harmony  with  the  fresh,  outward 
simplicity  of  the  Rig- Veda  to  make  much  of  this  single 
allusion  to  the  revelation  of  darkness.  And  3'et  it 
seems  impossible  not  to  accept  it  as  an  unconscious 
prophecy  of  the  course  which  later  thought  was  to 
follow.  The  faith  of  India  turned  from  the  seen  to  the 
unseen  ;  if  this  hint  of  a  sense  of  Light  as  the  concealer 
was  a  mere  accident,  at  all  events  it  was  an  accidental 
touch  which  gives  the  clue  to  the  labyrinth.  A  potent 
influence  beckoned  the  Indian  race  away  from  the  realm 
of  the  Outward,  curtained  off  the  invasion  of  eye  and 
ear  from  a  realm  where  the  spirit  might  study  the 
mysteries  which  lay  in  the  depth  of  its  own  being. 
The  world  of  event,  of  observation,  faded  and  became 
remote,  and  the  thinker  was  alone  in  the  world  of 
thought  in  which  he  found  his  home.  Duty  became 
almost  a  negation.  The  moral  life  was  one  of  pure 
receptivity.  All  effort  was  needed  for  the  one  great 
work  of  man — to  make  a  vacuum  within  for  that  mighty 

1  See  back,  p.  10. 
*  "  Why  do  we  then  shun  Death  with  restless  strife  ? 
If  Liijht  can  thus  deceive,  wherefore  not  Life  ?  " 

— Sonnet  by  Blanco  White. 


44  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tide  of  God  always  surging  up  into  every  human  heart 
that  was  open  to  receive  it.  To  this  behef  God  was  the 
universal  agent ;  man  had  but  to  cease  from  exertion,  and 
the  Divine  life  would  flood  his  own  with  its  inexhaustible 
wealth.  "  When  a  man  sleeps  here,"  says  the  mystic 
teacher,  "  he  becomes  united  with  the  True,  he  is  gone  to 
his  own  Self."  ^  The  silence  of  sense  is  the  revelation  of 
spirit ;  the  outer  eye  must  be  closed  before  the  inner  eye 
can  be  opened.  "  He,  the  highest  Person,  is  awake  in 
us  while  we  are  asleep."  ^  There  is  a  curious  fable  many 
times  repeated  in  these  sacred  scriptures  which  would 
seem  to  set  in  the  strongest  manner  the  supremacy  of 
the  passive  over  the  active  principle  in  man.  The  senses 
strive  with  breath  for  the  pre-eminence,  and  are  suc- 
cessively defeated  ;  that  is,  we  may  suppose,  the  principle 
in  man  which  connects  him  with  the  outer  world,  which 
fosters  the  exercise  of  will,  which  is  associated  with 
desire,  is  a  part  of  the  lower  order,  of  the  deceptive  un- 
real world.  "  A  wise  man  should  keep  down  speech  and 
mind."  ^  He  should  make  room  for  the  evolution  of  the 
primal  unity  by  repressing  all  that  is  individual — all  that 
belongs  to  the  world  of  the  many,  all  that  records  the 
separateness  of  individual  being,  with  its  hopes  and 
fears,  its  futile  activities,  its  illusive  centre  of  creative 
influence.  The  need  of  Humanity  was  a  deliverance 
from  all  that  was  multiform,  a  simple  recognition  of  that 
mysterious  ground  of  all  being,  so  near  the  conscious- 
ness of  every  man  that  its  least  misleading  name  was 
the  Self. 

It  is  not  without  a  great  effort,  both  of  the  imagina- 
tion and  the  reason,  that  we  come  near  enough  to  the 
doctrine  here  set  forth,  either  to  agree  or  disagree  with 
it.      It  is  apt  to  seem  not  merely  erroneous,  but  mean- 

^  Upanishads,  i.  98.  2  Jtid.^  W.  19. 

3  Ibid.,  ii.  13. 


INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  45 

ingless.     How  can  we  cease  from  our  own  personality  ? 
What  is  the  meaning  of  this  teaching  which  would  rob 
us   of  ourselves  ?      We   find   it   difficult   to   construe   to 
imagination  any  concrete  result  of  such  exhortation,  and 
turn  from  it  impatiently,  as   from   mere  words  ;   and  yet 
the   words  meet    us    from    very  different    quarters,   and 
we  are  forced  to  believe  in   some   common   ideal,  which 
appeals  to  the  most  various  minds  and  the  m^ost  remote 
ages.      Fenelon  and  Madame  Guyon  repeat  the  lesson  of 
the  Indian  m3'stic,^  and  again  we  find  it  in  the  raptures 
of  Mohammedan  piety.      And   there  are   phases  in  most 
human    lives,   if  they  pass   beyond   a  merely  child-like 
or  outward  experience,  which  light   up   the  fervours  of 
mystic  piety  with  an   illumination  rendering  them  intel- 
ligible  to  many  who   could   not  use  their  dialect.      No 
one,   surel}',  ever  looked  back  on  some  action  that   he 
recognized  as  wrong  without   feeling,  "  I   have  followed 
too    much    the  devices  and   desires  of  my  own   heart." 
He   has   substituted    the    Individual    for  the    Universal. 
Where  Personality  should  have  been   quiescent,  leaving 
place  to  Law,  some  gust  of  individual  feeling  has  broken 
in,   and    disturbed    the  harmony  of  things.      The  great 
maxim    of   the    moral   life   formulated   by   a    philosophic 
teacher,    "Act    so    that    thy   principle    of   action    could 
become  that  of  every  moral  agent,"  can  never  be  trans- 
lated into  experience  by  any  one  desiring  to  leave  the 
impress    of  his    own    individuality  on    the   structure    of 
circumstances.      "  Do  unto  all  men  as  you  would  they 
should  do  unto  you  "  may  be  so  read   as  to  encourage 
each    man    thus    to    impress    his    own    individuality    on 
the  world  ;   but   it   means,  in   fact,   the  same  as   Kant's 
maxim,  it  bids   us   invert   the   impulses  of  individuality, 
test  them   b}^   their  effects,  see  them   in   another  mind. 

1  The  reader  of  the  Buddhist  scriptures  is  constantly  reminded  of  i  liomas  a 
Kempis. 


46  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

He  who  has  ever  truly  sought  to  put  himself  in  the 
place  of  another  has,  unless  he  has  merely  identified 
himself  with  another,  risen  above  the  differences  of 
human  beings  towards  the  common  platform  of  Huma- 
nity. My  enemy  has  wounded  my  feelings,  mortified 
my  vanity,  injured  my  interests,  and  an  opportunity  has 
arisen  where  I  might  in  some  degree  do  unto  him  as 
he  has  done  unto  me  ;  it  is  easy  for  every  man  to  per- 
suade himself  at  such  a  crisis  that  he  is  following  the 
precept  of  Kant,  if  not  of  Christ.  It  may  seem  for  the 
advantage  of  all  that  this  man  should  be  made  to  re- 
cognize what  he  has  made  me  suffer ;  we  may  place 
ourselves  so  close  to  our  own  interests  that  they  may 
seem  the  interests  of  Humanity.  But  when  we  look  back 
on  such  a  course  after  long  years,  we  see  that  we  have 
thus  looked  at  the  individual,  where  the  object  of  our 
own  view  should  have  been  the  moral  commonwealth  of 
our  kind.  My  enemy,  it  may  be  pleaded,  is  an  indi- 
vidual as  much  as  I  am.  Yes  ;  but  when  I  endeavour 
to  respect  his  rights,  to  imagine  his  excuses,  to  consult 
his  interests,  I  am  driven  perforce  out  of  the  confines 
of  individuality  into  the  realm  of  the  human.  I  quit 
the  enclosure  of  idiosyncrasy  for  the  open  space  of 
common  desires  and  fears.  How  can  it  be  otherwise  ? 
I  have  no  other  clue  to  the  desires  I  seek  to  gratify. 
Between  us,  as  separate  individuals,  there  is  nothing 
but  repulsion  ;  to  find  our  common  gravitation  I  must 
turn  to  that  which  is  a  characteristic  of  catholic 
humanity. 

The  law  of  truth  is  here  the  same  as  the  law  of  love. 
What  is  all  party  spirit,  all  fanaticism,  all  prejudice,  but  the 
intrusion  of  choice  into  the  realm  of  passivity  ?  "  Surtout 
messieurs  point  de  zele,"  though  the  warning  be  spoken 
b}'  worldly  lips,  is  one  constantly  needed  by  the  seeker 
after  truth.     Truth,  as  much  as  Right,  if  indeed  they  can 


■INDIA  AND  THE  PRIMAL  UNITY.  47 

be  severed,  demands  the  sacrifice  of  individual  choice,^  the 
silence  of  individual  activity  ;  it  demands  that  creation  of 
a  vacuum  which  we  have  discovered  in  the  material  world 
to  afford  one  of  the  mightiest  forces,  and  which  we  must 
learn  in  the  same  way  to  recognize  as  a  power  in  the 
spiritual  world.  When  Paul  proclaimed  with  stammering 
and  pleonastic  eagerness  which  often  broke  down  grammar 
and  logic  that  man  is  justified  by  Faith,  he  saw  what  the 
Indian  saw,  that  God  is  everywhere  pressing  around  man 
like  the  atmosphere,  that  wherever  man  empties  himself 
of  his  own  choice,  his  own  notions,  his  own  opinion, 
God  fills  the  vacuum  with  Himself.  And  over  and  over 
again,  in  the  progress  of  the  ages,  this  discovery  has 
burst  upon  some  human  spirit  as  it  did  upon  Paul's, 
and  has  given  an  equal  energy  and  resonance  to  his 
call  to  his  brethren  to  come  and  share  his  joy  ; — for  the 
joy  and  the  message  are  one,  the  truth  is  in  its  very 
nature  a  truth  for  all. 

1  The  most  interesting  illustration  of  the  truth  here  suggested  is  to  my  mind 
the  word  heresy  (ai'pecrts).  Its  original  meaning  of  choice  or  election  remains 
as  an  unconscious  protest,  embedded  in  the  very  structure  of  language,  against 
the  tendency  of  man  to  impress  his  individuality  on  his  belief,  and  bears  witness 
to  the  deep  principle  which  we  can  express  only  as  an  audacious  paradox,  that 
in  some  sense  Free  Will  must  often  be  regarded  rather  as  an  infirmity  than  a 
power. 


CHAPTER  II. 
PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT. 

In  reviewing  life  we  often  find  our  thoughts  carried  back 
to  a  time  when  we  Hved  in  close  and  satisfied  union  with 
some  whose  voices  .now  come  faintly  towards  us  across 
a  wide  interval,  yet  without  being  able  to  recognize 
any  violent  change  of  belief  or  feeling,  either  on  their 
side  or  our  own.  We  remember  a  sense  of  sympath}^, 
of  common  ground,  which  seems  strange  to  us  now. 
We  see  in  looking  back  that  every  step  carried  us 
farther  apart,  though  we  hardly  know  how  to  account 
for  the  divergence.  Perhaps  this  may  be  the  feeling  of 
both  sides.  It  sometimes  happens  that  the  mere  growth 
of  thought  brings  out  the  strongest  antagonism  between 
two  who  during  long  periods  of  their  intellectual  journey 
could  travel  almost  hand  in  hand.  But  more  often  pro- 
bably one  party  feels  that  this  gradual  growth  in  the 
other  has  brought  about  a  reaction  in  his  own  mind,  and 
opened  his  eyes  to  the  presence  in  his  own  creed  of 
assumptions  between  which  he  was  forced  to  make  a 
choice.  For  all  belief,  all  thought,  is  a  developmxCnt  ; 
words  which  we  could  have  echoed  with  perfect  sincerity 
when  their  latent  tendency  was  hidden  from  us  may 
become  hateful  falsehood  by  the  mere  opening  of  that 
vista.  We  are  often  taught  by  facts  that  the  words  in 
which  logic  has  failed  to  discover  a  flaw  are  the  very 
opposite  of  our  deepest  convictions ;  we  thus  learn  to 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       49 

regard  Truth  and  even  Error  (which  is  indeed  but  a 
parasitic  growth  of  Truth)  not  as  a  set  of  opinions,  but 
as  a  hving  organism.  We  come  to  see  that  whenever 
this  ceases  to  be  the  case  with  any  belief,  then  it  can 
be  called  neither  truth  nor  error,  but  an  empty  formula, 
a  withered  husk,  that  can  tell  us  nothing  of  the  germ 
from  which  it  has  parted  company,  nay,  that  may  often 
lead  to  utter  misconception  as  to  its  very  nature. 

Such  a  process  must  be  familiar  in  our  own  day  to 
many  persons.  Probably  there  never  was  a  time  when 
it  was  not  going  on  more  or  less,  for  the  twilight  of  one 
form  of  thought  is  always  blending  with  the  dawn  of 
another,  and  men  are  constantly  discovering  that  the}-- 
have  confused  the  two.  All  reformers,  probably,  have 
begun  by  aspirations  that  they  have  discarded  as  the  pro- 
gress of  their  own  thought  and  action  have  acted  upon 
each  other,  and  shown  them  what  it  was  that  they  were 
really  attacking,  and  what  it  was  that  they  actually 
sought  to  embody  in  life  and  fact.  The  discovery  which 
thus  separates  many  between  whom  at  one  stage  of 
their  progress  sympathy  was  apparently  complete  is  an 
incident  of  the  development  of  thought  throughout  all 
history.  But  it  can  never  have  been  so  striking  as  in 
that  remote  age  when  the  young  race  first  awoke  to  the 
nascent  antagonism  within  itself  of  the  most  fundamen- 
tally antithetic  religions ;  never  again  could  a  reformer 
recoil  from  any  creed  with  the  same  energy  of  protest 
as  he  who  first  discerned  that  the  progress  was  towards 
an  obliteration  of  the  distinction  of  good  and  evil. 

The  Persian,  if  we  have  rightly  seized  the  clue  of 
his  thought,  was  the  first  to  give  to  belief  the  distinct 
outline  created  by  denial.  He  first  confronted  a  false 
religion}      The  failh  of  later  India  is  an  important  modi- 

1  Tlie  neiglibourhood  of  heresy  is   clt-arly  impressed  on  th<;  pa^cs  of  the 
ZcndavebU  (now  made  accessible  to  all  our  countrymen  in  M.  James  Darnie- 

D 


50  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

fication  of  the  faith  of  the  Veda.  The  faith  of  Persia 
is  manifestly  a  recoil  from  the  ripened  and  developed 
faith  of  the  Veda ;  it  is  distinctly  a  Protestant  reli- 
gion. Doubt,  we  have  seen,  was  familiar  long  before, 
but  with  the  division  of  the  two  races  there  arose  for 
the  first  time  the  idea  of  a  zvrojig  belief.  The  beliefs 
thus  contrasted  are  the  most  antithetic  of  all  beliefs. 
The  dividing  question  of  all  thought  is — In  this  universe 
of  life  and  sense  and  feeling  have  we  to  do  with  a  unity 
or  with  a  dualism  ?  Is  the  familiar  contrast  of  right  and 
wrong,  good  and  bad,  a  misleading  expression  for  the 
mere  fact  of  more  and  less,  or  does  it  express  a  funda- 
mental truth  ?  This  was  the  question  in  which  the  two 
races  found  their  division  line.  India  saw  at  the  root  of 
all  existence  a  vast  unity,  disguised  under  the  multiplicity 
of  Nature  ;  Persia  saw  a  profound  Duality,  carrying  on 
the  struggle  of  Conscience  beyond  the  boundaries  of  the 
phenomenal  world.  On  the  one  hand,  the  Indian  faith 
discovered  everywhere  the  unfolding  of  a  single  principle  ; 
it  recognised  no  other  antagonism  throughout  existence 
than  the  distinction  of  that  which  seems  and  that  which 
is.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Persian  faith  took  up  the 
position  of  that  faculty  in  man  which  keeps  its  arduous 
watch  on  the  boundary  of  good  and  evil ;  every  step  was 
an  approach  to  or  progress  from  a  deadly  foe.  In  the 
legendary  history,  the  mythology,  the  moral  standard,  and 
even  in  the  actual  history  of  Persia  we  see  in  its  fullest 
development  the  kind  of  belief  and  character  which  springs 
from  and  which  again  results  in  the  ideal  of  warfare, 
of  struggle,  of  the  choice  between  good  and  evil,  the  life 
of  the  Conscience,  the  constant  appeal  of  Duty  with  its 

Eteter's  translation  in  the  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  vols.  iv.  and  xxiii. ,  to 
which  all  the  following  references  are  made),  e.g. : — "  It  is  a  sin  worthy  of  many 
stripes  to  teach  one  of  the  faithful  a  wrong  creed  "  ("  Sacred  Books  of  the  East," 
iv.  172).  It  is  true  that  the  date  of  this  passage  is  uncertain,  but  it  seems  to  me 
in  accordance  with  the  spirit  of  the  whole. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       51 

shadow  of  sin,  the  sharp  and  all-pervading  antithesis  of 
Right  and  Wrong. 

The  idea  of  conflict  does  indeed  haunt  all  mythology  ; 
all  the  heroes  of  legendary  lore  triumph  over  some 
incarnation  of  malignant  destructive  power,  or  some 
guardian  of  hidden  wealth.  Even  in  India,  the  least 
prone  of  any  nation  to  the  idea,  we  have  the  legendary 
conflict  of  the  Mahabharata  side  by  side  with  the 
mythic  conflict  of  Indra  and  Vritra.  But  when  we  turn 
to  the  Persian  faith,  this  conflict  expands  to  fill  the 
whole  space  occupied  by  the  history  of  this  world.  It 
arose  in  conflict,  endures  in  conflict ;  it  is  thus  to  end. 
Legend  and  myth  alike  are  absorbed  by  the  idea  of  a 
continuous  struggle  pervading  all  existence,  the  antithesis 
of  good  and  evil  runs  through  all  creation  with  an  exact 
equivalence,  so  that  the  evil  world  represents  no  mere 
mutiny  against  the  good,^  but  a  hostile  power,  con- 
fronting it  from  without ;  it  ceases  to  be  the  expres- 
sion of  human  failure,  it  becomes  an  ideal  of  all  that 
against  which  human  effort  is  directed.  The  conflict 
between  the  powers  of  good  and  evil  began  with  the 
creation,  which  was  itself  the  result  of  their  discover- 
ing each  other ;  the  material  universe  is  a  bastion 
placed  in  the  empty  space  which  is  between  the  two 
principles.  The  work  of  creation  is  an  exercise  of 
rivalry  between  these  powers ;  the  fair  and  fruitful 
regions  called  into  existence  by  Ormazd  became  object 
of  a  kind  of  inverted  imitation  on  the  part  of  Ahri- 
man ;     each    new    exertion    of    the    creative    power    of 

1  "  Le  v(5disme  connalt  des  forces  mauvaises,  il  ne  connait  pas  des  forces 
m(5chantes.  .  .  .  Le  mazd(5ism  a  pr6cis(5 :  son  d(5mon  fait  le  mal  pour  Ic  mal : 
sa  ni(jchancet6  est  '  d6ik  de  destruction '  tout  ce  que  criiera  Ormazd  dcvicndra 
la  niire  de  son  effort,  sa  ni(':chancut(';  est  organisd'e  p.ir  la  bont<5  d'Ormazd  " 
("  Ormazd  et  Ahrinian,  leur  Origincs  et  Icur  llistoire,"  par  James  Darmcblcter, 
1877,  pp.  9,  10).  See  also  p.  244.  Where  no  other  reference  is  given,  this 
treatise  is  the  justification  fur  any  statement  given  ln:rc  which  needs  a  liistoric 
reference. 


52  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  beneficent  Deity  becomes  the  occasion  of  a  like 
exertion  on  the  part  of  his  opponent ;  so  that  we  must 
think  of  the  worlds  of  good  and  evil  as  opposed  in 
symmetric  equivalence  throughout  all  existence.  Ihe 
whole  of  life  is  seen  through  this  medium  of  fierce 
antagonism.  As  Ahriman  is  opposed  in  deadly  hostility 
to  Ormazd  in  the  opening  of  the  great  drama  of  the 
world,  so  the  most  important  event  in  the  course  of 
history  is  his  antagonism  to  Zoroaster,  and  the  victories 
of  both  the  God  and  the  Prophet  are  blended  in  com- 
mon visions  of  apocalyptic  splendour,  preluded  by  those 
images  of  horror  which  naturally  characterize  the  last 
outbreak  of  hostile  power  before  it  is  swept  away  for 
ever. 

Zoroaster  is  the  representative  of  Ormazd  on  earth, 
an  incarnation  of  righteous  law,  of  moral  purity,  of  the 
spirit,  that  is,  which  in  face  of  evil  is  one  of  unresting 
conflict.  Before  his  birth  his  mother  has  a  vision  of 
fearful  wild  beasts  approaching  to  attack  him,^  and  is 
only  reassured  by  his  voice  addressing  her  in  tones  of 
encouragement,  the  portent  being  fully  justified  by  a  life 
of  struggle  crowned  by  victory  at  every  point,  but  assailed 
with  fierce  persistence  by  all  the  powers  of  evil.  He  is 
the  first  inhabitant  of  the  material  universe  who  pro- 
claimed the  word  by  which  the  demon  is  to  be  overcome.'^ 
He  is  the  object  of  a  double  attack  from  Ahriman,  first 
as  a  deadly  foe,  second  in  the  more  dangerous  character 
of  the  Tempter.  "Zoroaster,"^  says  Ahriman,  "is  the  only 
one  who  can  banish  me  from  this  world ;  he  smites  me 
with  the  mystic  word  as  with  the  lightning."  Vainly  in 
Ahriman's  effort  at  resistance  does  he  aim  at  confounding 

1  "  L'Avesla,  Zoroastre  et  le  Mazdeisme,"  par  Abel  Hovelacque,  p.   142, 
1880 : — "  La  voix  de  I'enfant  lui-merne  vient  la  rassurer." 

'  Zendavesta,  translated  by  Darmesteter,  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  vol. 
xxiii.  201,  2. 

2  Ibid.,  274,  5  ;  the  passage  is  here  in  paraphrase  merely. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       53 

the  Prophet  by  his  own  weapons,  assaihng  him  by  mystic 
enigmas  which  would  seem  to  symbohze  the  doubts 
infused  by  the  spirit  of  negation,  weapons  that  would 
be  most  deadly  against  the  seeker  after  truth.  Vain 
are  his  subsequent  overtures  of  peace/  "  Destroy  not 
my  creation,  O  holy  Zoroaster.  Renounce  the  law  of 
Ormazd,  and  thou  shalt  possess  the  sovereignty  of  the 
world  for  a  thousand  years."  "  Never,"  declares  Zoroaster, 
"will  I  renounce  the  holy  law;  no,  not  though  my  body 
and  soul  should  be  shattered  and  crushed  in  the  struggle." 
And  his  recital  of  the  m3^stic  word,  the  invocation  which 
_is  the  weapon  of  Faith,  drives  Ahriman  to  the  depths  of 
hell.  Zoroaster  is  the  revealer  of  the  Law,  the  human 
expression  (as  Ormazd  is  the  Divine  expression)  of  the 
revealing  Light,  or,  from  another  point  of  view  which 
hardly  is  another,  of  the  revealing  word  ;  for  language  is 
to  thought  as  Light  to  the  material  universe ;  and  silence 
and  darkness  are  the  same  negation  expressed  by  a  dif- 
ferent symbol. 

The  victory  of  the  Prophet  is  succeeded  by  an  ap- 
parently final  defeat,  and  completed  by  a  miraculous 
revival  which  needs  that  blackness  of  disaster  to  enhance 
its  splendour.  He  is  not  an  immortal  being.  The 
legend  of  his  death  takes  various  forms,  according  as  it 
is  regarded  through  a  mythic  or  a  legendary  medium  ;  he 
is  the  victim  of  some  hostile  force  human  or  divine ;  his 
life  closes  as  it  opens,  in  storm ;  the  lightning  flash, 
which  is  the  weapon  of  the  Demon  as  well  as  the  God, 
reaches  him  at  last,  and  he  perishes.  But  the  storm 
which  is  the  death  of  Light  is  also  its  birth.  In  many 
forms  the  hero  rises  from  the  tomb.  'I'he  spirit  which 
survives  defeat  and  turns  it  to  gain  is  incarnate  in 
an  avenger,  generally  the  brother  or  son  of  tiie  dead 
hero ;   himself,   that  is,   in    another    form.      Or  else   the 

1  Vcndidad,  19,  i,  6,  7.     "  Sacrcrl  I5ooks  of  ilic  East,"  vol.  iv.  p.  206. 


54  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

same  idea  takes  shape  in  an  aspect  familiar  to  us.  We 
know  how  often  an  earlier  mythology,  throwing  its  con- 
fusing shadows  on  histor}'',  takes  possession  of  some 
actual  hero,  and  hides  him  in  mystic  seclusion,  whence  it 
foretells  his  glorious  reappearance  as  the  conqueror  in 
a  conflict  which  shall  bring  in  the  final  triumph  over 
all  that  is  conceived  as  evil.  Persian  mythology  knows 
many  a  kindred  hero  with  Arthur  and  Barbarossa.  The 
daily  resurrection  of  the  dawn,  the  yearly  resurrection 
of  the  spring,  the  sudden  outburst  of  light  from  the 
thundercloud,  all  combined  to  leave  on  the  imagination 
and  hope  of  the  Persian  an  ideal  of  the  final  triumph 
of  light,  expressed  in  -one  form  among  many  as  the 
awakening  of  some  warrior  from  what  had  seemed  the 
sleep  of  death  to  a  new  and  more  glorious  activity. 
The  hero  seemed  dead  ;  he  was  but  wrapt  in  slumber. 
He  is  to  appear,  when  least  expected,  as  the  triumphant 
destroyer  of  evil. 

For  in  all  these  dreams  of  a  hero  wrapped  in  death- 
like sleep  there  lies  hid  in  germ  the  conception  of  a 
saviour  of  the  world.  The  revival  is  always  to  be 
something  glorious  and  mysterious,  something  fitted  to 
herald  the  dawn  of  a  brighter  day.  But  the  faith  in  a 
renovated  future — in  a  "  restitution  of  all  things " — 
suggests  the  prophecy  of  some  divine  hero  who  has 
no  other  office  ;  it  concentrates  itself  in  a  being  who  is 
affiliated  by  inheritance  with  the  past,  but  who  himself 
belongs  to  the  future  which  he  is  to  herald.  In  the 
Persian  faith  this  saviour  of  the  world  is  a  son  of 
Zoroaster  not  yet  born,  who  is  to  bring  in  that  age  in 
which  the  desires  of  all  hearts  shall  be  fulfilled.  The 
appearance  of  the  Deliverer  is  preluded  by  a  storm 
of  all  the  ills  of  this  life,  such  as  is  painted  in  the 
apocalyptic  visions  of  the  New  Testament.  The  days 
are    shortened,    the    trees    and    plants    lose    their    fer- 


PERSIA  AXD  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       55 

tilit}',  the  world  is  ravaged  by  wars,  enough  blood  is 
shed  to  turn  the  mills.  A  terrible  winter  draws  on, 
lasting  three  years,  bringing  such  bitter  cold,  such 
storms,  that  man  and  beast  shall  perish  and  the  earth 
become  a  desert.  But  the  night,  the  winter,  the  storm, 
are  the  heralds  of  a  reign  of  eternal  unclouded  Light. 
When  the  tempest  has  raged  itself  away  Ahriman  has 
disappeared.  The  conflict  of  the  ages,  intensified  in 
this  last  hour  of  the  world's  history  into  a  combat 
between  all  the  powers  of  good  and  their  antagonist,  is 
ended  in  a  victory  so  complete  that  it  conceals  its  own 
greatness ;  the  world  of  evil  has  vanished  ;  the  Earth 
is  renovated  for  the  spirits  of  just  men  made  perfect, 
and  the  long  night  of  the  world  gives  place  to  an 
eternal  day. 

Here,  then.  Dualism  bears  witness  to  its  own  incom- 
pleteness. We  see  that  the  religion  of  conflict,  if  it  is 
to  be  in  truth  a  religion,  must  keep  before  itself  the 
hope  of  victory.  The  primal  unit}-,  banished  as  an 
actual  basis  of  the  world  in  which  we  live,  returns  as 
an  ultimate  hope.  Darkness  is  the  invading  shadow. 
Light  is  the  enduring  reality.  The  whole  course  of  the 
world's  history,  in  comparison  with  that  glorious  morrow 
of  the  resurrection,  is  but  one  long  night.  The  race 
has  greeted  the  daily  returning  light  with  daily  hope, 
but  the  curtain  of  night  has  been  lifted  on  deadly  strife, 
on  crime,  on  wretchedness  of  every  kind,  the  light  of 
common  day  is,  as  it  were,  polluted  by  the  deeds  in 
which  it  has  appeared  as  an  accomplice  ;  and  the  na'ive 
joy  with  which  primitive  man  greeted  the  dawn  of 
common  day  is  transfigured  into  a  mystic  hope  for  the 
"  mighty  dawn  "  which  is  to  herald  a  brighter  day  than 
that  of  this  world. 

The  very  symbolism  which  expresses  two  principles 
is   an    implicit   assertion   of  the   predominance  of  good. 


56  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  ab3'ss  of  light  was  a  reality,  the  abyss  of  darkness 
was  a  logical  creation,  a  supposed  antithesis  below  the 
earth  to  that  Heaven  of  brightness  above  it,  an  infinite 
expansion  of  the  darkness  of  the  tomb.  Darkness  itself 
was  not  a  logical  creation,  that  was  real  and  terrible 
enough,  but  it  was  the  logical  imagination  which  con- 
densed and  intensified  it  into  a  principle  and  gave  it 
an  equivalence  to  the  opposite  world  of  light.  There 
was  no  need,  in  like  manner,  for  the  Persian  to  discover 
a  Divine  Ruler  over  all  things  ;  that  belief  seems  to  have 
been  as  old  as  humanity ;  at  all  events,  as  the  tj^pical 
humanity  of  the  Aryan  race.  But  the  antagonist  of  this 
Divine  Ruler  is  a  new  creation  ;  and  this  is  the  special 
work  of  the  Zoroastrian  creed.  It  gave  distinctness  to 
the  ideal  of  right  by  first  conceiving  of  the  world  of 
wrong,  and  then  by  intensifying  this  world  into  a  central 
individuality.  But  note  how  the  eternal  laws  oppose 
themselves  to  a  false  completeness  in  this  antagonism. 
Ormazd  is  a  much  more  simple  conception  than  Ahriman  ; 
Ormazd  is  akin  to  Varuna,  he  is  the  all-Father  of  Aryan 
worship.  Ahriman  is  a  mythic  personage  moulded  on 
a  contrasted  ideal  and  transformed  b}^  the  neighbourhood 
of  his  divine  antagonist.  But  the  antagonism  is,  after 
all,  incomplete.  Ormazd  is  Light,  Ahriman  is  Dark- 
ness ;  Ormazd  has  discernment,  foreknowledge,  Ahriman 
is  blind. ^  The  equivalent  antagonist  of  Ormazd  should 
be  the  spirit  of  lies.  But  Ahriman  is  saved  from  that 
by  being  the  spirit  of  ignorance.  He  is  accurately  the 
spiritualized  ideal  of  darkness,  for  darkness  does  not 
deceive,  it  only  hides.  Thus  science  is  for  ever  on 
the  side  of  Goodness,  and  the  victory  is  certain.  The 
antagonism  of  Light  and  Darkness,  even  when  it  is 
endowed  with  an  ideal   completeness  which  nature  does 

1  "Bundahis,"  ch.  2.,  translated  by  E.  W.  West,  in  "Sacred  Books  of  the 
East,"  V.  5. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       57 

not  supply,  gives  no  accurate  model  for  an  antagonism 
of  Truth  and  Falsehood.  And  the  metaphysical  develop- 
ment of  the  religion  repeats  this  lesson  of  its  origin. 
With  the  process  of  rationalizing  reflection  a  primeval 
unit}^  arises  behind  the  primitive  dualism ;  Time,  or 
Destiny,  is  the  source  both  of  good  and  evil,  of  Ormazd 
and  Ahriman.  Then  the  allegory  is  forgotten,  and 
the  impersonation  of  Time  ^  becomes  a  conscious  being 
who  craved  for  a  son,  and  Ormazd  was  born  to  him 
as  the  result  of  his  sacrifices.  Ahriman  was  the  son 
of  his  doubts.  A  mysterious  being  is  thus  revealed 
to  us  even  beyond  this  impersonation  to  whom  these 
sacrifices  may  be  paid.  In  every  direction  we  are  re- 
minded that  all  Dualism,  where  it  is  based  on  a  moral 
order,  is  compelled  at  last  to  bear  witness  to  Unity. 
That  which  is  a  unity  shall  remain.  Division  is  a 
property  of  the  transient,  even  though  it  be  a  charac- 
teristic of  the  whole  stage  of  our  being  that  is  passed 
on  this  world. 

But  to  look  forward  to  victory  is  not  to  deny  conflict. 
There  is  the  widest  possible  gulf  between  the  religion 
which  allows  that  struggling  is  transient  and  that  which 
urges  that  struggle  is  unreal.  The  spirit  that  denies 
Difference  is  separated  by  a  whole  world  of  feeling  and 
belief  from  the  spirit  which  hopes  for  an  ultimate  unity, 
"  If  the  slayer  think  that  he  slays,  if  the  slain  think 
that  he  is  slain,  they  are  both  of  them  mistaken,"  is  the 
verdict  of  Indian  wisdom  on  the  conflict  of  life,  but 
Persian  wisdom  sees  strife  as  the  great  reality  of  all 
experience ;  strife  in  the  world  without,  and  not  less 
in  the  inner  world,  in  which  India  sought  its  type  of 
Unity.  India  described  God  as  the  Self,  but  Persia  saw 
in  the  Self  not  a  Unity,  but   a   Dualism.      That  strange 

I  The  sect  of  Zervanites  who  referred  the  two  principles  to  Zervan  {i.e. ,  Tiiuc) 
became  orthodox  in  I'ersia  in  the  fifth  century  of  ilie  Cliristinn  era. 


58  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

but  yet  familiar  experience  by  which,  at  the  very  depth 
of  our  own  individual  being,  we  are  made  sensible  of 
multiplicity,  that  mystery  by  which  Self  seems  at  once 
to  lose  and  to  double  its  meaning,  is  the  true  clue 
to  the  Persian  religion.  "  I  have  plainly  two  souls, 
O  Cyrus,"  says  a  Persian  soldier  in  the  earliest  speci- 
men of  the  historic  novel  that  has  come  down  to  us, 
"  for  a  single  soul  cannot  be  at  once  good  and  bad."  ^ 
The  "  Cyropaedia"  is  a  mere  romance,  but  it  was  written 
by  a  Greek  who  knew  Persia,  and  these  words  may  be 
taken  as  gathering  up  the  aspect  of  Persian  feeling  as  it 
revealed  itself  to  the  soldier-pupil  of  Socrates.  He  was 
awakened  by  the  teaching  of  his  master  to  an  interest  in 
the  moral  life  of  those  among  whom  he  sojourned  ;  and 
though  he  knew  the  nation  only  in  its  military  aspect, 
he  here  records  that  consciousness  of  struggle  which, 
if  we  may  trust  its  most  ancient  scriptures,  was  the 
dominant  influence  in  its  moral  life. 

It  is  not  only  belief  which  is  different  according  to 
the  apprehension  of  evil ;  the  whole  world  of  duty  and 
of  desire  is  influenced  by  the  difference.  The  object  of 
yearning  and  hope,  in  the  Indian  ideal,  is  the  life  of 
repose ;  all  moral  aspirations  turn  towards  quiescence 
of  will,  and  the  giving  up  of  that  which  marks  indivi- 
dual personality.  The  Persian  blessedness  is  the  exact 
opposite  of  all  this.  It  is  found  in  the  life  of  strenuous 
activity,  of  resolute  exertion.  Persian  religion  is,  if  we 
sum  up  its  tendencies  in  a  single  word,  the  religion  of 
will,- — the  religion  which  seeks  everywhere  to  impress 
personality  on  the  world  of  things,  which  sees  the 
Universe  of  Being  as  a  field  for  the  exercise  of  choice, 
which  discerns  through  all  the  varied  colouring  of  life  the 
fundamental  contrast  of  light  and  darkness.  We  appre- 
hend this  faith  most  distinctly  when  we  give  a  large  place 

1  Xcnophon,  Cyropaedia,  vi.  i,  41. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       59 

to  its  element  of  protest.  The  injunctions  to  industry, 
the  elaborate  provisions  for  agriculture,  the  constant 
stimulus  to  exertion  of  every  kind/  are  most  intelligible 
when  we  see  in  them  a  recoil  from  the  faith  which 
appeared  to  this  active  race  a  confusion  of  good  and  evil. 
We  might  express  the  contrast  of  the  two  religions 
with  a  certain  exaggeration,  but  with  a  real  indication  of 
what  is  characteristic  in  each  belief,  by  saying  that  India 
turns  towards  the  ideal  of  Death,  Persia  upholds  in 
every  varied  form  of  its  manifestations  the  worship  of 
Life.  India  craves  a  surrender  of  all  independent  exist- 
ence, Persia  reiterates  the  sanction  on  all  that  is  indivi- 
dual, vivid,  personal.  Life  and  Death  are  not  here  the 
rhythmic  breathing  of  the  Supreme  God,  but  the  varying 
victory  of  the  good  and  evil  powers  respectively.  A 
spirit  of  keen  activity  penetrates  the  whole  world  of 
duty,  every  faculty  is  to  be  kept  at  the  highest  point,  all 
that  opposes  itself  to  energetic  life  is  seen  as  a  spiritual 
foe  ;  thus  even  protracted  sleep  is  the  work  of  the  demon 
Busyacta  with  its  "  long  hands  "  holding  men  back  from 
vigorous  exertion.^  All  that  is  not  good  is  an  enemy  of 
good.  Death  is  to  the  righteous  the  entrance  on  eternal 
joy,  yet  Death  itself  is  to  this  vivid,  life-loving  religion 
an  object  of  horror.  The  double  feeling  thus  aroused 
is  brought  out  in  the  account  of  the  pilgrimage  of  the 
faithful  soul  who  has  "  come  from  the  material  world  to 
the  world  of  the  spirit,  from  the  decaying  world  into  the 
undecaying."  "     Even  in  those  raptures  there  is  a  tone  of 

1  "  He  who  does  not  till  the  Earth  of  Zoroaster  with  the  left  arm  and  the  right, 
to  him  thus  saith  the  Earth,  •  O  man  who  doth  not  till  the  Earth  of  Zoroaster, 
ever  shall  thou  stand  at  the  door  of  the  stranger  among  those  who  beg  for 
bread,  and  wait  there  for  the  refuse  that  is  brought  to  thee'"  (Zendavesta, 
p'argard,  iii. ;  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  vol.  iv.  29). 

-  "Busyacta  .  .  .  runs  with  long  hands  from  the  north  region,  saying 
'  Sleep,  O  men  I  Sleep  ye  who  lead  a  sinful  life '  "  (Khordah-A vesta,  Frag.  39  ; 
Bleeek's  translation  of  Spiegel,  ii.  139  ;  see  DarmestLler,  p.  181.  2). 

3  Zendavesta  ;  "  Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  xxiii.  314-318. 


6o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

solemnity,  of  awe,  in  the  reference  to  Death.  "How  didst 
thou  depart  this  life,  thou  holy  man  ?  "  he  is  asked  by 
one  who  is  gone  before,  with  a  profound  glance  back- 
ward to  the  homely  pleasures  of  Earth  that  is  full  of 
pathos.  "  How  didst  thou  come  from  the  abodes  full 
of  cattle,  and  full  of  wishes  and  enjoyments  of  love  ?  " 
And  Ormazd  interposes  to  keep  that  reminiscence  un- 
spoken, "Ask  him  not — him  who  hast  just  gone  the 
dreary  way,  full  of  fear  and  distress,  where  the  soul  and 
the  body  separate."  It  is  the  way  on  which  man  tastes 
more  bliss  than  all  that  is  enjoyed  in  the  life  that  is 
ended  :  but  there  is  a  horror  in  the  thought  that  it  is 
the  way  of  Death.  The  body  is  no  burden  which  it  is 
a  release  to  lay  down.  There  is  a  solemn  shudder  in 
the  thought  of  that  divorce  even  in  the  blessedness  of 
Heaven. 

For,  in  truth,  the  fulness  of  achievement,  the  strain 
of  tense  endeavour,  of  unremitting  activity,  which 
belongs  to  this  ideal  is  exactly  that  which  appears  to 
man  inseparable  from  the  life  of  this  world.  When  we 
contemplate  an  existence  beyond  the  grave,  we  have  to 
imagine  the  pure  life  of  spirit,  a  life  remote  from  all 
images  of  activity  and  exertion  such  as  we  most  easily 
conceive.  The  Persian  religion,  almost  alone  among 
the  religions  of  antiquity,  made  immortality  a  definite 
and  vivid  hope  by  joining  to  it  the  belief  in  a  human 
Resurrection  ;  yet  even  so  it  could  not  but  pay  the  tribute 
of  this  reverent  awe  to  the  separation  of  the  spirit  from 
the  associate  and  implements  of  its  active  days.  No 
other  religion  sets  so  deep  a  stamp  of  importance  on  the 
activities  of  this  life.  When  the  great  Persian  host 
gathered  up  its  shattered  strength  for  its  last  struggle 
at  Plataea  after  the  departure  of  Xerxes,  a  banquet  given 
by  the  friendly  Thebans  brought  Greek  and  Persian 
side  by  side,  and   left  on  the  page  of  the  historian  an 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       6i 

expressive  utterance  of  this  ^-earning  after  achievement. 
"See'st  thou  this  host?"  asks  the  Persian  noble, addressing 
his  Greek  neighbour.  "All  shortly  shall  perish,  and  leave 
but  a  few  survivors  from  the  vast  multitude."  "  Surely," 
urges  his  neighbour,  "  thou  shouldst  communicate  this 
knowledge  to  the  general  of  the  arm3\"  "  My  friend," 
answers  the  Persian,  with  a  flood  of  tears,  "  the  effort 
were  in  vain.  This  is  the  curse  of  life,  with  abundant 
knowledge  to  accomplish  nothing."  ^  In  that  lament 
we  discern  clearly  the  aim  of  the  historic  nation,  we  feel 
ourselves  among  the  people  whose  rise  marks  the  start 
of  the  narrative  of  civilized  human  life,  as  a  single 
sequence  of  connected  events.  When  we  turn  from 
India  to  Persia  we  have  crossed  the  barrier  that  separates 
the  men  who  breathe  philosophy  from  the  men  who  make 
history.  On  that  side  no  chronology,  no  definiteness, 
no  narrative.  On  this  everything  is  definite,  everything 
is  expressed  in  terms  of  time  and  space,  of  before  and 
after,  of  event  and  circumstance.  There  the  ideal  is 
resignation,  silence,  repose ;  here  it  is  courage,  speech, 
activity.  India,  we  have  allowed  ourselves  to  say,  has 
no  history  ;  we  may  say,  with  the  same  kind  of  one-sided 
truth,  that  history  begins  only  with  the  rise  of  Persia. 
There  must  have  been  great  events  in  the  previous  ages  ; 
the  rise  and  fall  of  great  nations  is  impossible  without 
them.  But  the  historian  may  ignore  them  all,  till  he 
comes  to  the  race  that  worshipped  Ormazd  and  dreaded 
Ahriman. 

It    is    the    fierce   swoop    of    Persian    invasion    which 
overcomes  the  mutual  repulsion  of  the  Hellenic  States 

1  iXOiffTT]  0(  oouvri  eo'Tl  Tuiv  f.v  dvOpuiTTOicn  avrrj,  ttoWo.  (ppoviovra  ftrjoevbi 
Kporeei;'  (llerodolus,  ix.  i6).  Grotc,  who  quotes  this  passage,  points  out  its  an- 
tagonism to  the  Greek  ideal.  'I  hu  way  in  which  Herodotus  mentions  the  name 
of  his  informant,  and  the  fact  tliat  the  latter  was  said  to  have  told  others  what 
lie  told  the  historian,  surely  justify  us  in  believing  that  we  have  here  a  genuine 
Persian  utterance. 


62  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  welds  Greece  into  a  nation.  Even  for  the  history 
of  England/  says  a  thinker  who  has  very  little  sympathy 
with  classic  life,  the  battle  of  Marathon  is  more  important 
than  that  of  Hastings.  Alone  of  the  empires  of  Asia, 
Persia  must  be  recognised  by  the  student  of  European 
history.  Xerxes  is  an  image  almost  as  familiar  to  our 
imagination  as  an  English  king  ;  his  words  have  become 
proverbial  among  us ;  we  feel  him  to  belong  to  the 
classical  world.  He,  almost  as  much  as  Homer,  may  be 
called  the  author  of  Greek  unity.  With  his  appearance 
on  European  soil,  all  that  in  the  most  typical  sense 
we  recognise  as  History  takes  it  rise.  Before  that 
event  we  have  isolated  facts  and  vague  surmise ;  after 
it  History  is  consecutive,  coherent,  organic.  We  might 
almost  say  that  no  history  is  so  historic  as  the  tale  of 
Thermopylae,  of  Salamis,  of  Plataea.  None  other  con- 
denses into  so  narrow  a  space  the  destiny  of  States,  the 
lessons  of  national  experience,  the  images  of  colossal 
hopes,  and  not  less  colossal  achievements.  It  seems 
a  rehearsal,  in  its  most  condensed  form,  of  the  drama 
of  History,  before  the  stage  clears  for  its  detailed  repre- 
sentation. 

The  strong  historic  spirit  of  Persia  is  equally  mani- 
fest also  in  that  glow  of  legendary  narrative  which  is 
but  the  penumbra  of  history.  The  scholar "  to  whose 
industry  Western  Europe  owes  its  knowledge  of  these 
legends  as  a  whole  gives  as  a  reason  for  their  wealth 
the  extent  of  Persian  conquest,  the  mingled  vicissitude 
and    continuity    of    Persian    dominion,    and    the   magni- 

1  "The  battle  of  Marathon,  even  as  an  event  in  English  history,  is  more 
important  than  the  battle  of  Hastings.  If  the  issue  of  that  day  had  been 
different,  the  Britons  and  the  Saxons  might  still  have  been  wandering  in  the 
woods"  ("  Dissertations  and  Discussions,"  J.  S.  Mill,  ii.  283). 

2  M.  Jules  Mohl,  whose  French  translation  of  the  Shah-Nameh,  "  Livre  des 
Rois,"  enables  the  reader  to  enjoy  these  legends  with  all  the  effortless  interest 
with  which  he  peruses  contemporary  fiction.  The  references  here  are  to  the 
first  edition  in  folio. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       6 


J 


ficence  of  the  monuments  by  which  it  is  recorded  ; 
— all  strong  conservative  influences  no  doubt,  yet  we 
ma}'  perhaps  regard  as  the  strongest  one  not  mentioned 
in  his  enumeration,  the  spirit  of  a  faith  which  in  its  ' 
protest  against  the  confusion  of  good  and  evil  marked  / 
all  action  with  a  stamp  of  praise  or  of  blame.  Nar- 
rative becomes  vivid  when  events  are  regarded  as 
important.  In  India  we  cannot  say  that  any  event 
is  important.  There  is  a  great  wealth  of  tradition 
there  ;  the  epic  which  embodies  it  is  the  longest  in  the 
world ;  but  the  interest  that  it  has  for  the  Western 
reader  lies  in  its  being  a  repository  of  philosophic  thought 
rather  than  a  narrative ;  the  best-known  portion  of  it  is, 
indeed,  a  striking  testimony  to  that  negative  ideal  which 
is  opposed  to  the  historic  spirit.  In  its  assumption 
that  the  temptation  of  the  wise  and  good  is  to  a  pro- 
found resignation  which  would  amount  to  civil  suicide,  it 
takes  the  heart  out  of  all  history  and  even  all  legend  ;  and 
its  protest  against  this  temptation  renders  the  testimony 
only  the  stronger.  Nothing  can  be  more  undramatic  / 
than  these  Indian  legends  ;  they  melt  into  vague  thought, 
glowing  description ;  the  events  seem  to  fade  as  one  / 
tries  to  grasp  them.  The  legends  of  the  Shah-Nameh, 
on  the  other  hand,  are  full  of  vivid  dramatic  interest, 
of  sharply  contrasted  character,  of  distinctly  conceived 
action,  of  elaborate  plot  and  clearly  marked  design. 
The  only  episode  well  known  to  the  English  reader — ■ 
the  pathetic  tale  of  Sohrab  and  Rustem  ^ — is  not,  per- 
haps, a  very  typical  specimen.  The  father  and  son  who 
encounter  each  other  unconsciously  in  battle — the  heroic 
warrior  who,  with  yearning  in  his  heart  for  the  father 
known  to  liim  only  by  description,  is  prevented  by 
treachery  from  recognizing  him  when   they  meet  on  the 

1  "Cette  histoirc  d'un  p6re  et  d'un  fils  que  ne  se  reconnaissent  pas  a  fait  lo 
tour  du  inondc  "  (Mohl,  Preface). 


64  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

battlefield,  and  learns  his  name  only  in  receiving  from 
him  his  death-blow — these  touching  images  of  heroic 
disaster  are  not  characteristic  samples  from  the  drama 
of  the  conflict  of  Iran  and  Turan.  They  seem  rather  to 
express  a  sort  of  unconscious  protest  against  the  religion 
of  conflict,  to  hint  that  the  fierce  blow  may  be  given 
ignorantly,  and  may  perchance  wound  a  beloved  son. 
This  is  the  lesson  of  a  large  part  of  life,  and  the 
animating  principle  of  much  that  is  most  interesting  in 
history  and  drama.  But  it  is  not  characteristic  of  a 
keen  eye  for  the  struggle  of  virtue  with  crime  to  per- 
ceive distinctly  the  hardly  less  frequent  struggle  of  virtue 
with  virtue.  The  ideal  of  the  Shah-Nameh  is  utterl}^ 
unlike  that  of  either  classic  or  of  chivalric  romance.  We 
find  here  a  curiously  modern  t3'pe  of  feeling ;  magna- 
nimous forgiveness  meets  gigantic  crime,  generally  to 
fall  as  its  victim,  but  alwa^^s  to  bring  out  its  meaning 
by  contrast  with  its  extreme  opposite.  In  no  classical 
epic,  probably  in  no  other  epic  whatever,  does  ingratitude 
play  so  large  a  part.  Zohak,  the  wicked  king  of  the 
Arabs,  begins  his  career  of  superhuman  wickedness  by 
yielding  to  the  temptation  of  Ahriman  and  murdering  his 
father,^  and  the  manifestation  of  pure  evil  shown  in  the 
return  of  evil  for  good  is  repeated  again  and  again 
throughout  the  series  of  legends,  together  with  the 
manifestation  of  pure  good  shown  in  the  return  of  good 
for  evil.  Perhaps  the  most  striking  instance  is  in  the 
murder  of  Iridj,"  the  eponymous  hero  of  the  Iranian 
race,  by  his  two  brothers,  of  whom  Tur  in  like  manner 
represents  the  Turanian.  Their  antagonism  typifies  at 
once  the  conflict  between  two  races  and  two  ideals ;  the 
hero  of  the  noble  Persian  race  represents  the  ideal  of 
heroic  purit}',  and  his  Turanian  opponent  is  clothed  in 
all  the  darkest  hues  of  moral  evil.      Nothing  more  truly 

1  Mohl,  "  Livre  des  Rois,"  i.  57-59.  .      ^  iHd.,  159. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.        65 

Christian  has  ever  been  imagined  in  fiction  than  the 
demeanour  of  Iridj  when  the  envy  of  his  brothers  is 
aroused  by  the  fond  affection  of  their  father,  who  has 
enriched  his  beloved  son  with  the  noblest  portion  of 
his  domain.  "  O  my  brothers,"  he  responds  to  their 
insulting  demand  that  he  should  surrender  to  them  the 
crown  of  Iran  (Persia),  placed  on  his  head  by  their 
father,  "  dear  to  me  as  my  own  soul,  the  power  that 
breeds  discord  is  undesired  by  me.  I  yield  to  you  the 
diadem ;  let  my  rule  and  your  hatred  die  together.  I  do 
not  attack  3^ou,  I  would  not  afflict  the  heart  of  any 
human  being."  The  soft  answer  does  not  turn  away 
wrath ;  the  generous  sacrifice  is  made  in  vain.  The 
wicked  brothers  requite  the  trust  which  brings  him, 
in  voluntary  defencelessness,  to  face  their  power,  with 
treacherous  murder,  and  send  his  head  to  their  father 
with  a  message  of  scorn.  A  special  significance  is 
attached  to  the  battle  which  avenges  his  death,  by  a 
mysterious  voice  declaring  that  the  combat  about  to  open 
is  one  with  Ahriman,  "  who  is  in  his  heart  the  enemy 
of  the  Creator."  The  ideal  saint  and  the  ideal  fiend, 
embodied  as  they  are  in  the  type  of  the  Iranian  and  the 
Turanian  races,  never  were  delineated  in  sharper  con- 
trast or  with  a  fuller  sense  of  their  mutual  dependence. 
The  wickedness  of  Tur  could  not  reach  its  height  apart 
from  the  neighbourhood  of  magnanimous  generosity  ;  the 
pure  and  gentle  Iridj  would  likewise  lose  his  halo  if  the 
background  of  perfidious  cruelty  were  withdrawn.  Wc 
arc  kept  throughout  the  legend  on  that  boundary-line 
of  good  and  evil,  where  each  is  seen  in  its  sharpest 
distinctness  against  its  opposite.  And  this  one  legend 
is  typical  of  the  whole. 

This  spirit  is  manifest  in  all  Persian  history  and 
mythology  for  good  and  for  evil.  Its  evil  is  seen, 
perhaps,  in  the  hideous   cruelty  which   stains   the  annals 

£ 


66  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  Persian  rule,  for  it  is  a  part  of  the  belief  that  life 
is  a  conflict  between  virtue  and  crime,  to  infuse  cruelty 
into  all  struggle.  Its  good  is  seen  in  a  high  ideal  of 
truth  and  a  profound  reverence  for  labour.  The  religion 
of  Persia  has  been  called  ■^  "  the  revelation  of  the  Word." 
We  have  seen  that  the  Indian  thought  of  God  is  that 
He  is  only  to  be  expressed  by  "No,  No."  To  the  Persian, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  word  reveals  as  the  light  reveals, 
and  the  demon  is  vanquished  by  its  utterance.  Language 
is  sacred,  its  perversion  is  a  crime.  With  the  sense 
of  a  great  spiritual  conflict — a  struggle  against  invisible 
enemies — Deceit  rises  to  an  importance  which  it  could 
never  possess  when  contemplated  as  mere  failure  of 
accuracy.  The  non-historic  nation  could  not  care  for 
such  failure ;  facts  are  not  sufficiently  important  to  be 
buttressed  with  reverence.  What  is  a  distortion  of 
experience  but  a  mere  additional  illusion  where  all  is 
illusory  ?  A  Pantheistic  religion  can  never  admit  of 
any  steady  condemnation  of  falsehood ;  all  thought  is 
divine,  all  is  in  some  sense  true.  Of  course  in  all 
societies  the  inconveniences  of  lies  about  matters  of 
fact  must  be  more  or  less  recognized  ;  but  Truth  will 
never  be  the  ideal  virtue  where  Falsehood  is  mere 
misstatement.  Where  one  vast  Unity  lies  at  the  root 
of  all  things,  there  is  no  room  for  any  development 
of  the  antithesis  which  separates  truth  and  falsehood. 
But  the  Persian  race,  inasmuch  as  it  begins  History,  vin- 
dicates Truth.  Falsehood  is  no  longer  mere  inaccuracy, 
but  an  act  of  treason  against  the  Divine  Being. 

The  later  development  of  the  Persian  religion  im- 
personated this  Divine  claim.  Mithra,  the  god  whose 
fading  radiance  shone  forth  in  the  dawn  of  Christianity," 

1  By  Edgar  Quinet,  "  G6nie  des  Religions." 

"  "Mithra,  ce  dieu  puissant  qui  un  instant  disputa  au  Christ  I'empire  du 
monde"  (Darmesteter's  "  Ormazd  and  Ahriman,"  p.  21). 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       67 

is  an  embodiment  of  the  Divine  s^'mpathy  with  human 
faithfulness.  "  The  ruffian  who  lies  to  Mithra  brings 
death  upon  the  whole  country."  ^  Mithra  represents  the 
idea  of  light  as  the  witness  to  all  contract,  the  guar- 
dian of  open  and  fair  feeling,  the  upholder  of  that  in 
man  which  man  can  trust.  No  strength  or  agility 
makes  up  for  the  withdrawal  of  support  from  the  God 
of  Truth  ;  no  skill  can  give  a  true  aim  to  the  weapons 
of  the  deceiver.  "  The  spear  that  the  foe  of  Mithra 
flings  darts  backward ;  .  .  .  even  though  his  spear  be 
truly  aimed,  it  makes  no  wound."  ^  Mithra  upholds 
the  columns  of  the  lofty  house,  and  makes  its  pillars 
solid  ;  he  sets  the  battle  a-going,  and  stands  against 
armies  in  battle.  .  .  .  Sad  is  the  abode,  unprovided 
with  children,  where  abide  men  who  lie  unto  Mithra"^ 
(who  hears  and  avenges  all  lies).  All  power  of  dis- 
cernment, all  the  sight  of  the  eyes,  the  hearing  of  the 
ears,  is  from  him ;  he  is  the  Revealer,  the  witness  to 
all  truth ;  he  takes  sight  from  the  eyes,  hearing  from  the 
ears  of  those  who  have  misused  their  sight  and  hearing 
to  the  confusion  of  another.  Especially  the  connection 
of  courage  with  truth  is  dwelt  on  with  a  lofty  confidence. 
Mithra  guards  the  life  of  the  true  man,  blunts  the  darts 
and  hinders  the  aim  of  the  false  man,  supplies  the  lack 
or  annuls  the  aid  of  all  material  weapons,  according  as 
the  warrior  has  or  has  not  kept  his  allegiance  to  the 
Revealer.  He  watches  with  a  discriminating  care  over 
graduated  claim  ;  "  Mithra,"  or  the  contract,  "  is  twenty- 
fold  between  two  friends,  fiftyfold  between  husband 
and  wife,  a  hundredfold  between  father  and  son.""*  So 
far,  perhaps,  we  may  doubt  the  wisdom  of  a  grada- 
tion which  leaves  least  guarded  the  contract  in  which 
there    is   least  affection ;    but    there    is    something   very 

^  Zcndavesta,  "  .Sncred  Cooks  of  the  East,"  vol.  xxiii.  120. 
2  /did.,  124,  s.  *  /6id.,  pp.  126-129.  *  Ibid.,  149,  150. 


68  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

characteristic  of  this  rehgion  of  distinctness  in  the  view 
of  human  beings,  however  closely  connected,  as  still 
separate  individualities,  facing  each  other  as  parties  to 
a  contract.  And  observe  the  sanction  laid  on  the 
contract  which  after  so  many  centuries  we  are  still  far 
from  regarding  with  a  worthy  reverence.  "  Mithra  is 
a  thousandfold  between  nations  ;  " — "  a  fair  recognition 
of  \he  jus  gentium, ^^  says  the  brilliant  scholar  to  whom 
we  owe  the  translation  here  epitomized.  This  is 
a  recognition  of  the  duty  of  nation  to  nation  which 
modern  Europe  has  not  yet  succeeded  in  working  out 
in  its  practical  application.  We  must  remember,  too, 
in  this  connection,  that  the  study  of  truth  is  not 
limited  to  our  dealings  with  those  who  are  loyal  sub- 
jects of  the  truth,  "  Break  not  the  contract  which 
thou  hast  entered  into  with  one  of  the  faithful  or 
the  unfaithful,  for  Mithra  stands  for  both  the  faithful 
and  the  iinfaithfuir  ^  Surely  an  unique  expression  of 
that  sublime  principle  which  all  true  religion  should 
uphold,  and  which  all  forms  of  religion  often  practically 
deny,  that  Truth  is  no  claim  of  an  individual,  but  an  act 
of  loyalty  to  that  which  makes  humanity  one. 

This  ideal  of  truth  is  indeed  discernible  even  in  the 
narration  which  ascribes  falsehood  to  Persian  agents. 
"  When  a  lie  is  to  be  told,  let  it  be  told,"  ^  says  Darius 
to  his  fellow-conspirators,  when  they  are  meditating  the 
deceit  by  which  they  will  win  entrance  to  the  apart- 
ments of  the  false  Smerdis.  How  often  in  history 
would  a  soldier  feel  even  such  a  momentary  hesita- 
tion as  the  words  imply  in  using  deceit  to  overthrow 
an  impostor?  It  may  be  objected  that  we  are  now 
criticising  a  narrative  which  is  the  mere  work  of  Greek 

1  Zendavesta,  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  vol.  xxiii.  120. 

2  Herodotus,  iii.  72.  The  conclusion  of  the  speech,  it  is  true,  is  rather  Greek 
than  Persian  in  this  respect ;  but  the  mere  fact  of  an  apology  from  any  one  in 
the  position  of  Darius  appears  to  suggest  a  conventional  respect  for  truth. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       69 

imagination.  But  if  Herodotus  gives  us  a  romance  in 
his  account  of  the  overthrow  of  the  false  Smerdis  by 
the  seven  conspirators,  his  fiction  is  almost  as  good 
evidence  to  the  characters  he  describes  as  his  facts  are. 
For  at  least  he  knows  what  the  Persians  w-ere,  and 
his  truthfulness  as  a  dramatist  is  unquestionable,  what- 
ever his  accuracy  as  a  historian  may  be.  And  the  most 
unassailable  portion  of  his  narrative  corroborates  this 
testimony  ;  it  teaches  us,  at  least,  that  something  in  the 
Persian  atmosphere  created  an  expectation  of  hearing 
the  truth,  in  circum.stances  where  most  minds  would  be 
set  to  disbelieve.  The  invasion  of  Greece  by  Xerxes 
was  surely  an  occasion  for  exceptional  wariness  of  belief. 
There  was  every  possible  temptation  to  deceit  on  the 
part  of  the  tiny  nation  confronted  with  the  might  of 
Asia ;  and  we  should  naturally  have  expected  that  their 
dangerous  foe  would  be  perpetually  on  the  alert  against 
every  apparently  friendly  communication  which  might 
be  the  channel  of  hostile  intent ;  instead  of  which  we 
find  that  Xerxes  believed  every  word  the  Greeks  said  to 
him.  He  never  seemed  to  have  suspected  that  a  Greek 
message  could  be  anything  but  what  it  professed  to 
be.  In  this  confidence  he  hurries  to  the  disaster  of 
Salamis ;  ^  and  in  his  subsequent  flight  from  Greece 
he  still  acts  on  Greek  advice  with  absolute  confidence. 
Falsehood  must  have  been  a  more  unnatural  idea  to 
him  than  to  most  rulers  of  an  invading  army.  The 
Great  King  must  have  known  plenty  of  instances  of  it, 
but   some  influence  was   at  work  on    him   which   made 

1  Herodotus,  viii.  75.  This  instance  of  credulity  on  the  part  of  the  Persian 
commanders  appears  the  more  striking  because  Sicinnus,  the  Greek  who  brings 
the  message  which  was  to  hire  them  into  the  trap,  does  not  claim  reward  or 
shelter.  '0  fxiv  ravrd  a-rjfxrjvai  (kwoqwv  airr)Wda(j€TO.  It  would  almost  seem 
as  if  the  historian  intended  to  express  surprise  at  their  credulity  in  the  next 
sf-ntence  (76) : — Totcrt  oe  ws  wiarii  ^y^vtro  tA  dyyeMhra.  Sicinnus  returns  quite 
fearlessly  to  Xerxes  afier  the  battle.  See  viii.  no,  with  the  comments  of  Grote. 
V.  191,  note. 


70  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

him  curiously  unsuspicious.  Truth  was  the  assumption 
as  to  human  intercourse,  even  where  all  experience  must 
have  supplied  a  warning  against  credulity. 

The    Persian    reverence    for  industry  is  closely  con- 
nected with  the   Persian  reverence  for  truth.      The  two 
qualities  belong  to  the  same  ideal.      The  Greek  on  the 
one  hand,  the   Indian  on   the  other,  despises  both.      As 
Pantheism  knows  no  error  in  falsehood,  so  it  also  dis- 
cerns no  danger  in   indolence.      And  then  again,  to  the 
lively  Greek  falsehood  is  a  mark  of  intellect,  as  indolence 
is  of  freedom.      Persia  sees  both  claims  from  what  we 
may  perhaps  call  a  modern  point  of  view.      Agriculture 
is,   in    its  sacred    scriptures,   surrounded   with    religious 
sanction.      "  When  wheat   is  coming  up,  it  is  as  though 
red-hot  irons  were  turned  in  the  throats  of  the  demons." 
"  Unhappy  is  the  land   that  has  long  lain  unsown,  and 
wants  a  husbandman,  as  a  fair  maiden  a  husband  ; "  the 
earth  is  to  be  to   the  husbandman  "  as  a  loving  bride." 
The  place  "  where   the   Earth   feels  most  happy  "  is  the 
place  whereon  "  one  of  the  faithful  erects  a  house,  with 
a  priest  within,  with   cattle,  with  wife,  child,  and   good 
herds  ;   where   the  cattle  thrive,  where  the  dog  thrives, 
the  wife  and  child  and  every  blessing  of  life,  where  one 
of  the    faithful   cultivates  much  corn,   grass,   and   fruit, 
where  he  waters  ground   that   is  dry,   or  dries  ground 
that  is  wet."  ^     Perhaps  we  may  find  in  the  course  of  a 
nation's  legendary  history  a  more  impressive  testimony 
to  its   ideal  than   even  in   the  injunctions  of  its  sacred 
scriptures;   and  the  testimony  of  the  Shah-Nameh  is  not 
less    emphatic    on    this    point    than    that    of    the   Zend- 
avesta.      Djemschid,    the    ideal    Persian    king,   institutes 
castes,   as    does    the   ideal    Indian    legislator;    but    note 
the  difference.     The  labourers  in  the  Persian  epic  render 
neither  homage  nor  obedience  to  any  one,  although  their 

1  Zendavesta,  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  vol.  iv.  pp.  22-30. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       71 

garments  are  mean  and  their  work  arduous.  "  They  are 
free ;  they  have  no  enemies,  no  quarrels.  A  wise  man 
has  said,  "Tis  indolence  which  enslaves  those  who  should 
be  free.'  "  ^  No  figure  of  prince  or  noble  in  these  legends 
is  more  full  of  heroic  significance  than  the  blacksmith 
Gaveh,  whose  leathern  apron  set  with  gold  and  gems, 
increased  by  every  successive  Persian  monarch,  becomes 
the  standard  of  Persia,  and  from  whom  the  proudest  are 
glad  to  claim  descent.^  It  is  this  son  of  lowly  toil  who 
resists  the  tyrant  Zohak  and  sets  the  glorious  Feridun 
upon  the  throne.  Zohak  has  permitted  the  demon  Iblis 
to  kiss  his  shoulders,  and  from  each  kiss  has  sprung  a 
serpent,  to  whose  hunger  the  miserable  people  over  whom 
he  has  usurped  dominion  are  compelled  to  furnish  a 
tribute ;  for  these  creatures,  true  to  their  devilish  origin, 
feed  onl}^  on  human  brains.  The  two  sons  of  the  black- 
smith have  been  seized  as  their  prey,  but  his  fierce 
indignation  compels  their  restitution  and  initiates  a 
revolt,  in  which  the  demon  usurper  perishes,  and  a 
member  of  the  lawful  dynasty  is  placed  upon  the 
throne.  Honour  to  toil  is  secure  with  a  people  whose 
imagination  associates  labour  and  glory,  and  makes  of 
the  apron  of  toil  the  sacred  standard  of  victory. 

This  spirit  of  reverence  for  work  is  equally  manifest 
in  the  religion  of  Persia.  The  change  of  feeling  from 
sympathy  with  repose  to  sympathy  with  activity,  is  shown 
in  the  fact  that  all  the  ideas  of  cosmogony  seemed  to 
have  passed  over  from  the  region  of  growth  to  the  region 
of  art.  India  knows  nothing  of  that  which  we  mean  by 
Creation.  The  universe  is  an  egg,  a  germ  in  a  fluid 
environment;  it  has  become;  li  vjas  not  made.  Whence 
came  that  germ  of  being  is  a  point  on  which,  as  we  have 
seen,  not  only  the  human  but  even  the  Divine  Teacher 
is  profoundly  ignorant.  God  himself  partakes  in  the 
1  Mohl,  "  Livre  dcs  Kois,"  i.  51.  ^  JUJ,^  91. 


72  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

uncertainty  of  man.  That  of  which  He  speaks  is  a  Unity 
including  all  existence ;  it  lies  outside  all  Will,  it  pre- 
cedes, and  therefore  baffles,  all  Thought.  None  can 
possess  any  record  of  that  primal  dawn  which  initiated 
the  whole  of  Being,  for  all  are  the  product  of  that 
evolution  which  then  took  its  start.  Gods  and  men 
alike  are  but  the  fruit  of  its  later  growth,  and  can 
preserve  no  independent  view  of  a  process  commemo- 
rated in  the  very  structure  of  their  being ;  it  is,  then,  in 
vain  to  seek  to  pass  beyond  its  scope  and  decide  on 
anything  external  to  its  operation.  We  can  but  catch  a 
glimpse  of  its  later  stages  and  chronicle  some  observations 
of  a  process  of  which  we  are  as  much  the  result  as  the 
spectator ;  and  the  form  in  which  all  suggestions  exceed- 
ing this  limit  are  cast  is  quite  unhistorical. 

Nothing  can  be  more  strongly  contrasted  with  this 
audacious  agnosticism  than  the  Persian  Genesis.^  The 
origin  of  this  universe  is  related  in  terms  much  more 
definite  than  those  of  a  great  part  of  ordinary  history. 
The  whole  conflict  of  good  and  evil  which  makes  up 
the  history  of  the  universe  is  contained  within  a  C3'cle 
of  12,000  years,  that  is  to  say,  a  gigantic  year,  of  which 
every  month  is  a  millennium  ;  and  the  same  sharp  dis- 
tinctness which  defines  this  period  arranges  its  various 
stages  ;  there  are  seonian  seasons  for  this  aeonian  year. 
The  conception  is  definite,  chronological,  almost  geo- 
graphical. The  worlds  of  Ormazd  and  Ahriman  are 
conceived   as   two  vast  regions,  separated   by  an   empty 

1  "  Le  role  capitale  d'Ormazd,"  says  M.  Hovelacque,  "est  celui  du  Dieu 
crtateur.  .  .  .  Zoroastre,  iniplorant  d'Ormazd  la  r^v^lation  I'appelle  a  chaque 
instant  de  ce  nom  :  datare  6  createur  !  ....  A  plusieurs  reprises,  Ormazd  lui- 
meme  se  proclame  createur.  .  .  .  Azem  .  .  .  yo  dadhwao  Ahuromazdao,  '  moi 
qui  suis  le  createur  Ahuraniazda.'  .  .  .  Darius  dit  dans  son  inscription  d'Alvend, 
Auramazda  est  un  dieu  puissant,  qui  a  fait  cette  terre,  qui  a  fait  le  ciel,  qui  a 
fait  I'homme,  qui  a  fait  la  satisfaction  de  rhomme.  II  r^pete  cette  formule  dans 
les  inscriptions  de  Persdpolis,  et  Xerxes  la  repete  apres  lui "  ( "  L'Avesta,  Zoroastre 
et  le  Mazd6isme,"  par  Abel  Hovelacque,  i8So,  p.  168-171). 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       y^ 

space — an  idealization  of  the  sk}'  and  subterranean 
darkness,  with  the  atmosphere  as  a  sort  of  neutral 
space  between  them.  Ormazd  in  his  realm  of  light  is 
conscious  of  the  opposed  darkness,  but  Ahriman  has 
no  corresponding  knowledge,  he  suspects  the  presence 
of  no  mighty  rival,  and  to  all  appearance  thinks  that  his 
congenial  darkness  is  the  whole  of  being.  But  Ormazd, 
aware  of  the  impending  battle,  makes  his  preparations  ; 
he  calls  into  existence  spiritual  beings  who  are  to  be 
enlisted  in  the  hosts  of  righteousness,  and  for  the  first 
great  season  of  the  secular  year  this  spiritual  creation 
exists  alone.  The  second  3000  years  begin  with  the 
emerging  of  Ahriman  from  his  native  darkness  and  his 
discovery  of  the  Light.  Filled  with  hatred  and  fierce 
wrath  at  the  sight,  he  prepares  for  battle,  but  the  first 
approach  to  his  mighty  rival  changes  his  wrath  to  terror  ; 
he  takes  flight  into  the  abyss,  and  calls  into  existence 
his  army  of  demons,  preparatory  to  the  struggle  which 
he  is  ready  to  undertake.^  Ormazd  meanwhile  occupies 
this  second  season  of  the  great  year  in  his  material 
creation,  which  is  a  sort  of  bastion  placed  in  the  empty 
space  between  the  two  principles — the  face  which  the 
Divine  world  turns  towards  Evil — the  outlying  barrier  of 
the  light  as  it  confronts  the  realm  of  darkness.  Beyond 
this  barrier  the  two  great  chiefs  meet  in  preliminary  con- 
ference, and  the  overtures  of  Ormazd  being  rejected,  the 
battle  begins,  and  the  third  season  of  the  great  year  makes 
up  the  whole  history  of  human  kind.  Throughout  the 
whole  nothing  is  dim  or  uncertain  ;  the  record  is  one  of 
continuous  activity.  We  are  confronted  at  every  stage 
with  the  result  of  vigorous,  efficient  will.  In  Indian  life 
we  see  history  itself  melting  into  philosophy.  In  Persia 
it  is  the  very  opposite  ;  religious  philosophy  takes  the 
form  of  the  most  definite  history.      The   universe   takes 

i  Sec  the  Bundabis,  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  v.  7-10,  15. 


74  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

shape  before  our  eyes  in  the  clear  daylight  of  historic 
record,  and  for  every  stage  of  creation  we  have  a  definite 
date  and  an  adequate  explanatory  motive. 

The  strong  monarchic  spirit  of  Persia  is  the  natural 
result  of  such  a  faith  as  has  been  described.  It  is  the 
tendency  of  all  organized  warfare  to  cultivate  uncritical 
devotion  to  a  single  head.  The  religion  of  conflict  was 
the  religion  of  loyalty.  We  are  reminded  continually 
that  "  the  Great  King "  was  the  name  by  which  the 
deadliest  enemies  of  Persia  spoke  of  its  ruler.  There 
are  kings  in  plenty  in  Indian  tradition,  but  none  of 
them  emerges  into  this  typical  importance,  as  a  link  be- 
tween the  human  and  the  Divine.  The  caste  system  is 
utterly  opposed  to  all  monarchic  feeling ;  an  elaborately 
organized  aristocracy  is  incompatible  with  the  dominion 
of  an  autocrat.  In  Persia,  on  the  other  hand,  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  sovereign  and  the  subject  is  one 
that  leaves  scant  room  for  any  other.  The  latest  editor 
of  Herodotus  ^  notes  an  instructive  instance  of  the  want 
of  Greek  knowledge  of  Persian  feeling  in  this  respect ; 
the  messenger,  in  the  drama  of  vEschylus,  who  brings 
the  news  of  the  colossal  disaster,  fails  to  announce  the 
monarch's  safety  as  his  opening  communication.^  "The 
Persians,"  says  Herodotus  (viii.  99),  with  truer  appre- 
hension, "were  overwhelmed  with  consternation  when 
they  heard  of  the  disaster  at  Salamis,  not  so  much  on 
account  of  the  destruction  of  the  fleet  as  from  their  fears 
for  the  safety  of  Xerxes,  .  .  .  and  their  lamentations 
were  kept  up  until  the  king  put  an  end  to  them 
by  his  return."  His  return  removed,  it  would  seem, 
their  deepest  anxiety.      To   lose   their  king  would  be  a 

1  Instead  of  representing  the  safety  of  the  King  as  the  first  thought  of  the 
Persians,  the  messenger  is  on  the  stage  for  half  a  scene  before  the  point  is 
touched  (Rawlinson's  Herodotus,  iv.  pp.  336,  337,  note). 

2  ..Eschylus,  PersEe,  248,  seq. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       75 

calamity  more  terrible  than  to  lose  all  that  vast  host  that 
had  drained  the  strength  of  Asia.  There  was  nothing 
rational  in  such  a  leeling ;  it  was  a  part  of  their  worship. 
Lo^^alty  cannot  be  incorporated  with  religion  without 
profoundly  modifying  the  whole  spirit  of  both.  Political 
feeling  becomes  a  different  thing  when  it  is  developed 
in  such  close  proximity  to  religious  feelings  that  it  is 
subject  to  the  contagion  of  all  religious  impulse.  The 
cruelty  which  is  naturally  developed  by  the  belief  in  a 
conflict  between  good  and  evil  pervading  all  existence, 
finds  an  additional  stimulus  in  the  prostrate  submission 
of  a  race  at  the  feet  of  a  monarch  whose  dominion  is 
regarded  as  something  almost  divine.  The  earthly 
ruler  who  shares  the  claim  of  the  heavenly  to  uncritical 
obedience,  must  develop  a  tendency  towards  ruthless 
tyranny,  unless  he  be  secured  by  some  peculiar  idiosyn- 
crasy of  gentleness  or  wisdom.  Man  shares  in  his  own 
worship  ;  the  reluctance  of  his  worshipper  becomes  an 
object  not  alone  of  human  displeasure,  but  of  indigna- 
tion against  impiety.  The  blackest  crime  narrated  by 
Herodotus  of  Xerxes — his  slaughter  of  four  noble  Lydian 
youths,^  freely  offered  to  his  service,  because  their  father, 
alarmed  by  a  dream,  asked  for  the  restoration  of  one 
— would  assume  to  the  Great  King,  the  reader  feels, 
the  aspect  almost  of  a  zeal  for  religion.  The  father 
who  grudged  his  all  to  the  sovereign  was,  in  his  view, 
worthy  of  the  severest  tortures  that  could  lacerate  a 
father's  heart.  This  is  no  mere  exhibition  of  human 
rage,  it  is  justified  to  the  tyrant  by  a  confusion  of  the 
Divine  claim  with  the  claim  of  self.  There  arc  not 
wanting  instances  which  prove  the  character  of  Xerxes 
to  have  been  by  no  means  one  of  universal  barbarity 
where  the  sense  of  his  own  Divinity  was  not  concerned, 
which  exhibit  even  magnanimity  in  dealing  with   those 

1  Herodotus,  vii.  27,  28,  38,  39. 


76  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

who  did  not  come  within  the  circuit  of  his  regal  claim. 
It  is  in  contrast  with  what  could  be  regarded  as  dis- 
loyalty that  we  see  in  him  the  cnielty  of  a  fiend.  And 
cruelty  in  the  strong,  when  it  is  watched  without  resist- 
ance or  indignation,  is  sure  to  become  cruelty  in  the 
weak.  Our  moral  standard  is  influenced  far  more  by 
those  actions  which  we  admire  or  condemn  than  by 
those  which  we  endeavour  to  imitate.  A  thousand 
accidents  decide  what  part  of  our  neighbour's  conduct 
shall  be  the  model  of  our  own,  but  our  ideal  acts  on  us 
at  every  moment,  and  influences  our  whole  being  in  a 
region  far  deeper  than  the  conscious  will.  And  thus 
a  religion  which  finds  in  a  series  of  individual  men  a 
special  type  and  representative  of  God  upon  earth,  tends 
to  make  room  in  its  moral  ideal  for  the  passions  of  hatred 
and  resentment,  and  to  incorporate  the  zeal  for  what  is 
divine  with  the  worst  forms  of  cruelty  and  revenge. 

This  characteristic  of  Persian  morals  is  brought  out 
by  the  Persian  antagonism  to  the  nation  which  has 
most  strongly  influenced  the  intellectual  development  of 
Europe.  The  narrative  of  the  deliverance  of  Greece 
shows  the  impression  made  by  Persian  barbarity  on  a 
people  comparatively  humane,  and  the  reader  is  taught 
to  shudder  at  the  dominion  of  Persia  as  synonymous 
with  the  triumph  of  all  that  is  terrible  and  hateful ;  the 
conflict  not  only  of  a  lower  with  a  higher  form  of  civiliza- 
tion, but  of  a  hideous  despotism  with  an  enlightened, 
beneficent  form  of  government  and  of  society.  We  feel 
as  if  the  salvation  of  Greece  had  been  the  repulse  of  all 
that  was  evil ;  we  seem  to  see  the  combat  of  Ahriman 
with  Ormazd  in  flesh  and  blood.  The  Persian  faith 
seems  to  detach  itself  from  the  Persian  nation,  and  to 
exhibit  its  worshippers,  from  an  external  point  of  view, 
as  an  embodiment  of  that  evil  principle  in  which  it 
taught    men    to    believe.      Doubtless   it   was    so,    in    the 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       77 

aspect  which  it  showed  itself  to  Greece.  Persian  victory 
would  here  have  been  the  touch  of  paralysis  on  all  that 
has  been,  to  the  intellectual  development  of  Europe,  the 
very  spring  of  energy  and  fount  of  inspiration.  It  would 
have  been  slavery  instead  of  freedom,  torpor  instead  of 
genius,  death  instead  of  life. 

But  there  was  another  race,  equally  well  known  to  the 
modern  world,  to  which  Persian  victory  brought  deliver- 
ance, and  to  whose  faith  that  of  the  Persians  seemed 
closely  akin.  The  Jew  felt  that  the  Persian  might  join 
him  in  the  worship  of  Jehovah,  if  only  the  Evil  Principle 
were  deposed  from  sharing  the  Heavenly  throne.  We 
seem  to  hear  a  protest  against  the  dual  Divinities  of  the 
Persian  from  that  great  Hebrew  Prophet  whose  utterances 
we  have  been  taught  to  confuse  with  those  of  Isaiah — 
"  Thus  saith  the  Lord  thy  Redeemer,  I  am  the  Lord  that 
maketh  all  things,  that  stretcheth  forth  the  heavens  alone, 
that  spreadeth  abroad  the  earth  by  myself"-^ — the  God 
who  has  had  no  hostile  partner  in  creation,  who  has  made 
both  light  and  darkness — "  who  saith  to  the  deep.  Be  dry, 
and  I  will  dry  up  thy  rivers  ; " " — the  God  who  destroys 
all  separation  at  His  will — "  that  saith  of  Cyrus,  He  is  my 
shepherd,  and  shall  perform  all  my  pleasure  ;  even  saying 
to  Jerusalem,  Thou  shalt  be  built ;  and  to  the  temple.  Thy 
foundation  shall  be  laid." "  The  Great  King  is  the  shep- 
herd of  Israel ;  to  him  is  applied  a  title  elsewhere  only 
given  to  David  and  to  the  Son  of  David.  He  has,  in- 
deed, a  more  sacred  title  ;  we  might  startle  Christian  cars 
by  quoting  the  passage  of  Scripture  w^hich  names  him 
literally — he  is  the  Christ,  the  Anointed,  "  whose  right 
hand  I  have  holden,  to  subdue  nations  before  him  ;  to 
make  the  crooked  places  straight,  to  break  in  pieces 
the  gates  of  brass,  and  cut  in  sunder  the  bars  of  iron."  * 

1  Isa.  xliv.  24.  2  isa.  xliv.  27. 

3  Isa.  xliv.  28.  *  Isa.  xlv.  i,  2. 


78  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

To  him  shall  be  revealed  the  excellence  of  that  which 
has  taken  the  aspect  of  the  foe  of  all  excellence — "  I  will 
give  thee  the  treasures  of  darkness,  that  thou  mayest 
know  that  I,  which  call  thee  by  thy  name,  am  the  God 
of  Israel.  I  have  surnamed  thee,  though  thou  hast  not 
known  me.  I  am  the  Lord,  and  there  is  none  else," 
no  rival  creator,  no  hostile  ruler,  no  potent  Ahriman, 
Darkness  is  no  foe  of  Light,  only  the  shadow  that  gives 
it  meaning.  "  I  form  the  light  and  create  darkness.  .  .  . 
I  the  Lord  do  all  these  things." 

The  protest  is  there,  and  yet  it  is  not  emphatic,  and  it 
is  not  finally  victorious.  The  Persian  dualism  filtered 
into  the  religion  which  here  repudiates  it,  and  emerges 
in  the  religion  which  was  born  of  Judaism,  in  a  more 
distinct  form.  Satan  gradually  expands  to  the  limits 
of  Ahriman.  The  earlier  books  of  the  Old  Testament 
know  nothing  of  him,  his  name  does  not  occur,  nor  is 
there  any  place  for  him  in  the  scheme  of  thought  the}'- 
portray.  Jehovah  is  the  one  Supreme  Ruler  of  all 
things  visible  and  invisible ;  there  are  evil  agencies  (as 
also  in  the  Veda),  but  they  are  neither  prominent  nor  in 
our  sense  of  the  word  diabolic  ;  they  are  all  indistinct  and, 
we  may  say,  excusable.  An  adversary  provokes  Hannah 
to  make  her  fret,^  but  her  urgent  importunity  wins  its 
object  and  makes  her  the  mother  of  Samuel ;  a  lying 
spirit  appears  before  the  throne  of  Jehovah,"  but  it  is  to 
carry  out  His  purpose,  in  the  destruction  of  Ahab  ;  finally 
(for  here  the  idea  seems  to  have  taken  its  full  develop- 
ment as  far  as  it  was  independent  of  Persian  influence), 
"  ihe  adversary "  appears  among  the  sons  of  God  to 
accuse  a  righteous  man,  but  it  is  to  bring  forth  that 
righteousness  sifted   and   purified ;   and   after   the   trials 

^  I  Samuel  i.  6. 

'  I  Kings  xxii.  21-23.     C/.  Job  i.  6-12.     The  similarity  of  the  lying  spirit 
to  the  o&Xoj  oveifot  of  Iliad  ii.  8  has  been  often  noticed. 


PERSIA  AND  THE  RELIGION  OF  CONFLICT.       79 

which  have  separated  the  chaff  from  the  wheat  we  hear 
no  more  of  Satan  ;  ^  the  human  adversaries  are  rebuked, 
but  the  accusing  spirit  is  forgotten.  Was  he  really  an 
evil  spirit  ?  Is  not  the  sifting  spirit  a  part  of  the 
agency  of  Heaven  ?  Judaism  leaves  the  question  un- 
answered, or  perhaps  we  may  say  that  it  suggests  an 
affirmative  answer,  though  the  spirit  that  sifts  is  too 
near  the  spirit  that  doubts  for  it  to  give  that  answer 
distinctly.  The  influence  that  questions  what  is  good 
is  wonderfully  close  to  the  influence  that  purifies  what 
is  partly  evil.  We  should  be  struck  by  this  in  the 
allusions  of  Christ  if  we  could  read  the  Bible  with  the 
same  unprejudiced  mind  as  we  read  any  other  book. 
"  Simon,  Simon,  Satan  hath  desired  to  have  you  that 
he  may  sift  you  as  tvhcaty  ^  An  arrogant  purpose  in 
a  created  being,  but  not  in  itself  evil,  na}',  dangerous 
only  because  it  is  a  copy  of  that  which  is  the  prerogative 
of  the  creator.  Satan  desires  to  sift  the  true  Israel,  but 
the  Lord  achieves  that  sifting  so  that  "  not  the  least 
grain  falls  upon  the  earth."  His  alone  is  the  power,  but 
not  His  alone  is  the  desire.  It  is  shared  by  the  one 
in  whom  men  have  seen  the  principle  of  all  evil.  And 
there  is  no  doubt  that  that  conception  was  developed 
by  the  Hebrew  contact  with  Persia.  The  later  books 
show  a  strong  trace  of  this  influence,  while  they  exhibit 
in  a  striking  form  that  tendency  by  which  the  Tempter 
stands  so  near  the  Redeemer  that  it  almost  seems  as 
if  they  may  at  some  moment  exchange  parts.  Jehovah 
provokes  David  to  number  Israel  in  the  original  history, 
but  in  the  redaction  made  after  the  exile  that  part 
is  ascribed  to  "  the  adversary ; "  and  the  exchange  is 
a  significant,  though  it  seems  a  trifling,  instance  of  the 
tendency  by  which  at  last  Satan  is  elevated  into  the 
strong  conspicuous  position  which  he  takes  in  the  latest 

1  Job  xlii.  1-8.  2  Luke  xxii.  31.     C/.  Amos  ix.  9. 


8o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

expression  of  Jewish  feeling  in  the  Bible — the  Book  of 
Revelation.  Here  we  are  again  on  the  battlefield  of 
two  principles.  Evil  is  once  more  a  mighty,  for  the 
present  we  may  say  even  a  victorious  power,  and  its 
future  defeat  is  not  (for  it  cannot  be)  more  distinct  than 
it  is  in  the  religion  of  Persia.  Here,  then,  we  may  say 
that  the  element  which  entered  Judaism  with  Persian 
influence  attains  its  fullest  development ;  we  have  here 
an  army  of  evil  powers,  a  Prince  of  darkness,  a  mighty 
foe  to  the  Divine  ruler.  To  many  persons  it  seems 
that  we  have  all  this  in  the  teaching  of  Christ.  They 
forget  that  He  beheld  Satan  fall  from  Heaven  ;  ^  that  He 
applied  the  name  to  the  most  trusted  of  His  followers ; " 
that  when  His  own  homage  was  claimed  for  this  evil 
being.  He  answered  with  no  denunciation,^  but  with  a 
calm  assertion  of  the  claim  of  the  One.  The  teaching  of 
His  disciple  has  obscured  His  own,  and  there  is  a  great 
deal  of  what  we  must  call  Christianity  in  which  the 
belief  in  Ahriman  is  quite  as  real,  and  more  active,  than 
it  was  in  the  ancient  creed  of  Persia.  And  so  deep  has 
this  spirit  put  its  roots  into  the  faith  of  Christendom, 
that,  now  that  it  has  fallen,  a  great  vacuum  seems  left 
in  our  religion,  and  much  of  what  is  most  essential  to 
it  is,  there  can  be  no  doubt,  explained  away  by  those 
who  still  speak  its  language  and  call  themselves  by  its 
name. 

1  Luke  X.  1 8. 

2  Matt.  xvi.  23,  and  parallel  passages  in  the  other  synoptics. 

3  Matt.  iv.  10,  and  parallel  passages. 


CHAPTER  III. 
GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES. 

We  only  half  understand  the  principle  of  dualism  when 
we  contrast  it  with  the  principle  of  unity.  The  spirit 
that  sees  all  events,  all  characters,  all  phenomena,  as  the 
development  or  symbol  of  a  great  conflict  between  two 
fundamental  principles  is  not  more  antagonistic  to  the 
spirit  which  sees  them  all  as  the  various  expression  of 
one,  than  each  is  to  that  which  looks  with  an  impartial 
interest  on  the  whole  play  of  natural  impulse,  and  sees 
in  the  struggle  of  life's  opposing  forces  the  appropriate 
gymnastic  for  all  that  is  most  truly  human,  the  battle 
that  tests  and  develops  all  that  is  destined  for  rule.  It 
is  only  on  a  superficial  view  that  we  could  suppose 
this  latter  spirit  an  ally  of  either  antagonist  against 
its  enemy.  According  to  our  point  of  view,  it  is  either 
impartially  hostile  to  both  or  impartially  friendly  to 
both.  "  Life,"  said  the  Indian,  "  is  the  seeming  change 
in  one  unchangeable  reality  ;  let  us  neglect  what  seems, 
and  turn  to  what  is."  "Life,"  said  the  Persian,  "is  the 
actual  conflict  between  tvv'o  deadly  foes  ;  let  us  take 
part  with  the  good  and  oppose  the  evil."  But  these  two 
forms  of  thought,  embodied  not  merely  in  two  creeds 
of  the  past,  but  in  many  kinds  of  speculation  that  belong 
to  all  time,  are  hardly  more  unlike  each  other  than 
both  are  unlike  one  which  we  may  call  by  very  different 
names,  and  recognize  under  very  different  aspects,  for 
it  also  belongs  to  all   time  and   to  ail   thought ;    while 

F 


82  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

its  typical  expression  remains  also  fixed  for  all  time  in 
the  records  of  a  nation's  life,  and  that  the  nation  which 
has  most  deeply  influenced  the  intellectual  development 
of  our  race.  It  is  the  ideal  of  the  artist  throughout  all 
history,  and  it  is  the  ideal,  at  a  particular  point  in  history, 
of  the  artist  people ;  it  moulds  the  poetry,  the  art,  and 
the  philosophy  of  Greece. 

This  spirit  is  sympathetic  to  all  forms  of  thought,  and 
also  critical  to  them  all.  It  does  not  turn  from  what 
seems  to  absorb  itself  in  what  is,  as  the  Pantheism  of 
India.  It  does  not  rank  itself  on  the  side  of  righteous- 
ness, and  find  its  ver}'-  life  in  a  conflict  with  evil,  as  the 
dualism  of  Persia.  It  admits  no  great  fundamental  anti- 
thesis either  of  illusion  and  reality  or  of  good  and  evil ; 
and  from  some  points  of  view  the  two  hostile  doctrines 
which  severally  accept  these  contrasts  as  the  leading 
distinctions  of  the  moral  world,  are  nearer  to  each  other 
than  is  either  to  the  spirit  that  finds  truth  in  a  balance 
of  opposites,  and  the  aim  of  life  in  a  harmony  of  its 
contending  forces. 

This  is  the  ideal  of  genius.  It  is  the  perennial 
aspect  that  life  bears  to  the  Poet.  It  is  the  side  of 
all  human  dealings  which  they  turn  towards  the  world 
of  Art.  To  the  race  dowered  with  genius  it  was  the 
national  ideal,  and  all  the  records  of  what  they  have 
done  and  been  are  but  various  and  not  always  obvious 
illustrations  of  this  spirit  of  balance,  of  harmony,  of 
rhythm.  At  times  it  takes  a  deeply  moral  aspect,  and 
seems  to  anticipate  the  deepest  lessons  and  the  most 
urgent  warnings  of  the  Christian  Scriptures.  But  this 
resemblance  is  misleading.  The  Greek  dread  of  extra- 
vagance has  a  merely  external  similarity  to  the  Christian 
dread  of  sin ;  in  its  most  characteristic  aspects,  it  is 
indeed  antagonistic  to  earnest  moral  feeling,  to  all  zeal 
for  righteousness,  to  all  hatred  of  iniquity.     Genius  is  not 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     83 

immoral ;  probably  in  this  respect  its  records  would  show 
favourably  in  comparison  with  the  records  of  common- 
place humanity.  But  it  is  utterly  unmoral.  It  metes 
out  its  interest  according  to  other  laws  than  those  which 
regulate  the  moral  sympathies  ;  it  demands  only  the  play  of 
opposite  forces  and  the  balance  of  contending  impulses, 
and  wherever  these  are  found,  there  is  the  soil  for  its 
roots  and  the  atmosphere  in  which  its  blossoms  may 
expand  in  all  their  beauty.  Against  such  an  ideal  the 
conscience,  in  some  sense,  always  embodies  a  latent 
protest.  It  is  a  protest  only  in  the  sense  in  which 
we  may  imagine  youthful  vigour  to  protest  against  that 
invitation  to  repose  which  is  to  renew  all  its  springs. 
But  the  faculty  which  centres  in  the  conscience,  and  the 
creative  powers  of  genius,  are  hostile  in  this  sense,  that 
they  must  emerge  into  distinctness  alternately.  It  is  as 
with  the  light  of  the  sun  and  moon  ;  if  we  are  to  see 
them  together,  the  light  of  one  or  both  must  be  compara- 
tively faint.  Genius,  however  we  reconcile  that  truth 
with  others  not  less  certain,  implies  always  a  certain 
moral  impartiality  ;  hence  its  dangers  :  hence  also — if 
we  would  remember  that  the  whole  of  our  nature,  and 
no  part  more  than  the  conscience,  needs  repose — its 
deepest  benefits  alike  to  those  who  share  it  and  those 
who  only  share  its  gifts. 

Greece  represents  the  moral  ideal  of  genius,  with  all 
its  wealth  and  all  its  peril.  It  shows  us  moral  truth  as 
we  see  the  moon  by  da3dight — faint,  delicate,  forgetable, 
secondary,  yet  never  indistinct.  Not  that  passion  is  faint, 
not  that  the  moral  sympathies  are  feeble,  but  that  it  is 
manifold,  that  they  are  balanced.  There  is  fierce  wrath, 
there  is  passionate  love,  but  wherever  we  can  distinguish 
the  poet's  feeling  it  sympathises  with  both.  Greek  life  is 
penetrated  wiih  that  spirit  of  balanced  judgment,  of  elastic 
sympathy,  which,  allowing  vehement  utterance  to  all  feel- 


84  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

ing,  refuses  decided  predominance  to  any  ; — which  tends 
to  exhibit  all  conflict  as  gymnastic,  all  antagonism  as  the 
harmonious  play  of  opposite  emotions.     Greek  mythology, 
Greek  legend,  Greek  history,  are  all  full  of  the  idea  of  a 
struggle,  but  we  never  find  that  any  combatant  can  be  re- 
garded as  a  principle  of  evil.    As  compared  with  the  Persian 
ideal,  we  find  that  we  have  exchanged  a  moral  contrast  of 
light  and  darkness  for  an  artistic  balance  of  hght  and  shade. 
The  idea  of  a  primeval  conflict,  symbolized  by  the  great 
phenomena  of  nature    and   typical  of  all    that   is    most 
impressive  in  human  history — this  fruitful  germ  of  myth 
and  legend  was   the  inheritance  of  the  Aryan  race,  and 
nowhere  do  we  find  it  more  prolific  than  on  the  soil  of 
Greece.      But  it  never  develops  into  any  parable  of  the 
conflict  of  good  and  evil.      Greek  mythology  knows  of 
no    Ahriman   and   Ormazd ;    Greek   deities  are  as  little 
like  one  of  these  beings  as  like   the  other.      Whatever 
is    evil    is    vague ;    the    objects    of    antagonism    partake 
rather  the  character  of  things  than  of  persons.      Perhaps 
we  may  say  that  the  contrast  of  persons  and  things  marks 
the  nearest  approach   made  by  the  Greek  mind  towards 
the  contrast  of  good  and   evil.      All  heroic  achievement 
impresses  on  brute  matter  the  record  of  Will,  banishing 
the  hurtful,   the    monstrous,   the    foul ;    humanizing  the 
confused  material  w^orld ;  extending  the  empire  of  Spirit. 
The  conflict  repeats  in   a   condensed  form   the  work  of 
primitive    man ;    the    hero    must    slay    m.onsters,    drain 
marshes,    go    through    arduous    toils    in    subduing    the 
powers  of  nature,  but  his  struggles  never  take  the  aspect 
of  a  great  duel   between  equal  or  nearly  equal  foes,  he 
knows    no    spiritual    adversary.      Hercules    is    a    great 
hunter,   a  daring  traveller ;    a   beneficent  helper  ;   he  is 
never  a  wrestler  with  any  principle  of  evil.      He  and  all 
those  heroes  of  whom  he   is  a   typical   example  express 
the  spirit  of  civilization  overcoming  the  lower  forces  that 


GREECE,  AXD  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     85 

rise  up  against  it,  never  the  spirit  of  righteousness  set- 
ting itself  to  overcome  the  spirit  of  iniquity.  That  is  an 
antithesis  of  which  Greece  knows  nothing  ;  when  mytho- 
logy and  philosophy  come  nearest  to  such  a  conception 
we  see  most  clearl}^  how  impossible  it  was  to  the  Greek 
mind.  Its  philosophy,  when  most  occupied  with  moral 
problems,  scarcely  takes  cognizance  of  right  and  wrong ; 
its  mythology,  when  absorbed  in  the  moral  aspects  of  the 
Invisible  world,  seems  at  times  to  recognize  this  antithesis 
only  to  invert  it,  and  to  give  to  the  claimants  for  human 
worship  the  attributes  and  aspect  of  the  Tempter. 

Those  who  know  something  of  the  writings  of  Plato, 
and  still  more  those  who  only  know  his  name,  may  be 
inclined  to  dispute  this  description  of  the  philosophy 
that  has  sown  the  seed  of  so  much  of  the  world's 
thought.  The  name  and  the  writings  of  his  great  pupil, 
if  equally  familiar,  would  be  a  much  stronger  cause  for 
protest,  for  all  our  ethical  study  takes  its  rise  with 
Aristotle.  And  nevertheless  it  remains  true  that  moral 
truth  is  discernible  on  Greek  soil  only  as  the  moon  is 
discernible  by  day.  The  very  fact  which  seems  to 
confute  this  is  its  strongest  proof.  Aristotle  originates 
ethical  science,  it  takes  its  start  with  the  thought  that 
ripened  in  the  stormy  autumn  of  Greek  life.  Plato  never  i 
recognized  the  life  of  the  Conscience.  He  knows  only  1 
two  antitheses — the  pleasant  in  contrast  to  the  painful,! 
the  true  in  contrast  to  the  false.  His  own  disastrous 
and  disappointing  experience  as  the  guide  of  a  ruler  who 
embodied  his  ideal — that  of  the  philosopher  on  a  throne 
— may  have  shown  him  that  clear  vision  does  not  alwa3's 
imply  right  action  ;  and  the  dialogue  of  his  melanchol}' 
old  age  appears  to  bear  some  traces  of  the  dislocating 
shock  of  that  discovery.^     But  from  all  his  characteristic 

1  It  must  be  confessed  tlial  tliis  is  denied  by  the  writer  who  has  made  of  Plato 
almost  an  English  classic.     But  Dr.  Jowctt's  assertion  (I'lato,  vol.  iv,  p.  7)  that 


86  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

utterance  we   should   conclude   that   the   supreme   glory 
which  centred  in  the  idea  of  Truth  gathered  up  into  itself 
all  excellence,  and  left  nothing  to  be  appropriated  by  that 
of  Duty  and  Virtue.      What  we  mean  by  true  and  what 
we  mean   by  right  were  blended   for  him  in  one  great 
ideal,  which  he  called  the  good.      This  was  to  the  man's 
nature  as  light  to  the  eye,  as  air  to  the  lungs ;   nothing 
was  wanted  but  that  it  should  be  presented  to  its  appro- 
priate organ.      If  this  were  so,  the  word  ought  would  b 
emptied  of  its  meaning.     It  would  be  as  impossible  to 
see  that  an  action  was  right  without  doing  it,  as  it  is  to 
see  that  a  doctrine  is  true  without  believing  it.      In  the 
wider  sense  of  morals  in  which  the  word  indicates  the 
impulses,  the  S3^mpathies,  the  ultimate  needs  of  humanity, 
/'no  people  have  contributed  more  to  its  development  than 
the  countrymen  of  Plato.      To  those  who  have  given  us 
the  very  name  of  Ethical  Science  we  are  indebted  for  the 
larger  part  of  all  that  makes  the  subject   interesting  and  , 
I     vivid.     In   the  narrower  sense,   in  which   it   traces   the  I 
/     claim   of   Duty,    we    can   only   say   that    Greek    thought 
I      beckons   us    into  realms  whence  we    see    the  mountain 
1      as  the  cloud, 

U^  Thus  it  is  that,  while  Greek  philosophy  is  non-moral, 
Greek  mythology  is  non-theistic.  To  the  Greek  mind, 
in  its  most  natural  and  characteristic  attitude,  the  Divine 

there  is  no  reason  "to  imagine  that  this  melancholy  tone  is  attributable  to 
disappointment  at  having  failed  to  convert  a  Sicilian  tyrant  into  a  philosopher" 
is  very  surprising  to  me.  If  the  melancholy  tone  and  the  disappointment  both 
exist,  can  we  help  connecting  them  ?  And  when  Plato  says.'^A/)'  ovv,  c&  Oavfidaie 
'KeXTjdafiev  avOponroi  Trdvres  .  .  .  olofievoi  fxev  iKaaroTe  tl  Ka\bt>  opqv  irpdyfia. 
yevofievov  Kal  Bavfiaffra  av  ipyaad/Jievov  (Leges,  686),  and  continues  that  this 
opinion  often  turns  out  a  mistake,  is  it  possible  not  to  connect  this  mournful 
confession  with  the  assertion  in  the  "  Republic,"  473  : — 'Ed;'  fj.ri,  rj  oi  ^i\6ao<poi 
^aa-iKeiKTUcnv  if  rais  TroXecnv  t)  oi  /SacriX^s  .  .  .  (pi\o(ro(pT]a(j3crt.  .  .  .  ovk  icrri 
KaKQ>v  TrduXa  (and  then,  it  appeared,  there  would  be)?  Was  Plato  not  remem- 
bering, when  he  wrote  the  sentence  in  the  Laws,  that  he  kad  seen  this  noble 
thing,  a  Philosopher  on  the  throne,  from  which  he  had  hoped  so  greatly  ;  and 
could  anything  have  blurred  his  memory  of  that  disappointment  ? 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     87 

Being  was  out  of  sight.      Greek  feeling  is  not  atheistic, 
it  denies  nothing  that  human  instincts  have  ever  asserted. 
But  it  hurries  on  to  other  realms,  it  never  lingers  before 
the  Divine  Throne.       We  hear  in  its   deeper  music  the 
note  of  a  profound  reverence  and  faith,  but  it   is  not  a 
characteristic  note ;   the  most  Greek  of  all  Greek  poems 
knows  nothing  of  it.      Greek  mythology  knows  neither 
a   truly    Divine    nor    a    truly   Satanic   being,   but  if   we 
are   to  associate   the   Greek  divinities   with  either,  they 
come  nearer  to  the  last.      The  desire  of  Plato  to  banish 
poets  from  his  Republic  is  justified  by  many  passages  in 
Homer  ;  the  gods  are,  from  a  moral  point  of  view,  inferior 
to  the  objects  of  their  capricious  protection  and  dislike. 
"  The  Law  of  Mithra  is  fiftyfold   between  nations,"  says 
the  Persian  hymn  ;  but  when  the  enemies  of  the. Greeks 
have  to   be  defeated,  the  daughter  of  Jove,  the  divine 
Athene,^   takes  the    part    of  Ahriman,   and    provokes    a 
Trojan  to  a  treacherous  breach  of  the  truce  just  agreed 
on.      The    poet    has    opened    a    vista   towards    all    that 
enhances  the  guilt  of  this  treachery — the  weariness  of 
long  warfare,   the  longing    for   home,   the  yearning  for 
all  the  blessings  of  Peace — and  then,  with  no  sense  of 
anything  surprising  or  unnatural,  passes  on  to  tell  how 
the   Goddess    of  Wisdom  bends    her   irresistible    might 
to  pour  temptation  into  a  Trojan   heart  and  wing  from 
a  Trojan   bow   the   arrow   that   shall  rekindle  the  half- 
extinguished  flames  of  war.      It  is  a  striking  illustration 
of  the  truth  that  no  religion  can  be  consistently  unmoral. 
It  is  not  enough  to  say  that  Olympus  reflects  the  incon- 
sistencies and  contradictions  of  human   beings,  it   must 
be    confessed    in    this    case   enormously    to    exaggerate 
them  ;    and  we  are  reminded,   as   we  contemplate  such 

1  11.,  iv,  93,  sey.     Note  especially  104,  tui  0^    tpp^vas  S.(l>povt  irciOev,  words 
which  MiUon  might  have  translated  to  describe  the  iiilluciice  of  the  serpent  on   .^ 
Eve ;  c/.  iii.  2. 


88  ■  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

a  picture,  that  man's  conception  of  the  Divine,  if  it   is 
not  to  rise  above  the  human  world,  must  sink  far  below 
it.      Wherever  God   is  not  regarded   as  the  inspirer  of 
all  high   and   pure  desires  He   takes  the  aspect  of  the 
Tempter ;  if  no  spirit   of  trust  lift  to  Him   the  prayer, 
"  Lead  us  not  into  temptation,"  then  all  temptation  seems 
to    come    from    Him.      And    thus    the    characteristically 
Greek  spirit  is  irreligious,  and  was  felt  as  such  even  by 
the  deeper  thinkers  among  the  Greeks  themselves.      It 
knows  of  no  spiritual  foe  to  humanity,  but  any  God  may 
take  the  place  of  such  a  foe,  and  those  promptings  to  evil 
which  Christianity  has  associated  with  a  single  invisible 
personality  are  diffused   throughout  the  whole  realm  of 
supernatural  agency  and   suggestion.      And  if  ever  we 
come  near  the  distinct  conception  of  a  principle  of  Evil, 
we  shall  find  that  we  are  equally  near  the  very  opposite 
idea — that  where  the  Greek  spirit   most   approaches  the 
contemplation  of  an  Ahriman   or  a  Satan   there  also  it 
comes  nearest  to  the  sense  of  a  Redeemer.     Not  because 
the  two  mutually  suggest  each   other — in  all  religions 
we  find   the  Tempter  and  the  Saviour  become  visible 
together — but  because  to  the  Greek  the  two  were  but 
different    aspects  of  one   reality.      They   seem    to   have 
passed  over  by  the  merest  hair's-breadth  of  change  from 
the  sense  of  evil,  which   is  characteristic  of  the  spirit 
that  strives  with  evil,  to  evil   itself.      Like  some  eagle 
hovering  on  poised  wing  above  the  summit  of  the  Andes, 
they  exchanged,  as  it  were  with  a  stroke  of  the  wing, 
the    slope  that    sends   its  waters    to    the    east   for  that 
which   sends   its  waters   to   the  west,  and    confused   in 
their   lofty    gaze    the    springs    of  mighty   rivers,   which 
increase  their  remoteness  with  every  foot  of  progress, 
and   find  their  issue  in   oceans   that   are  thousands  of 
miles  apart. 

The  group  of  Greek  divinities  known  to  some  English 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     89 

readers  under  the  somewhat  misleading  title  of  "  The 
Furies,"  and  supposed  to  be  called  "The  Gentle  Ones" 
only  b}--  a  euphemism,  affords  us  the  most  striking  ex- 
ample of  this  elastic  vibration  between  the  ideas  of  good 
and  evil,  bringing  us  nearer  a  religious  sense  of  the 
meaning  of  remorse  and  repentance  than  we  find  else- 
where, and  nearer  also  to  an  identification  of  these 
feelings  with  evil.r~The  Eumenides  belong  to  an  older 
system  ^  than  the  '^tjyous  go3s~of  Olympus,  and  migiit, 
'  ^— seenij'trxve  let  fancy  ^settle  their  affinities,  to  embody 
the  reminiscence  of  an  earlier  historic  phase,  when  all 
that  is  characteristically  Greek  was  undeveloped.  We 
might,  from  some  points  of  view,  call  them  the  Greek 
equivalent  of  Ahriman.  They  are  daughters  of  night ; 
they  enter  into  conflict  with  the  God  of  Day,  who  shelters 
from  them  the  object  of  their  pursuit,  banishes  them 
from  his  temple  with  fierce  invective,  and  forces  them  to 
surrender  their  victim  to  his  protection.  They  are  hate- 
ful beings,  embodiments  of  the  curses  of  vengeance,  of 
the  spirit  that,  in  seeking  to  cure  ill  by  ill,  would  make 
it  eternal ;  and  their  struggle  with  Apollo  is  the  nearest 
approach  to  the  Persian  symbolism  of  a  struggle  of 
light  and  darkness  that  we  can  discover  through  the 
Greek  mythology — the  radiant  Sun-god,  in  all  his 
majesty  and  beauty,  on  the  one  hand ;  on  the  other, 
these  daughters  of  night,  odious  in  aspect  and  pitiless 
to  the  hunted  being  to  whom  he  extends  a  merciful  and 
soothing  care.  We  are  reminded  of  Satan  by  them 
more  than  by  any  other  representation  known  to  classic 
thought ;  sometimes  even  of  the  vulgar  Satan  with 
horns  and  hoofs,-  of  Mephistophcles  clamorous  for  his 
prey,  for  they  inspire  horror  by  their  mere  aspect,  and 
their   haunting  presence   is   the  worst  torment  they  can 

1  yl-'schylus,  "  Humcn.,"  162,  731,  778,  847. 
"  /6id.,  46-59. 


90  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

inflict  on  their  victim.  And  Satan  as  he  appears  in  the 
Old  Testament — the  accusing  spirit — seems  exactly  that 
which  they  are  intended  to  represent.  They  take  the 
same  place  as  he  does  when  he  appears  among  the  sons 
of  God  to  bear  witness  against  Job.  But  Greek  thought, 
unlike  Jewish,  gives  them  a  permanent  place  in  Heaven, 
and  passing  on  light  wing  that  boundary-line  of  good 
and  evil  which  never  had  much  significance  for  it,  sees 
them  as  types  not  of  the  resentment  and  hatred  which 
attend  the  footsteps  of  and  perpetuate  wrong,  but  as 
that  witness  of  wrong  within  which  is  also  the  eternal 
witness  of  right.  The  Goddess  of  Wisdom  appeases  the 
wrath  of  the  pitiless  beings,  and  even  induces  them  to 
take  up  their  abode  with  those  who  have  dared  to  shelter 
their  victim  from  them ;  they  remain  as  beneficent 
guardians  on  the  domain  they  had  entered  as  foes ;  and 
the  Furies  become  the  Gracious  ones  ;  the  Accuser  of 
the  Brethren  is  reverenced  as  the  Guardian  of  Law.^ 

The  poet  who  first  brought  the  Eumenides  into  the 
world  of  tragic  representation  himself  conceived  of  them 
under  this  dual  aspect,  and  it  is  from  his  verse  that  we 
may  draw  the  most  emphatic  vindication  of  the  right 
of  the  daughters  of  night  to  a  place  in  the  elect  city. 
But  the  successor  of  yEschylus  takes  a  further  step, 
and  obliterates  altogether  that  aspect  of  horror  which 
is  predominant  in  the  earlier  poem.  He  even  ventures 
to  reconcile  these  awful  beings  with  their  Divine  foe. 
Phoebus  himself,  in  the  verse  of  Sophocles,  appears  as 
their  ally,  and   the  God  of  Day  refers   his   supplicant  to 

^  ^schylus,  "  Eiimen. ,"  88i,  sei/.  Is  it  not  possible  that  the  reason  why  modern 
associations  with  these  deities  belong  so  exclusively  to  their  malii;;nant  aspect 
may  be  the  failure  of  the  dull  Roman  intelligence  to  grasp  this  antithesis? 
The  mention  both  of  Tacitus  and  Lucretius  shows  that;  they  were  to  the 
Roman  merely  "  the  Furies  ;  "  and  when  Pausanius  visited  Athens  about  a.d. 
170,  he  seems  to  have  been  surprised  to  have  found  nothing  horrible  in  the 
representation  of  them. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES,      91 

the  healing  care  of  night.  His  oracle  has  promised 
peace  to  the  woe-worn  CEdipus  "  when  he  shall  come  to 
the  seat  of  awful  Divinities  ;  "  and  when,  in  their  sacred 
grove  of  Colonos,  he  learns  that  he  is  in  their  territory, 
a  solemn  pathos  like  that  of  music  breathes  through 
the  prayer  in  which  he  entreats  them  to  "  be  not  harsh 
to  Phoebus  and  to  me."  ^  It  is  as  if  the  younger 
poet  had  set  himself  to  complete  the  harmony  of  oppo- 
sites  which  the  elder  had  begun  ;  to  show  us  these 
dark  beings,  who  had  been  welcomed,  in  the  verse  of 
^Iischylus,  by  the  Goddess  of  Wisdom,  but  detested 
and  defied  by  the  God  of  Day,  as  reconciled  even  to  the 
God  who  had  confronted  them  as  Ormazd  confronts 
Ahriman.  The  God  of  radiance,  of  beauty,  of  healing, 
recognizes  the  claim  of  the  Divinities  who  typify 
remorse  and  punishment ;  he  points  the  weary  pilgrim 
to  their  shrine  as  to  a  shelter  from  the  stormy  blast. 
We  seem  to  grasp  some  clue  which  leads  us  to  a  unity 
below  the  antithesis  of  Light  and  Darkness,  and  all  that 
they  symbolize ;  to  hear  som.e  whisper  of  a  music  in 
which  the  harshest  discords  are  to  find  their  place  as 
elements  of  a  harmony  as  much  richer  and  more  varied 
than  all  that  could  be  without  them  as  harmony  itself  is 
richer  than  unison. 

Here  we  have  in  its  fullest  blossom  the  spirit  that 
always  insists  on  hearing  the  other  side.  Greek  worship 
makes  a  place  for  that  which  is  most  abhorrent  to  Greek 
feeling.  Greece  lives  in  the  world  of  Light;  here  is 
its  home  ;  the  Sun-god  is  the  "  cliief  of  all  the  gods  ;  "  " 
yet  the  daughters  of  night  are  honoured  not  only  with 
reverent  fear,  but  with  a  sort  of  mystic  rapture.  There 
is  a  marvellous  depth  of  meaning  in  tlie  invocation  of 
the  blind  Qidipus  to  the  "  sweti  daughters  of  the  ancient 

'  Sophocles,  Oul.  Col.,  86-91. 
'■«  CEd.  Tyr.,  660. 


92  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

darkness."  ^  His  life  has,  since  the  discovery  of  his 
unconscious  crime,  been  spent  in  their  realm,  and  the 
dread  summons,  which  he  alone  of  any  Greek  hero  is  to 
hear  with  joy,  cannot  remove  him  from  the  light,  which 
in  that  moment  of  horror  he  resolved  to  see  no  more. 
To  the  powers  of  darkness  he  then  devoted  himself,  and 
now  that,  after  many  wanderings,  he  finds  himself  in 
their  sacred  grove,  and  learns  the  name  of  propitious 
omen  by  which  the  Athenians  worship  them,  he  knows 
his  toils  are  past,  he  feels  the  stillness  of  a  vast  and 
sudden  calm  and  a  mysterious  hope.  The  Avengers 
have  become  the  Gentle  Ones,  their  sacred  grove  is  the 
refuge  of  the  broken  heart,  the  domain  on  which  the 
indigent  wanderer  is  to  deal  with  a  Prince  on  equal 
terms.  And  yet  this  complete  change  of  view  is  the 
result  of  no  sudden  and  wonderful  revelation,  of  no 
rush  upwards  into  a  higher  region.  It  is  due  less  to 
the  teaching  of  the  moralist  than  to  the  instinct  of  the 
artist.  It  does  not  (as  we  see  from  the  harsh  vindictive- 
ness  of  Qiidipus  to  his  son)  imply  any  of  that  sense 
of  the  blessedness  of  forgiveness  which  we  cannot  help 
reading  into  every  line.  It  is  simply  an  expression  of 
that  swift  elastic  expansion  of  sympathy  which  moves 
naturally  to  an  opposite  pole — of  that  spirit  of  measure 
and  balance,  which  refuses  confinement  to  a  single 
point  of  view,  and  desires  to  look  at  its  object  from 
every  side.  It  has  an  element  of  profound  morality. 
It  is  pregnant  with  deep  lessons  on  the  meaning  of  Con- 
science ;  it  vindicates  with  noble  earnestness  the  homage 
owed  by  the  city  to  the  spirit  of  righteous  fear;  it  sees 
with  keen  insight  into  the  play  of  moral  forces,  and 
accepts  as  a  great  fact   the  sense  of  guilt  and  the  need 

1  it'  wy\vK€iai  tra^Ses  dpxa-!-ov'ZK6TOv(<^d.  Col.,  io6).  Professor  Jebb  thinks 
that  no  other  poet  of  the  classical  ages  "ventures  on  this  use  of  yXvKvs  in 
addressing  Deities." 


GREECE,  AXD  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     93 

of  expiation.  But  it  sees  these  as  facts  just  like  any 
other  facts,  not  as  affording  a  clue  to  the  central  prin- 
ciples of  our  being.  The  impartial  Greek  spirit  looks 
at  crime  from  various  points  of  view  ;  it  finds  a  good 
deal  to  say  for  deeds  which  bear  a  criminal  aspect  as 
well  as  against  them.  It  discovers  the  truth  not  in  any 
single  view,  but  in  the  harmony  of  all. 

No  legend  can  be  richer  in  august  associations  than 
that  which  Sophocles  has  here  treated.  Much  that  has 
called  itself  history  has  evidently  been  moulded  upon 
the  story  of  Oedipus  ;  it  is  the  refraction  of  his  destiny 
through  the  legendary  lore  of  Persia  and  of  Rome 
which  has  created  the  more  picturesque  and  vivid  in- 
cidents in  the  biographies  of  C3a-us  and  of  Romulus. 
The  moral  element  in  the  legend  is  indeed  dropped  in 
its  historic  adaptation ;  but  it  is  surely  to  this  moral 
element  that  the  story  owes  all  its  power,  and  we  may 
take  the  historic  echoes  of  the  theme  of  Sophocles 
as  a  tribute  even  to  that  portion  which  they  fail  to 
repeat.  To  him  it  would  appear  as  if  the  tale  of  the 
House  of  Labdacus  had  gathered  up  the  problem  of 
guilt  and  of  disaster; — of  man  as  a  unit,  and  man  as 
the  member  of  a  group  in  which  his  individual  will 
was  submerged,  and  his  responsibility  lost  in  some 
more  mysterious  embodiment  of  purpose  and  volition. 
We  see  the  development  of  this  idea  in  the  comparison 
already  suggested.  Orestes  is  in  truth  the  slayer  of  a 
parent ;  the  deed  may  be  excused,  but  not  denied.  Fate 
works  through  his  will,  using  it  as  an  instrument ;  he  is 
fully  conscious  of  what  he  is  doing  in  slaying  Clytem- 
nestra,  and  works  out  the  curse  on  his  house  by  his  own 
deliberate  and  impassioned  purpose.  Hence  individual 
choice  runs  in  the  same  current  with  the  will  of  Fate, 
and  cannot  be  distinguished  from  it.  But  in  the  case 
of  G£dipus,  guilt,  if  it  docs  exist,  exists  outside  the  will. 


94  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  Labdacids  may  collectively  be  stained  with  crime,  but 
(Edipus  individually  is  innocent.  Who  could  be  more 
free  from  bloodguiltiness  than  one  who,  as  an  infant, 
was  cast  out  by  his  parents  to  perish,  who  had  killed 
his  father  only  when,  as  a  stranger,  he  was  attacked  by 
him  with  a  superior  force,  and  married  his  mother  only 
when  she  appeared  to  him  as  the  unknown  queen  of  a 
city  he  had  just  delivered  from  a  deadly  pest  ?  And 
yet  in  some  form  we  are  made  to  feel  that  guilt  is  there. 
It  is  not  merely  that  the  penalty  of  guilt  falls  on 
(Edipus  ;  we  feel  him  in  his  utmost  prosperity  under  a 
curse.  If  the  crime  be  not  his,  it  is  that  of  some  ances- 
tor with  whom  we  must  think  of  him  as  identified  in  a 
closeness  of  union  that  makes  his  suffering  for  sin  in 
some  sense  just.  CEdipus  accepts  it  as  such  ;  he  bows 
before  the  decree  which  hurls  him  from  his  throne, 
and  executes  the  vengeance  of  Heaven  on  himself  by 
depriving  himself  for  ever  of  its  blessed  light.  There 
is  no  remonstrance,  no  indignation  against  the  Gods,  in 
the  first  discovery  of  their  dreadful  appointment  for  him  ; 
the  doom  which  hurls  him  from  his  throne  to  wander  a 
fugitive,  deprived  by  his  own  hands  of  sight,  and  depen- 
dent on  the  charity  of  the  indifferent,  "  asking  little  and 
receiving  less  " — this  doom  is  surely  in  some  form  the 
indignation  of  the  Gods  against  guilt.  It  stands  in 
some  relation,  however  obscure,  to  the  idea  of  justice 
— it  is  in  some  form  an  exhibition  of  the  law  that 
suffering  should  follow  sin. 

This  is  the  lesson  of  CEdipus  the  king.  It  illustrates 
with  the  brilliant  light  and  shade  of  genius  the  ideal 
— which  we  may,  speaking  broadl}',  call  that  of  the 
old  world — of  "  man  the  fragment."  It  sets  forth  in 
colossal  simplicity  the  predominance  of  Fate,  the  futility 
of  individual  resolution,  showing  us  man  as  a  leaf  on 
the  surface  of  a  river ;  as  a  thread  of  gossamer  wafted 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     95 

onwards  by  the  breeze ;  as  an  arrow  directed  to  the 
target  b}^  the  hand  of  a  practised  archer.  The  very 
efforts  which  are  made  by  this  feeble  and  incomplete 
being  to  escape  his  destiny  become  links  in  the  chain 
by  which  it  binds  him.  The  idea  is  far  more  definitely 
developed  than  in  the  trilogy  of  ^Esch^dus.  There 
we  see  how  Apollo  may  enjoin  what  the  Erinnys  may 
avenge ;  how  the  same  deed  can  be,  according  to  the 
diiferent  points  of  view,  an  act  of  pious  homage  to  one 
parent  or  of  crime  towards  the  other ;  but  we  see  this 
only  as  we  must  always  recognize  it  in  that  legacy  of 
impulse  which  is  bequeathed  by  father  to  son  in  every 
age,  and  which  our  own  generation  has  made  a  subject 
of  special  investigation  and  has  discovered  to  be  a  mine 
of  scientific  result.  It  is  indeed  not  very  easy  to  deter- 
mine how  far  the  audience  is  meant  to  be  in  sympathy 
with  the  plea  of  Orestes  against  the  deities  who  would 
avenge  his  mother's  murder,  but  we  cannot  be  intended 
to  look  either  upon  their  declamations  or  his  apology  as 
wholly  void,  and  it  is  possible  for  us  to  concede  a  certain 
validity  to  both.  The  predestination  here  is  a  predestina- 
tion of  choice;  the  ills  are  done,  not  merely  suffered.  But 
when  we  turn  to  the  tale  of  CEdipus,  we  see  divinel}'- 
ordained  Fate  and  human  Will  in  a  much  more  distinct 
antagonism.  Wc  cannot  feel  that  he  contributed  of  his 
own  choice  any  link  to  that  chain  in  which  his  family  is 
bound.  The  Gods  are  responsible  for  his  murder  of  his 
father  in  quite  a  different  sense  from  that  in  which  thej' 
are  responsible  for  the  murder  of  Clytemnestra.  It  is 
as  if  the  younger  poet  had  felt  dissatisfied  with  the 
assertion  of  their  predestination  in  the  work  of  his  pre- 
decessor, and  had  brought  it  out  far  more  distinctly- 
through  the  protest  of  an  individual.  GIdipus  the  king 
represents,  wc  have  said,  man  the  Fragment ; — the  death 
of  (Edipus  (let  it   be  permitted   to  give  as  a  substitute 


96  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

for  the  ordinary  title  an  indication  of  the  true  impres- 
sion of  the  play)  brings  us  in  face  of  man  the  Individual. 
As  (Edipus  looks  at  his  history  through  the  vista  of 
years,  he  sees  his  acts  from  what  we  may  call  a  modern 
point  of  view.  These  so-called  crimes  were,  after  all, 
only  misfortunes.  They  were  "  suffered  rather  than 
done ;  "  ^  the  murder  which  he  is  expiating  has  yet  left 
him  "pure  before  the  law"^ — a  remarkable  expression, 
identifying  guilt  and  will  to  an  extent  that  perhaps  we 
are  not  meant  by  the  poet  always  to  remember.  How 
can  it  be  any  fault  of  his  that  the  Gods  before  his  birth 
decreed  that  he  should  slay  his  father  ?  Creon  is  more 
guilty  in  speaking  of  his  deeds  than  he  in  doing  them.^ 
Even  the  single  admission  that  the  burden  of  hereditary 
misfortune  has  any  connection  with  what  may  properly 
be  called  guilt  is  faint  and  hesitating.'^ 

"  These  ills  were  Heaven's  decree, 
Perchance  indignant  with  our  race  of  yore." 

The  whole  tone  is  that  of  absolute  and  entire  self-justi- 
fication. Modern  feeling  takes  part  with  it ;  from  our 
point  of  view  (Edipus  at  Colonos  is  wholly  right,  the 
judgment  of  his  enemies  is  mere  error.  But  this,  if  it 
be  taken  alone,  is  not  the  point  of  view  intended  for  the 
spectators  of  the  tragedy  by  its  author,  nor  that  of  its 
great  critic,^  when  he  pointed  out  Qldipus  as  the  typical 
figure  for  a  tragic  hero,  because  he  was  neither  wholly 
guilty  nor  wholly  innocent.      We  must,  if  we  would  be 

1  CEd.  Col.,  266,  7. 

2  v6ix(^  5e  Ka9ap6s  (CEd.  Col. ,  548). 

3  CEd.  Col.,  986,  7. 

*  TO-x  0.V  Tc  ix7)VL0v<SLV  eiS  7^:^05  TrdXat  [Ibid.,  965.) 

5  Arist.,  "  Poetica,"  cxiii.  5  : — ^'Eort  5^  roiovTO%  6  /J-rjTe  apery  dia^ipuv  Kal 
diKaioavvr],  p.7]Te  8ia  KaKlav  koI  ^ox9y]pla.v  p.eTaj3a\\u}v  eis  ri)v  5v(TTvx''0-v, 
dWa  OL  'ap-apTiav  tivol,  tQv  ev  /xeydXr)  56|?7  tvTijv  .  .  .  olov  Oiolirovs.  From 
the  numerous  references  to  CEdipus  in  this  treatise,  it  was  evidently  almost  a 
type  of  the  ideal  tragedy. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     97 

in  sympathy  with  the  spirit  of  ancient  life,  accept  the 
behef  that  ancestral  is  in  some  sense  real  guilt.  We 
must  teach  ourselves  to  regard  the  dogma  of  original  sin 
as  a  great  historic  influence,  whatever  we  may  think  of 
it  on  theologic  ground.  The  sense  in  which  the  indi- 
vidual is  a  fragment  and  the  sense  in  which  he  is  a 
unity  must  both  be  taken  into  account  if  we  would  reach 
the  point  of  view  from  which  Greek  feeling  confronted 
Fate  and  Guilt. 

But  the  antithesis  which  we  have  been  endeavouring 
to   set    forth    is    no    mere  contrast    of  the    past.      It   is 
what  we  see  and  feel  every  day.      We  blame  ourselves, 
it  ma}'  be,  in  the  eyes  of  others  even  with  an  excessive 
blame ;   we  lose  for  the  moment  every  thought  of  what 
was  inevitable  in  our  wrongdoings ;   we  see  nothing  but 
their  wrong.      Then  some  one  else  speaks  of  them — it 
may  be  in  the  gentlest  of  accents,  it  is  conceivable  that 
it  should  even  be  in  tones  of  excuse.      Even  then  it  will 
generally  be  found   that    something   in   the  measure  of 
individual  responsibility  taken  by  the  person  who  is  not 
responsible  rouses  protest   in   the  one  who  is.      When 
most  repentant  the  wrongdoer  will  almost  always  dis- 
cern  in  wrong  some  clement  of  the  inevitable  that  is  in- 
visible   to   every   eye    but   his  own.      To   be    conscious 
of  wrongdoing,   in   fact,   is  almost   the   same   as    to    be 
conscious  of  this  fragmentary  life  in  which  we  feel  that 
our  acts  are  "  suffered  rather  than   done."      It  is  quite 
true  that  this  is  not  tlic  whole  of  the  consciousness  of 
wrong — that  where  there  is   no  other  feeling  than  this 
the  consciousness  is  of  being  wronged  merely.      But  the 
greater  part  of  the  self-reproach  which  saddens  memory 
is  entangled  with  some  such  feeling  as  this.      So  far  as 
we  condemn  ourselves,  of  course  we  must  be  conscious 
of  our  own  individuality  ;  the  very  idea  of  moral  respon- 
sibihty  is  based  on  that  sense  of  initial  action  wliich  we 

u 


98  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

speak  of  as  Free  Will,  and  which  we  can  describe  only 
by  saying  that  our  actions  began  with  ourselves,  and 
cannot  be  regarded  as  the  transformation  of  any  pre- 
vious form  of  energy.  But  though  most  men  are  con- 
scious of  this  feeling,  they  hardly  ever  know  it  apart 
from  its  opposite.  They  too  feel  like  CEdipus  that  action 
is  passion.  One  who  knew  the  whole  of  a  man's  past 
as  he  knows  it  himself  would  probably  be  unable  to 
reproach  him  with  his  worst  crimes.  If  the  judge  could 
have  before  him  the  whole  legacy  of  the  past  to  the 
present,  as  he  has  it  in  his  own  experience,  he  would 
seem  always  to  hear  the  remonstrance  to  Creon,^  "  Dost 
thou  with  right  condemn  the  unwilling  deed  ?  "  And 
what  each  one  of  us  feels  for  himself  the  poet  shows  us 
for  all  mankind. 

Hence  the  Greek  idea  of  Fate  is  no  definite  limitation 
of  human  Will,  but  a  mysterious  warp  to  which  Will  is 
illogically  conceived  as  the  woof.  Ancestral  guilt  is  in 
some  sense  real  guilt,  and  has  therefore  for  those  under 
its  shadow  become  fate ;  but  there  must  have  been  a 
time  when  it  was  guilt  in  the  ordinary  sense  ;  divine 
displeasure  must  have  had  a  beginning.  The  legends 
which  have  given  Fate  its  moral  significance  record  some 
whisper  at  least  of  the  eternal  protest  against  the  belief 
in  Fate.  The  very  desire  to  know  the  future  is  rooted 
in  the  belief  that  it  lies  with  man  to  change  the  future. 
If  CEdipus  were  inexorably  fated  to  slay  his  father  and 
marry  his  mother,  why  poison  the  fragment  of  life  un- 
stained by  crime  with  any  prevision  of  the  inevitable  ? 
His  attempt  to  escape  the  announced  parricide  implies  a 
disbelief  in  the  oracle  which  announces  it  as  an  absolute 
prediction.  But,  in  fact,  the  legend  of  CEdipus  is  the 
strongest  evidence  for  the  absolute  character  of  Oracles. 
The    event    predicted    in   this  case  has   no  root  in   any 

1  CEd.  CoL,  977. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.    59 

permanent  condition  of  things  such  as  might  be  made 
the  subject  of  warning,  but  must  be  called,  if  we  are 
to  describe  it  in  the  language  appropriate  to  purpose, 
a  mere  accident.  No  foresight,  short  of  an  absolute 
power  to  read  the  future,  will  explain  the  prevision  of  a 
chance  encounter  between  a  king  and  a  stranger,  and  its 
result  in  the  death  of  the  king  and  all  his  train.  Only 
the  absolute  prediction  implies  that  the  future  lies  open 
to  the  seer  just  as  the  past  lies  open  to  the  ken  of 
an  ordinary  mortal,  the  trivial  accident  no  less  than  the 
tragic  achievement.  Yet  in  that  case  the  whole  object 
of  consulting  the  Oracle  would  be  gone.  We  might 
fancy  it  some  ironical  sense  of  this  futility  in  the  CEdipus 
legend  which  made  the  Oracle  cause  its  own  fulfilment, 
the  means  taken  to  avert  the  dreaded  event  proving 
the  means  of  bringing  it  to  pass ;  but  that  cannot  have 
been  the  intention  of  the  poet ;  the  contemptuous  ex- 
pression applied  to  the  Oracle  by  both  the  unhappy 
pair  came  too  near  that  dread  discovery  of  its  truth 
which  drives  Jocasta  to  the  halter  and  her  son-spouse 
to  madness.  In  truth,  it  is  impossible  to  say  that  the 
Oracle  was  consistently  either  believed  or  disbelieved. 
Sometimes  it  seems  to  have  been  regarded  as  that 
which  must  happen,  and  sometimes  as  that  which  might 
be  prevented  from  happening.  Greek  love  of  liberty 
speaks  in  the  Greek  belief  in  Fate,  blurring  its  limits 
and  hiding  its  source,  but  never  wholly  conquering  its 
influence.  The  two  ideas  are  held  together,  and  we 
must  forget  logic  when  wc  try  to  judge  of  their  mutual 
relations. 

This  oscillation  between  the  ideas  of  Will  and  Law  is 
a  striking  indication  of  the  bent  of  national  sympathy. 
The  Greek  mind  seems  to  demand  a  certain  vagueness 
in  all  that  claims  authority,  and  to  ascribe  ultimate 
power  with  some   hesitation  ;   where   it   is  granted  with 


ICO  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

one  hand  it  seems  revoked  with  the  other,  as  though  the 
distrust  of  power,  which  made  the  name  of  tyrant  hateful, 
swayed  belief  in  Divine,  as  well  as  concession  to  human 
rule.  Whether  we  say  that  Fate  is  the  will  of  Zeus, 
that  Fate  is  a  deity  superior  to  Zeus,  or  that  Fate  is 
some  influence  antithetic  to  all  personal  will,  in  any 
case  we  have  something  to  explain  away.  "  Not  thou, 
dear  child,  but  the  Gods,  are  responsible  for  this,"  ^  the 
gracious  Priam  consoles  the  guilty  Helen,  as  he  surveys 
the  hosts  her  flight  has  brought  to  Troy  for  the  de- 
struction of  his  city.  But  the  consistent  application  of 
this  identification  of  Fate  with  the  Divine  will  would 
necessitate  the  sacrifice  of  all  that  is  most  striking  in 
Greek  poetry.  Jove  feels  the  law  of  Fate  as  a  king 
feels  the  laws  of  nature,  and  in  man}^  respects  the  true 
analogy  seems  with  these  laws  ;  events  may  be  "  super- 
fatal,"  as  we  say  supernatural.^  Jove  cannot  decide 
on  the  fate  of  rival  heroes  without  reference  to  some 
standard  independent  of  his  will,^  and  whatever  the 
meaning  of  the  balance  in  which  he  weighs  these  con- 
trasted fates,  it  is  something  which  interferes  with  the 
idea  of  his  absolute  power.  Most  of  all,  perhaps,  does 
the  recent  origin  of  his  power  conflict  with  the  idea  of 
its  absoluteness.  Omnipotence  must  have  no  history. 
Ormazd  confronts  Ahriman  from  the  beginning.  But 
Jove  is  a  temporal  monarch,  his  origin  is  a  subject  of 
legend,  he  has  passed  through  infancy,  his  dominion  is 
characterized  by  the  harshness  incident  to  "new  rule"* 
Surely  a  reign  which  has  had  a  beginning  shall  have  an 
end.  The  dread  of  such  a  contingency  is  easily  raised 
within  his  own  mind  ;   he  is  terrified  at  learning  that  he 

1 1  II.  iii.  164  ;  cf.  her  address  to  Hector,  vi.  344. 

2  Ibid,,  ii.   155  : — '^vda.  Kev'   Apydoiaip  virep/xofta   voaros   irvx^V,  ""less 
Athene  had  taken  vigorous  measures. 
s  /did. ,  xxii.  209. 
*  ^sch.,  "  Prometheus  Vinctus,"  34,  35. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     loi 

is  doomed,  if  he  contract  certain  nuptials,  to  bear  a  son 
mightier  than  himself;  he  exhausts  all  his  arts  to  wring 
from  the  representative  of  Foresight  a  fuller  knowledge 
of  his  own  destiny.  The  destiny  of  Jove  !  The  very 
words  express  this  Greek  reluctance  to  contemplate 
steadily  any  form  of  absolute  power,  the  Greek  tendency 
to  bring  in  continually  some  counterbalancing  influence 
to  all  that  is  monarchic.  Behind  the  throne  of  a  God 
who  is  so  far  from  being  omnipotent  that  he  is  not 
omniscient,  hovers  a  dim  mysterious  power,  so  vague 
that  we  may  or  may  not  give  it  a  moral  colouring  as 
our  sympathies  incline,  which  we  cannot  bring  into  any 
definite  relation  with  the  will  of  any  other  being,  Divine 
or  human.  As  it  is  not  entirely  subordinate  to  the  will 
of  God,  so  it  is  not  entirely  supreme  above  the  will  of 
man,  but  it  is  a  real  agent,  and  cannot  be  confused  with 
either. 

This  curious  reluctance  to  conceive  distinctly  of  any 
source  of  ultimate  power  is  most  interesting  in  its  political 
aspect.  The  same  feeling  which  hems  in  ro3'alty  with 
multiform  restrictions  on  Olympus,  banishes  it  in  the 
city  ;  the  impatience  of  individual  authority  is  common 
to  the  visible  and  invisible  worlds.  The  dread  of 
any  overpowering  personal  predominance  is  the  more 
striking  because  it  is  in  a  certain  sense  opposed  to  the 
genius  of  a  vivid,  dramatic  people.  But  the  peculiarities 
which  most  strike  an  observer  as  national  characteristics 
arc  largely  made  up  of  precautions  against  national 
temptations;  the  strong  tendency  to  differentiation  which 
in  Greece  produced  so  many  types  of  genius  must  have 
been  a  perpetual  source  of  danger  from  the  presence  of 
strong  individualities,  and  Greek  feeling  in  every  direc- 
tion was  strongly  tinged  by  the  consciousness  of  the 
need  for  a  guard  against  this  danger.  How  much  the 
temptation  impressed  a  teacher  who  sought  to  imbue  the 


102  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

lively  Greek  temperament  with  the  doctrines  of  the 
Gospel  we  may  gather  from  the  frequent  use  by  St. 
Paul,  in  addressing  the  Corinthians,  of  the  term  we 
translate  "  to  be  puffed  up ; "  ^  an  expression  which, 
except  in  addressing  the  Greek  Christians,  is  not  used 
in  the  New  Testament.  And  we  may  set  the  explicit 
warnings  of  Paul  beside  the  implicit  warning  of  another 
Greek  thinker  who  showed  the  Greek  fear  of  being 
"  puffed  up "  as  Paul's  converts  showed  the  cause  for 
that  fear.  ^schylus,  the  poet  of  the  supernatural, 
breaks  through,  for  once,  the  cycle  of  prehistoric  legend 
on  which  he  finds  his  appropriate  ground,  and  speaks 
to  his  fellow-citizens  of  events  they  themselves  remem- 
bered, and  in  which  they  had  taken  part.  But  "  the 
Persians "  ^  is  no  exception  to  the  general  iEschylean 
strain  ;  awe  and  terror  are  excited  here  more  than  else- 
where, for  the  tale  is  of  the  dehverance  of  Greece,  and 
the  colossal  character  of  the  disaster  lifts  it  out  of  the 
mere  course  of  earthly  circumstance  and  invests  it  with 
the  awful  dignity  of  Divine  intervention.  In  telling  the 
tale  of  Persian  ruin  the  page  is  crowded  with  Persian 
names — mostly,  one  would  suppose,  the  invention  of  the 
poet — but  throughout  the  play  which  celebrates  the  Greek 
valour  that  had  just  worked  a  miracle  not  a  single  Greek 
is  mentioned.  Miltiades  and  Themistocles — names  which 
shine  through  the  haze  of  2000  years  with  undiminished 
brilliancy — might  be  supposed  with  perfect  dramatic  pro- 
priety to  be  heard  at  the  barbaric  court  where  lies  the 
scene  of  the  drama.  But  their  countryman  never  allows 
himself  to  mention  them ;  he  celebrates  the  triumph  of 
Athens,  he  will  bring  no  individual  into  rivalry  with  the 
city  of  Athene. 

The  poet  here  speaks  as  the  genius  of  Greece.      The 

1  (pvaibw,  I  Cor.  iv.  6,  i8,  19  ;  v.  2,  &c. 

2  i^3ch.,  "  PersES,"  249,  seq. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     103 

orators  of  a  later  age  ^  looked  back  with  longing  regret 
to  the  patriotic  modesty  of  the  earlier  heroes,  when  the 
battles  of  Salamis  or  Marathon  were  cited  as  victories 
0/  the  Athenian  people,  the  name  of  the  general  being 
left  for  silent  gratitude.  The  "jealousy  of  the  gods  "  is 
shared  by  the  city,  the  unseen  power  admits  no  rivalry 
from  any  seen  power.  It  seems  as  if  the  poet  felt  that 
for  a  mortal  to  be  clothed  in  the  dazzling  radiance 
which  shone  upon  the  day  of  Greek  deliverance  was 
more  than  mortal  could  bear.  History  justifies  such 
mistrust  ;  the  leaders  of  the  victorious  host  should  all 
have  fallen  like  the  victor  of  Thermopylae,  if  they  were 
to  keep  their  fame  untarnished.  Miltiades,  Themistocles, 
Pausanias — all  might  have  envied  Leonidas.  It  would 
not  be  easy  throughout  the  whole  range  of  modern 
history  to  find  such  traitors  as  the  two  last,  and  the 
inglorious  death  in  prison  of  the  victor  of  Marathon  -  is 
a  hardly  less  expressive  lesson  on  the  dangers  of  Greek 
glory.  If  the  banishment  of  Aristides  shows  us  the 
other  side  of  this  danger,  and  illustrates  the  grudging 
impatience  of  superiority  felt  by  the  vulgar,  yet  the  very 
institution  which  gave  effect  to  the  popular  jealousy 
tends  to  show  that  in  itself  the  feeling  was  but  the  base 
alloy  of  a  true  national  instinct,  guarding  a  race  dowered 
with  genius  from  the  temptations  incident  to  such  a 
nature,  and  counteracting  them  with  a  strong  attraction 
to  all  that  belonged  to  the  golden  mean,  such  as  to 
our  notions  would  seem  alien  from  poetic  genius  and 
philosophic  originality. 

The  Greek  hatred  of  monarchy  is  but  another  aspect 

1  Demosthenes  (if  the  speech  be  really  liis),  Trepl  ^wraffcot,  171,  20,  oi^Stis 
ham  tiv  ii-Koi  T7]f  if  ^aXaiMvi  vaviJ-axiav  Of/j.i(TTOK\iovs,  d\\  Ad-qvaluf,  ovSi 
TTiV  iv  'MapaOCifi.  /J.dxv  MtXTidoou  dXXd  riji  TriXewy. 

2  Grote  docs  not  believe  that  Miltiades  was  put  in  prison  :  see  his  arguments, 
iv.  496.  The  reader  must  choose  between  him  and  I'lutarch.  The  hero's 
death  was  in  any  case  disgraceful. 


I04  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  this  feeling.  It  is  only  another  side  of  the  Greek 
dread  of  all  arrogance  and  excess.  To  set  up  any  one 
human  being  at  so  vast  a  height  above  his  kind  seemed 
to  them  a  sort  of  impiety  to  the  gods,  as  well  as  an 
insult  to  his  fellow-men ;  above  all,  it  was  impiety  to 
that  true  Divinity  of  Greek  worship — the  State.  Rever- 
ence paid  to  a  visible  head  robbed  of  its  right  that  un- 
seen Being  whose  presence  made  the  many  a  corporate 
whole ;  it  broke  the  unseen  bond,  it  destroyed  Liberty. 
The  sense  of  a  common  relation  to  the  unseen,  except  in 
so  far  as  any  one  excellence  is  connected  with  all  excel- 
lence, has  nothing  to  do  with  what  we  mean  by  Liberty. 
But  few  distinctions  are  so  important  for  a  true  under- 
standing of  History  as  that  between  Liberty  in  the 
classic  and  in  the  modern  sense  of  the  word.  An 
Englishman,  when  he  desires  Liberty,  thinks  of  it  as 
the  opportunity  of  individual  development,  the  soil  on 
which  strongly  marked  character  flourishes  most  vigo- 
rously. It  is  doubtful  whether  a  Greek  would  have . 
understood  what  this  means,  and  still  more  whether  he 
would  have  thought  it  desirable.  Indeed,  to  some  extent, 
we  may  say  that  the  Greek  love  of  liberty  embodied  \ 
the  very  opposite  feeling  to  this.  There  never  could  j 
have  been  a  city  less  free  than  Sparta,  according  to  J 
our  ideas  ;  and  evidently  in  making  it  the  model  of  his  \ 
Republic  Plato  was  not  eyen  contemplating  as  a  possi- 
bility the  reproach  that  he  was  a  foe  to  Liberty.  He 
and  his  contemporaries  meant  by  Liberty  something 
which  was  compatible  with  any  amount  of  despotic  regu- 
lation of  individual  life.  The  ideal  Republic  of  liberty- 
loving  Greece  would  have  been  a  despotism  more  in- 
tolerable to  modern  feeling  than  the  most  despotic  king- 
dom of  modern  Europe. 

It  is  hardly  a  stretch  of  words  to  say  that  Liberty  was 
to  the  Greek  the  unseen   bond  which  made  a  collection 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     105 

of  men  into  a  city.  What  made  the  name  of  a  tyrant 
hateful  was  not  that  he  was  cruel  or  despotic,  but  that 
he  destroyed  this  invisible  bond ;  he,  a  mortal,  took  the 
place  of  an  immortal.  And  hence  the  love  of  liberty 
necessarily  involved  the  reverence  for  law,  as  no  doubt 
with  the  best  men  it  does  always,  but  as  with  ordinary 
men  it  does  not  now.  The  Spartans  who,  by  a  deeply 
religious  influence,  were  led  to  the  court  of  the  great  King 
to  offer  up  their  own  lives  as  a  voluntary  atonement 
for  the  murder  of  his  heralds  slain  by  their  city  in 
defiance  of  sacred  law,  refused  indignantly  to  prostrate 
themselves  before  the  mortal  at  whose  command  they 
were  ready  to  die.^  They  had  made  a  long  and  toilsome 
journey  from  their  own  beloved  city  to  confront  the  King 
on  his  throne  and  suffer  his  will,  but  they  would  not 
bow  down  before  him,  "  for  it  was  not  their  way  to  wor- 
ship men  ;  "  and  the  great  King,  impressed  by  the  rare 
spectacle  of  fearless  submission,  dismissed  them  un- 
harmed. Their  journey  from  Sparta  to  Susa,  and  their  | 
return,  express  the  Greek  submission  to  law  and  resist-J 
ance  to  personal  claim.  That  resistance  implies  no  ' 
recoil  from  tyranny  as  we  understand  the  words  ;  there 
never  was  a  more  detested  tyranny  than  that  which 
Sperthias  and  Bulls  would  have  died  to  perpetuate. 
While  equally  ready  to  die  at  the  Divine  command,  they 
would  not  renounce  an  opportunity  of  protest  against  the 
claim  of  a  mortal  to  intercept  even  the  mere  symbol  of 
that  homage  which  was  the  claim  of  the  State.  The  bond 
which  made  a  multitude  into  a  city,  the  many  into  one, 
must  be  something  invisible.  The  seen  monarch  was 
an  embodiment  not  only  of  impious  arrogance,  but 
we  might  say  (if  all  our  associations  with  the  words 
were  not  too  shallow)  of  vulgarity  and  bad  taste.  The 
supreme    despot    was     barbaric,    lawless,    and     in     the 

1  Herodotus,  vii.  134,  sf^. 


io6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

stress  of  conflict  weak.  The  supreme  Law  was  an 
inspiring  and  unconquerable  influence,  at  whose  com- 
mand or  in  whose  defence  men  were  ready  to  die,  and 
whose  claim  they  would  rather  die  than  transfer  to  a 
mortal. 

Any  association  of  monarchy  which  seems  incompatible 
with  this  supremacy  of  the  unseen  is  wholly  superficial. 
The  Homeric  kings  are  not  kings  in  any  other  sense 
than  that  they  are  the  leaders  of  the  armies,  and  when 
Ulysses  says  that  the  rule  of  one  is  necessary,  he  means 
only  that  the  rank  and  file  must  wait  for  the  word 
of  command.^  Monarchy  was  un-Greek,  Asiatic,  an 
institution  associated  with  barbarism,  and  discredited 
by  Asiatic  defeat  in  the  one  respect  in  which  lay  its 
supposed  strength.  The  great  King  leading  the  might 
of  Asia  was  ruined  by  the  onset  of  the  populations  of 
a  few  small  towns  ;  and  thus  in  those  few  generations 
which  contain  all  that  is  most  brilliant  of  Greek  poetry 
and  art,  monarchy  was  associated  not  merely  with  de- 
grading bondage,  but  also  with  degrading  failure.  Never 
was  the  tyrant  opposed  to  the  city  without  suffering 
defeat  ;  the  associations  of  victory  were  all  on  the  side 
of  the  State  that  owned  an  invisible  bond.  The  con- 
quest over  the  seen  power  is  closely  associated  with 
a  trust  in  the  unseen ;  some  divine  influence  appears 
when  human  power  fails  to  give  its  weight  and  sanc- 
tion to  the  resolute  spirit  of  freedom.  The  victory  of 
Greece  over  Persia  is  the  victory  of  spirit  over  matter, 
of  will  over  might.  The  Gods  protect  the  man  who 
spurns  mere  human  dominion.  An  Unseen  Power 
fights   on   the   side  of  those  who   dare   to  defy  all  law- 

1  II.  ii.  204.  It  does  not  seem,  when  we  attend  to  the  context,  a  good  oppor- 
tunity for  the  remark  (h^  Kolpavot  iaru),  which  is  perhaps  made  more  famiHar 
by  the  quotation  of  Aristotle  (Met.,  Bk.  x.),  and  its  actual  reference  somewhat 
disguised  thereby. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     107 

less  power,  and  the  supreme  influences  of  the  world 
above  are  in  harmony  with  those  who  reject  all  bondage 
here. 

It  is  necessary  to  dwell  on  this  thought,  because  the 
miracle  by  which  a  few  small  towns  scattered  the  might 
of  Asia  has  not  been  always  worked  wherever  brave  men 
have  been  willing  to  die  for  their  country.  Nor,  on  the 
other  hand,  has  the  rule  of  the  monarch,  throughout 
modern  historj',  been  invariably  associated  with  tyranny  ; 
the  despotism  from  which  modern  nations  have  suffered 
most  is  not  that  of  an  individual,  but  an  order.  The 
conditions  which  prevailed  in  the  ancient  world  during 
the  short  period  of  the  life  of  Greece,  were  such  that  both 
her  dread  of  individual  pre-eminence  and  her  confidence 
in  unseen  power  were  justified  and  enforced  by  all  that 
is  most  striking  in  her  history.  Nowhere,  not  even  in 
Judaea,  do  we  find  a  nation  more  distinctly  marked  by 
Heaven  for  the  part  it  has  to  play  in  the  world's  history. 
What  a  scholar  meant  by  history  until  quite  lately  was  little 
more  than  Greek  history ;  and  surely  he  who  knows  the 
history  of  Greece  may  with  very  little  exaggeration  be 
said  to  know  what  History  means.  He  sees,  disentangled 
from  the  confusing  cross  lights  of  modern  life,  and  exhibited 
on  a  scale  which  the  eye  can  take  in,  what  the  meaning 
is  of  a  ^lational  vocation.  It  is  not  more  true  of  Greece 
than  of  England  that  a  national  vocation  exists,  but  the 
writer  who  should  endeavour  to  bring  out  in  the  his- 
tory of  England  any  moral  purpose,  as  he  cannot 
help  bringing  it  out  in  the  history  of  Greece,  would  be 
continually  tempted  to  falsify  facts  ;  he  would  lose  that 
intellectual  disinterestedness  which  is  the  first  duty  of 
a  historian,  and  would  take  up  the  irritating  position  of 
the  teacher  who  infuses  his  moral  into  his  facts  instead 
of  drawing  it  from  them.  But  it  is  hardly  possible  to 
narrate  the  history  of  Greece  without   assuming   that   it 


io8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

has  a  lesson  for  the  world.  In  merely  setting  forth  the 
facts  of  Greek  history  we  must  speak  of  the  triumph  of 
the  resolute  few,  the  downfall  of  the  barbaric  armament, 
the  Nemesis  of  arrogance,  the  vindication  of  the  spirit  of 
liberty.  No  one  can  w^ite  the  history  of  Greece  without 
expanding  the  text,  "  He  hath  put  down  the  mighty  from 
their  seat,  and  hath  exalted  the  humble  and  meek." 
What  the  historian  longs  to  discover  in  all  history  is 
written  in  the  tale  of  Salamis  and  Thermopylae,  so  that 
he  who  runs  may  read. 

Yet  the  sentiment  which  we  best  express  in  the  text 
just  quoted  was,  after  all,  so  faintly  moral  that  it 
melts  into  a  belief  known  as  much  through  the  protest 
of  Plato  ^  as  the  continued  assertion  of  Herodotus — the 
belief  in  the  envy  of  the  Gods.  The  words  suggest 
fallacious  analogies.  They  have  not  really  any  relation 
to  the  assertion,  "  I,  the  Lord  thy  God,  am  a  jealous 
God."  The  Greek  feeling  is  not  a  claim  on  the  devotion 
of  man,  but  a  grudge  against  the  advancement  of  man  ; 
it   is   the  jealousy  not  of  a   spouse,  but  of  a  rival.      It  % 

seems  to  reproduce  on  the  field  of  the  Divine  the  lowest 
and  most  vulgar  feelings  of  earth,  and  to  associate  the 
idea  of  Divinity  with  the  temptations  of  a  paltry  aristo- 
cracy, repressing  a  pushing  how-geoisie.  The  displea- 
sure of  the  Gods  is  attracted  not  only  by  arrogance  or 
intemperance,  but  by  a  mere  excess  of  prosperity  ;  they 
wish  to  keep  unmingled  good  fortune  to  themselves,  as 
a  privilege  of  their  order,  and  are  resolute  to  shut  out 
mankind  into  the  realm  of  vicissitude,  far  from  all  partici- 

1  Timceus,  29,  ar^o-QQ  hi  oi)Se!s  7re/)i  oiiZevhi  ovoiiroTe  iyyiyverai  <f)96voi.  The 
emphatic  form  of  this  protest  reminds  us  that  the  belief  it  opposes  was  popular 
as  well  as  orthodox.  I  suppose  Plato  was  thinking  of  the  speech  of  Achilles  to 
Priam,  II.  xxiv.  525,  6,  but  he  may  also  have  intended  to  confute  many  passages 
in  Herodotus.  Timoeus,  in  whose  mouth  the  remark  is  placed,  was  a  Pytha- 
gorean philosopher,  who  has,  says  the  Platonic  Socrates  "  attained  the  summits 
of  philosophy." 


>!: 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     109 

pation  in  their  own  invulnerable  bliss.  The  prosperous 
man  who  fails  to  propitiate  them  by  sacrifice  of  a  cherished 
possession  is  doomed  by  them  to  a  fearful  death  ;^  it  does 
not  appear  that  anything  but  the  prosperity  of  Polycrates 
was  hateful  to  them  ;  he  dies  a  victim  to  their  grudge, 
not  to  their  justice.  The  sentiments  thus  attributed  to 
the  Gods  were  indeed,  as  one  of  their  own  poets  has 
said,"  shameful  among  ordinary  men.  But  see  how  this 
mobile  national  spirit  crosses  on  light  wing  the  water- 
shed of  good  and  ill,  and  melts  the  low  into  the  high. 
The  envy  of  the  Gods,  from  a  slightly  shifted  point  of 
view,  becomes  their  compassion.  The  feeling  to  which 
we  may  give  either  of  these  names,  on  one  side  so  ignoble, 
has  its  justification  and  expression  in  all  that  is  grandest 
in  Greek  history,  and  makes  that  history  come  nearer 
than  any  other  to  being  an  exhibition  of  the  justice  of 
that  power  which  rules  the  world. 

The  profound  and  hidden  junction  between  piety 
and  pity — between  a  reverent  awe  for  what  is  high, 
a  generous  compassion  for  what  is  lowl}' — seems  con- 
tinually indicated  by  the  expressions  in  which  Hero- 
dotus clothes  this  belief.  The  shipwreck  of  Asia  on 
the  rock  of  Greek  freedom  does  not  appear  to  a  modern 
reader  an  illustration  of  that  theme ;  he  is  already  too 
familiar  with  the  issue.  But  if  we  had  been  present  at 
the  conflict  and  watched  the  result,  we  should  have  felt, 
as  Herodotus  did,  that  God  had  rebuked  the  insolence 
of  the  proud,  and  taken  part  with  the  weak.  The  wise 
Persian  who  endeavours  to  turn  Xerxes  from  the  expedi- 
tion that  is  to  end  in  his  ruin  uses  almost  the  same  words 
as  we  have  cited  from  a  Psalm, ^  and  though,  no  doubt, 
he  is  chiefly  a  creation  of  Greek  imagination,  he  is  none 

1  Herodotus,  iii.  41-43,  125. 

2  Sec  the  l-'ragmcnts  of  Xenophanes,  ed.  by  Karsten;  Fr.  vii. 

'  Herodotus,  vii.  10,  5  .—tplXiei  ydp  6  Ocb^  rh  mtpixovTO.  irdi/ra  KoXoveiv. 


no  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  less  a  figure  of  historic  significance  on  the  canvas  of 
Herodotus.  He  tells  us  how  that  great  event  looked 
to  those  who  were  to  pass  on  its  influence  to  the  modern 
world,  and  such  a  representation  must  be  allowed  to 
possess  the  highest  kind  of  historic  truth,  even  if  from 
the  literal  point  of  view  it  is  mere  fiction.  And  some 
of  the  forms  in  which  Herodotus  expresses  this  feeling 
must  be  allowed  to  have  more  than  this  kind  of  authen- 
ticity. When  he  represents  Greek  envoys  from  the 
army  at  Thermopylae  striving  to  encourage  allies  with 
the  reminder  that  ^  "  the  invader  is  not  a  God,  but  a  man, 
and  that  there  never  had  been  and  never  would  be  a  man 
who  was  not  liable  to  misfortunes  greater  in  proportion 
to  his  own  greatness ;  "  when  he  paints  a  victorious  general 
dissuading  the  army  from  pursuit  of  the  defeated  host 
with  the  reminder  that  ^  "  we  have  not  achieved  this 
victory  by  our  own  might,  it  is  the  work  of  Gods  and 
heroes  who  were  jealous  that  one  man  should  be  king  at 
once  over  Greece  and  Asia" — the  reader  may  doubt 
whether  these  are  the  very  expressions  which  were  actu- 
ally used  as  a  matter  of  fact,  but  can  hardly  suppose 
that  the  historian,  in  professing  to  cite  words  so  memor- 
able, so  recent,  and  so  public,  would  make  use  of  any 
very  unlike  those  which  were  actually  uttered.  The 
sense  of  the  constant  nearness  of  disappointment  to  hope, 
of  a  hidden  irony  in  the  adjustment  of  anticipation  and 
effort  to  result,  is  not  ordinarily  or  necessarily  a  moral 
feeling ;  sometimes  it  is  an  immoral  feeling.  But,  as  we 
have  said  of  the  Eumenides,  it  belongs  to  that  frontier 
region  of  human  thought  where  a  step  sets  us  on  a 
different  kingdom.  It  seems  almost  as  if  the  same  words, 
with  a  different  emphasis,  might  belong  to  either  realm 
— as  if  we  might  cross  over  with  hardly  any  change 
of  a  word  from   the   envy  of  the   Gods  to    the  love  of 

1  Herodotus,  vii.  203.  "  Ibid,,  viii.  109. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     iii 

the  Father  that  chasteneth  His  children  for  their  profit. 
Doubtless  this  is  an  illusion ;  when  we  have  reached 
this  belief  we  have  quitted  the  hand  of  our  guide. 
But  the  illusion  is  almost  inevitable,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  understand  the  true  Greek  feeling  without  entertain- 
ing it  for  a  moment. 

The  feeling  gives  an  epic  unity  to  the  great  prose 
Iliad.  A  spectator,  watching  the  mighty  host  passing 
the  Hellespont,^  wonders  why  Jove,  in  the  likeness 
of  a  Persian,  has  led  the  whole  race  of  men  for  the 
destruction  of  Greece  ;  and  the  subsequent  fall  is  pre- 
faced and  preluded  by  the  presumption  which  these 
words  reflected.  It  casts  back  shadows  on  the  impe- 
tuous spirit  of  Xerxes;  the  tears  which  he  explains  by 
the  transitoriness  of  all  things  earthly  suggest  a  sense  of 
inadequacy  in  any  prize  to  justify  such  effort  in  beings 
so  ephemeral.  Some  dim  foreboding  seems  present  of 
the  illusory  nature  of  the  hopes  on  which  such  efforts 
are  founded,  a  conviction,  as  in  the  words  which  follow, 
that,  short  as  life  is,  it  is  too  long  for  success,  that 
the  shadow  of  disappointment  and  failure  darkens  what 
is  spared  from  the  darkness  of  the  grave.  And  this 
conviction  is  presented  always  with  a  sense  of  compas- 
sion ;  we  feel  the  ills  of  humanity  lamented,  not  those 
alone  of  an  individual.  "  Short  as  our  time  here  is," 
answers  the  Persian  prince  to  the  lament  of  Xerxes 
over  the  transitoriness  of  life,  "  there  is  no  man  who 
is  so  fortunate  as  not  to  have  felt  the  wish  for  death, 
not  once,  but  many  times."  ^  Is  there  not  in  these  words 
a  sense  of  compassion  for  the  dumb  multitudes  whom 
the   great    King   had  just   reviewed,    who   were   driven 

1  Herodotus,  vii.  56. 

-  Ibid.,  vii.  45,  46: — TfOvivai  ^o<u\€aOai  fia.\')\ov  f)  ^iheiv.  The  spcccli  curi- 
ously rc-scmblcs  llanilct's  "To  be,  or  not  to  be,"  and  is  spoken  by  a  Prince 
in  somcwliat  similar  circumstances. 


112  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

on  under  the  lash  to  a  fate  which  was  certain  for 
many  of  them,  however  the  presumptuous  hopes  of  their 
monarch  might  be  fulfilled  ?  Such  a  feeling  seems 
alwa^'s  heard  as  a  tremulous  undertone  through  the 
cheerful,  light-hearted  strain  of  the  narrative,  everywhere 
we  feel  the  sighs  of  suffering  mingle  with  notes  of 
triumph ;  we  see  the  envy  of  the  Gods  melt  into  the 
compassion  of  noble  men. 

At  times  we  watch  a  higher  transformation,  we  see 
the  envy  of  the  Gods  as  a  thin  veil,  covering  the  love  of 
God.  The  dispensation  which  takes  the  aspect  of  Divine 
envy  to  mortals  might,  it  seems,  from  a  higher  point  of 
view,  be  discerned  as  the  very  opposite ;  human  vicissi- 
tude is  the  result  of  a  Divine  love  anxious  not  to  keep 
but  to  share  the  true  blessedness  which  comes  in  the 
form  of  sorrow.  The  fall  of  Croesus  changes  a  tyrant 
to  a  philosopher.^  No  contrast  between  different  men 
could  be  more  striking  than  that  between  the  vain- 
glorious King  and  the  philosophic  exile  ;  he  emerges  from 
that  hour's  anguish  on  the  burning  pyre  a  sage  to  whom 
the  great  King  may  safely  bequeath  the  onerous  task  of 
admonishing  his  son,  and  who  never  betrays  that  trust. 
His  history  is  an  eloquent  sermon  on  the  teaching  of 
adversity.  Christian  interpretation,  we  have  allowed, 
infuses  a  foreign  element  into  this  teaching.  We  mis- 
interpret it  when  we  see  it  under  the  shadow  of  the 
Cross  ;  the  only  words  we  can  use  to  replace  the  Greek 
expressions  are  for  us  marked  indelibly  by  the  worship 
of  a  suffering  God ;  and  to  the  Greek  the  associations  oi 
pity  and  pardon  which  they  convey  are  wholly  want- 
ing. Yet  we  hold  a  sure  clue  to  the  deepest  feeling  of 
Greece  when  we  point  out  that  this  misinterpretation  is 
almost  inevitable.  "  The  quality  of  mercy,"  says  Shake- 
speare, "is  mightiest  in  the  mighty."      "Zeus  himself," 

1  Herodotus,  i.  85  ;  <^  iii.  35. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     113 

says  Sophocles,  "  hath  mercy  ^  for  the  sharer  of  his 
throne."  We  are  not  reminded  that  between  the  utter- 
ance of  Sophocles  and  Shakespeare  came  the  utterance 
of  one  who  bade  his  hearers  be  merciful  as  their  Father 
in  Heaven  was  merciful ;  rather  the  resemblance  is 
greatest  where  it  could  not  possibly  have  been  conscious. 
In  both  what  moulds  the  thought  is  rather  creative  art 
than  holy  aspiration,  yet  we  cannot  sharply  divide  the 
two.  The  Venetian  lady  pleads  for  her  friend  as  the 
Theban  prince  for  himself;  it  is  the  insight  of  genius 
which  gives  a  moral  precept  as  an  appeal  of  need. 
Probabl}'  it  has  happened  only  once  in  the  world's  his- 
tor}'  that  mercy  was  enjoined  on  the  heart  and  conscience 
by  one  who,  in  the  hour  of  need,  never  sought  it  for 
himself  Man,  for  the  most  part,  learns  the  excellence 
of  the  high  by  experiencing  the  needs  of  the  low,  and  feels 
the  beauty  of  tenderness  first  as  the  claim  of  weakness. 
And  thus  it  is  that  the  perfect  artist  cannot  but  preach 
virtue  when  all  he  desires  is  to  paint  the  lot  of  ordinary 
humanity,  with  its  burden  of  toil,  and  difficult}',  and 
sorrow. 

Among  the  artist  people  this  is  true  of  every  great 
writer.  The  historian  illustrates  its  force  as  well  as  the 
poet.  We  may  almost  sa}''  that  on  the  soil  of  Greece 
the  historian  blossoms  into  the  poet ;  poetry  lies  in  his 
theme,  a  faithful  transcript  reproduces  it  on  his  page. 
We  have  seen  how  that  sense  of  human  vicissitude, 
disguised  in  a  misleading  garb  as  the  "  envy  of  the 
Gods,"  weaves  in  a  continued  strain  of  pathos  into  the 
narrative  of  Herodotus  ;  we  trace  it  with  more  difficulty 
in  the  work  of  his  successor,  yet  perhaps  the  belief 
it.self  is  more  striking  when  it  escapes  as  a  half  in- 
consistency in  a  dry  neutral  narrative  than  when  it 
forms   the  central   idea  which  gives    the  narrative  epic 

'  Al5tl)t,  so  translated  by  Prof.  Jebb,  CEd.  Col.,  1268,  g. 

H 


114  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

unity.  Not  a  single  word  is  left  us  by  Thucydides 
to  show  that  he  believed  in  any  power  but  that  of 
man  ;  his  tone  is  in  this  respect  curiously  recent ;  and 
yet  the  shadow  of  some  influence  that  seems  to  mock 
at  the  hopes  of  man  falls  on  his  page,  and  the  strange 
dramatic  contrast  between  men's  hopes  and  their  for- 
tunes seems  to  intensify  the  narrative  of  facts  into  an 
utterance  of  regret  and  a  claim  for  compassion.  As 
he  describes  the  modest  desire  of  Nicias  "  to  leave  to 
posterity  a  name  associated  with  no  disaster  to  the  city,"  ^ 
he  suggests  the  terrible  catastrophe  by  which  the  name 
of  Nicias  is  for  ever  associated  with  the  greatest  disaster 
that  Athens  ever  knew.  The  description  of  the  Athenian 
Armada's  start  for  Sicily  glows  with  picturesque  colour- 
ing ;  the  historian's  dry  tradesmanlike  account  of  the 
expense  incurred  in  this,  the  most  costly  expedition 
ever  sent  out  from  Athens,  is  mingled  with  a  richness 
of  detail  that  seems  almost  to  belong  to  the  page  of 
romance.  We  see  the  crowds  hurrying  from  an  emptied 
city  to  the  Piraeus  ;  those  who  hastened  to  embrace  sons  p 

and  brothers  they  were  never  to  see  again  jostled  by 
idlers  eager  to  behold  a  spectacle  of  splendour  "  exceed- 
ing belief;  "  the  flashing  gold  and  silver  goblets  catch 
our  eye  as  the  libations  are  poured  on  the  decks  of  the 
noble  fleet,  gay  with  a  wealth  of  adornment  that  attracts 
the  admiring  gaze  even  of  those  from  whom  it  bears 
away  their  nearest  and  dearest.  We  hear  the  clarion 
note  of  the  trumpet  announce  a  solemn  prayer  which 
goes  up  from  the  united  army  and  from  the  attendant 
crowds  on  the  banks  as  from  one  man,  and  the  musical 
thunder  of  the  P^an,  as  it  mingles  with  the  rattle  of 
weighed  anchors  and  the  last   bustle  of  the  final  start. ^ 

1  NtKt'as  fiev  pov\6/j,evos  .  .   .  rco  /x^Wovti  xP'^^V  KaToKiweif  ovofia  ws  oiidev 
(r(prj\as  ti]v  Tvb'XLv  oceyeuero  (Thucyd.,  vi.  i). 

2  Thucyd.,  vi.  30-32. 


\d 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     115 

All   that    tells    of   pride   and    hope   in    that    description 
reminds  us  that,  of  the  joyous  army  then   flushed  with 
anticipations  of  victory,    some  few  stragglers  alone  are 
to   return   to  Athens  with    a   ghastly   tale   of  dead   left 
unburied   on   a  foreign   soil,   their  corpses   an  object  of 
envy  to   the  wounded  who  cumbered  the   fugitives  with 
helpless   clinging,  and   made   the   inevitable  flight   seem 
heartless    treacher3^      That    impressive  contrast   on   the 
page   of  Thucydides   expresses   a    creed   as  well    as   an 
event.      As    we    compare    the    triumphant    but    not    un- 
reasonable hope  with  which   the  Sicilian  expedition  was 
decided   on,   with    the    unmatched    disaster   in   which   it 
issued,  we  feel  that  the  jealous  fate  w^hich  shattered  the 
pride  of  the  Great   King  was   to   the   Greek  no  partial 
Deity,    but   a   supreme    influence   casting   down   all   un- 
measured ambition,  intervening  to  overthrow  even  reason- 
able when   it  was  gigantic  anticipation,   and   constantly 
bringing  in  unexpected  hope  to  the  vanquished,  unexpected 
humiliation  to  the  conqueror.      It  seemed  the  very  same 
power  which  saved  Athens  from   Persia   and   Syracuse 
from  Athens.      It  was  not  the  genius  of  Athens  arising 
to  repel  her  foes.      It  was   the  ultimate  divine  influence 
of  the  whole  Hellenic  world,  the  God  of  proportion,  of 
measure,  of  balanced   forces  ;   the  Divinity  by  whom   all 
intemperance  was   abhorred   and  whose  sway  is   repre- 
sented   by  the  ceaseless  vicissitude    of  human   fortune, 
the  chequered   aspect   of  human   life.      When  Athens  is 
threatened   by  the  might  of  Asia  she  rises  ;  when  her 
power  appears  to  justify  the  aim  at  dominion  within  the 
Hellenic  world  she  falls.      There  is  no  room  on  the  soil 
of  Greece  for  an  "  empire  city  ;  "  the  miniature  Europe  on 
which  the  struggles  of  history  are  repeated  on  a  small 
scale,  and  with   such  vivid   contrast  of  light  and  shade, 
does  not  allow  any  rehearsal  of  the  part  of  Rome.      The 
spirit    of    proportion,    of    limit,    which    animates    Greek 


Ii6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

literature  regulates  Greek  history ;  its  ideal  is  that  of 
equal  and  independent  states,  and  those  efforts  which 
foreshadow  empire  initiate  intestine  strife  and  rapid 
national  decay. 

It  is  a  striking  illustration  both  of  the  richness  and 
the  balanced  dualism  of  Greek  life  that  the  two  historians 
who  chronicled  the  brightness  of  its  spring  and  the 
glowing  decay  of  its  autumn  might  have  known  each 
other.-'  If  we  imagine  Froissart  and  Voltaire  as  con- 
temporaries we  bring  home  to  our  minds  some  shadow 
of  the  rich  variety  shown  forth  in  the  contrast  between 
the  historians  of  the  Persian  and  Peloponnesian  war. 
How  wonderful  is  the  adaptation  between  each  of  them 
and  the  subject  he  has  made  familiar  to  every  student ! 
There  never  was  a  narrator  more  perfectly  adapted  to 
the  earlier  tale  than  Herodotus.  His  genius  seems 
ripened  in  the  sunshine  that  flings  its  glow;  on  his 
canvas ;  he  tells  of  the  glory  of  Greece,  and  Greek 
feeling  moulds  every  line.  All  that  is  here  set  forth 
might  be  justified  and  illustrated  from  his  page  alone. 
Homer  is  not  more  fitly  the  singer  of  those  legends 
than  Herodotus  a  narrator  of  those  events  which  alike 
worked  to  make  Greece  a  unity.  The  reader  who  knows 
him,  and  him  alone,  is  familiar  with  all  that  is  most 
characteristic  of  Greek  feeling  and  Greek  life.  All,  we 
repeat,  that  is  uiost  characteristic.  The  cold  scepticism 
of  Thucydides  has  its  own  place  ;  it  is  but  one  phase 
of  the  Greek  desire  to  see  the  other  side ;  it  is  such 
an  example  of  Greek  balance,  Greek  impartiality,  as  we 
find  nowhere  else.  But  if  a  reader  desires  to  make 
acquaintance  with  Greek  life  in  a  single  book,  we  should 
give  him  Herodotus.      There  he  will  find  what  is  best 

1  Herodotus  is  said  (on  no  good  evidence)  to  have  given  a  recitation  of  his 
History  in  456  B.C.  to  an  audience  at  Olympia,  by  which  Thucydides,  as  a 
boy,  was  moved  to  tears.     The  legend  measures  chronological  possibihties. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     117 

worth  remembering  in  the  history  of  Greece — what 
stands  out  from  the  history  known  to  students  and  takes 
its  place  in  the  history  known  to  all  readers  and  to  some 
who  can  scarcely  claim  a  place  even  among  readers — 
the  history  which  has  seasoned  the  world  of  allusion 
and  proverb,  and  glides  into  the  mind  almost  apart  from 
its  conscious  effort.  And  there  he  finds  too  the  fitting 
spirit  in  which  such  history  should  be  chronicled — the 
unquestioning  belief  in  the  Invisible,  the  profound  sense 
of  a  national  vocation,  the  light  touches  of  delicate 
humour  and  keen  sarcasm  without  which  this  conception 
would  have  lacked  its  true  counterpoise  and  appropriate 
relief.  There  he  finds  History  written  in  the  dialect  in 
which  it  reaches  not  only  the  student  but  the  dreamer, 
the  idler,  the  lover  of  gossip,  of  anecdote,  of  moral 
reflection.  In  that  dialect  it  was  fit  that  the  world 
should  possess  the  history  of  the  race  which  appeals 
to  it  with  the  bewitching  aspect  of  vast  hope,  immense 
promise,  and  a  vivid  delight  in  freedom. 

For  the  history  of  its  decay  another  voice  was  needed, 
a  voice  that  reaches  a  different  and  a  much  smaller  audi- 
ence, but  one  which  will  never  fail  as  long  as  men  care 
for  literature.  The  prose  life  of  Greece  is  set  forth  with 
as  much  perfection  as  its  poetry,  and  with,  perhaps, 
more  of  instruction  and  warning  for  modern  Europe. 
Indeed  the  extreme  modernness  of  tone  is  what  at  first 
most  strikes  the  reader  of  Thuc3'dides.  The  eighteenth 
century  seems  to  breathe  in  every  page,  especially  if 
memories  of  Herodotus  be  present  to  his  mind.  The 
resemblance  is  not  an  accidental  one.  The  history  of 
Greece  after  the  Peloponnesian  war  continually  suggests 
the  history  of  Europe  after  the  Reformation.  Europe 
had  its  Catholic  unity,  as  Greece  had  its  Hellenic  unity  ; 
and  then  Athens  and  Sparta  represent  much  the  same 
entanglement  of  patriotism   witii    an   opposite  principle, 


Ii8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

bringing  in  cross  lines  of  division  that  perplex  the  dis- 
tinction of  the  city  or  the  nation.  But  the  moving 
forces  that  are  in  European  history  confused  and  indis- 
tinct show  themselves  in  Greek  history  sharp  and  clear, 
and  make  it  the  typical  specimen  of  what  we  mean  by 
history.  Greece  is  modern  Europe  on  a  tiny  scale,  but 
with  all  the  intellectual  forces  of  modern  Europe  on  a 
gigantic  scale.  It  presents  that  platform  of  culture  above 
barbarism  which  Europe,  and  that  greater  England  which 
forms  a  vast  appendix  to  Europe,  present  in  contrast  to 
the  African  and  Asiatic  populations  ;  while  in  diminish- 
ing the  breadth  of  the  platform  no  less  than  in  increasing 
its  height  it  concentrates  and  intensifies  the  teaching  of 
history,  and  is  indeed  to  all  other  history  what  the  best 
fiction  is  to  biography.  The  art  is  present  in  the  very 
course  of  events  which  it  traces. 

Thus  as  the  struggle  of  Greece  with  Persia  shows  the 
dynamic  vitality  developed  by  a  nation's  first  self-con- 
sciousness— the  heat  generated  by  a  rush  of  union — 
so  the  struggle  of  Athens  with  Sparta  shows  the  para- 
lyzing touch  of  party  spirit  on  patriotism,  the  chill  of 
disintegration.  If  there  be  any  principle  of  corporate 
union  of  which  we  may  say  broadly  that  it  is  evil,  we 
may  say  it  of  party  spirit.  In  all  that  binds  there  must 
be  some  good ;  and  since  almost  all  that  binds  also 
separates,  there  will  be  probably  some  evil  also.  But 
nowhere  else  is  the  gain  so  small,  and  the  loss  so 
great.  Reversing  the  noble  sentence  of  Antigone,  the 
political  partizan  may  almost  say,  '*  I  was  not  born  to 
share  thy  love,  but  hate."  On  that  soil  all  love  withers 
and  all  hate  flourishes.  The  love  of  country  is  the 
love  of  the  neighbour.  It  sets  us  in  kindly  relation- 
ship with  those  of  whom  we  know  most,  for  whom 
we  can  do  most ;  it  includes  every  variety  of  opinion, 
of  circumstance,  of  character ;    it  contains  within  itself 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     119 

lessons  of  tolerance  and  forbearance,  and  it  becomes  in 
a  healthy  mind  an  expansive  feeling,  passing  be3^ond  its 
own  large  boundaries,  and  ready  to  embrace  the  world. 
It  may  no  doubt  pass  into  the  hatred  of  the  foreigner, 
but  as  far  as  it  does  so  it  becomes  an  exceptional 
influence,  not  concerning  the  life  of  every  day.  Irra- 
tional dislike,  if  it  must  be  felt  at  all,  had  better  be  felt 
for  those  whom  we  rarely  see,  and  have  small  power  to 
injure.  When  it  is  turned  into  the  current  of  partizan 
feeling  it  sets  up  a  principle  of  division  in  every  house- 
hold and  stirs  hostility  where  the  power  to  give  pain  is 
at  its  highest.  It  is  the  parent  of  that  "madness  in  the 
brain  "  that  comes  from  being  "  wroth  with  one  we  love." 
Its  bonds  have  no  elasticity.  The  patriot  is  the  possible 
philanthropist.  The  partizan  is  as  much  cut  off  from 
that  possibility  as  is  the  mere  egotist.  For,  however 
numerous  the  sharers  of  his  sympathies,  those  sym- 
pathies have  nothing  catholic  in  them  ; — party  spirit  is 
that  spirit  of  taste,  of  preference,  which  is  strong  enough 
in  every  man,  strengthened  by  a  sense  of  duty.  Friend- 
ship on  such  a  basis  is  a  house  built  on  the  sand,  for 
the  ally  ma}^  any  day  become  the  traitor.  Enmity, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  a  fortress  on  a  rock,  for  the  foe 
can  never  become  the  trusted  ally.  It  is  the  negative 
principle  of  human  intercourse,  put  in  the  place  of  the 
positive. 

These  considerations  refer  to  party  spirit  at  all  time 
and  in  all  places.  Wherever  it  prevails  it  is  a  solvent 
to  friendship  and  natural  affection,  an  antagonist  to  pity, 
generosity,  and  justice.  But  it  never  again  shows  itself 
in  its  naked  repulsiveness  as  in  the  history  of  Greece. 
For  no  modern  life  is  quite  so  sensitive  to  party  spirit 
as  was  the  city  life  of  antiquit}'.  It  is  hurtful  to  all 
national  feelings,  but  a  nation  is  large  enough  to  absorb 
it  and  triumph  over  it.      A  city  becomes  its  prey.     Eng- 


I20  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

land  has  survived  the  rise  and  fall  of  many  parties. 
But  when  Greece  was  divided  between  oligarchic  Sparta 
and  democratic  Athens  its  life  was  rent  asunder  in  the 
strife.  It  is  true  that  Athens  was  a  small  city,  and  that 
the  adherents  of  Democracy  were  a  large  party.  But 
the  smallest  city  is  less  exclusive  than  the  largest  party. 
A  family,  a  tribe,  a  city,  a  nation — any  natural  group 
whatever — is  founded  on  something  more  allied  to  self- 
sacrifice  than  the  spirit  of  choice.  A  party  is  a  conse- 
cration of  all  those  egotistic  impulses  which  everywhere 
adhere  to  the  spirit  of  choice.  Thus  the  exchange  of 
patriotism  for  partizan  feeling  in  Greece  was  a  narrow- 
ing influence,  even  though  it  did  exchange  a  number 
of  small  groups  for  two  large  ones.  It  was  the  more 
narrowing  because  the  groups  it  dissolved  were  small. 
The  disease  attacked  an  organism  unfitted  to  cope  with 
it.  Party  spirit  was  more  hostile  to  civic  than  it  could 
ever  be  to  national  life,  because  it  met  with  nothing 
strong  enough  to  swallow  it  up.  And  it  is  still  more 
to  our  purpose  to  note  that  Greece  was  disloyal  to  its 
fundamental  principle  when  it  gave  itself  up  to  party 
spirit.  It  ceased  to  hold  to  the  spirit  of  the  balance,  it 
loosed  its  hold  on  what  was  in  truth  the  rudder  of  its 
political  life.  Greek  feeling,  divorced  from  the  harmony 
of  opposites,  lost  all  vitality,  all  coherent  moral  stan- 
dard. Greek  liveliness  was  then  converted  to  hatred. 
Party  spirit  is  a  deliberate  refusal  to  hear  the  other  side. 
The  Greek  ideal  could  not  admit  such  a  refusal ;  where 
the  last  was  victorious  the  first  perished.  We  may 
record  the  completeness  of  the  victory  in  the  oath 
taken,  in  some  states,  at  the  time  of  Aristotle,^  by 
the  members  of  the  oligarchy,  "  I  swear  to  be  eter- 
nally hostile   to   the    commonalt}^,   and   to   do   it   all   the 

1  Kol  Tt^  5i7/U(p  KaKbvovs  IffOfiai  /cot  |3ovXei/crw  S  rt  Slv  e^w  KaKov  (Ar.,  Pol., 
V.  7.  19)- 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     121 

harm  in  my  power  by  my  counsels."  Hatred  and 
treachery  were  thus  incorporated  in  political  life,  and 
Greece,  broken  up  into  warring  factions,  ceased  to  be 
a  nation. 

"The  universe,"  says  one  of  the  earliest  thinkers  of 
Greece,  "  is  the  harmony  of  the  lyre  and  bow."  ^  The 
order  of  nature,  in  its  widest  sense,  Heracleitus  thought, 
rests  on  the  harmon}-  of  all  that  the  lyre  symbolizes, 
and  all  that  the  bow  symbolizes  —  the  union  of  the 
power  that  gives  to  life  all  its  value  with  the  power 
that  destroys  life.  The  harmony  would  lose  all  its 
richness  with  the  withdrawal  of  its  discords.  "  The 
hidden  harmony  is  better  than  that  which  is  mani- 
fest." "  It  is  not  well  that  man  should  choose  his 
fate ;  his  true  good  is  resignation,  not  pleasure."  Plea- 
sure is  the  manifest,  resignation  the  hidden,  harmony  ; 
— the  element  of  discord  is  lacking  where  man  has  his 
own  will,  and  with  it  all  the  finest  music  of  humanity. 
Even  death  and  life  join  in  the  lesson  of  the  indissoluble 
unity  of  opposites  ;  man  chooses  life  which  is  truly  death, 
and  flees  from  death  which  is  truly  life.  The  union 
of  antagonistic  principles  is  the  clue  to  all  that  man  can 
achieve  or  know. 

"It  is  not  well  that  man  should  choose  his  fate."' 
One  might  fancy  that  sentence  as  an  utterance  from 
the  cloister;  it  seems  a  strange  expression  from  one  of 
the  joy-loving,  art-loving  Greek  race.  Yet,  in  truth,  it 
is  one  of  the  most  characteristic  that  have  come  to  us  in 
the  Greek  tongue.  It  represents  a  large  part  of  what 
is  most  impressive  in  Greek  literature.  It  would  not  be 
possible,  probably,  to  gather  so  many  illustrations  of  the 

'  These  fragments  are  tnkcn  from  t]ie  work  of  Ferdinand  Lassalle,  "Die 
rhilosophie  Ileracleitos  des  Dunkkn,"  with  liis  interpretation. 

'  AfOpuirois  ylytcOat  oKbaa  6i\ovci.v,  ovk  A/*f ivoi' (Lassaile's  "  Ileracleitos," 
ii.  448). 


122  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

belief  in  the  blessings  of  adversity  from  any  other  his- 
torian as  from  Herodotus.  The  story  of  Croesus  at  its 
opening  sets  the  ke3'note,  and  Polycrates  supplies  the 
best-knoAvn  illustration  of  the  theme;  but  perhaps  nothing 
is  so  impressive  as  the  decision  of  Solon,  so  offensive  to 
Croesus,  that  the  second  place  in  human  happiness  is 
to  be  given  to  the  two  Argive  youths  who  drew  their 
mother  to  the  temple  of  Juno  in  place  of  the  oxen,  and 
after  her  prayer  to  the  goddess  to  grant  them  that  which 
is  best  for  man,  fell  asleep  in  the  holy  precincts,  and 
awoke  no  more.^  What !  one  is  tempted  to  ask,  is  the 
earthly  doom  of  humanity  one  prolonged  mistake  ?  Is 
it  better  to  quit  this  scene  of  existence  as  soon  as  it  is 
fully  open?  The  spirit  which  seems  to  answer  "Yes" 
is  the  spirit  which  most  delights  in  all  the  beauty, 
the  pleasure,  the  joy  of  earth.  The  power  to  see  its 
charm  seems  but  the  other  side  of  the  power  to  see  its 
emptiness.  "  Man  is  the  dream  of  a  shade,"  says  the 
poet  who  has  immortalized  the  games  of  Greece."  The 
sense  of  life's  brightness  and  the  sense  of  its  vanity  seem 
to  have  attained  their  summit  together.  We  have  all 
known  moments  in  which  we  could  understand  the  con- 
junction— moments  in  which  the  crash  of  dance  music 
or  the  brightness  of  a  summer's  day  seemed  to  hold 
some  profound,  unspeakable  melancholy,  a  melancholy 
lying  at  the  very  core  of  all  that  was  its  very  opposite. 
Such  a  feeling  is  found  often  in  the  poetry  of  Scott, 
and  lends  it  a  peculiar  Greek  grace — a  grace  with  us 
somewhat  allied  to  what  is  conventional,  and  not  char- 
acteristic of  the  highest  poetry  of  the  modern  age,  which 
demands  a  fuller  grasp  on  the  great  realities  of  the 
spiritual   world.      For  we  come  in   contact  with  hardly 

1  Herodotus,  i.  31. 

2  Pindar,    Pyth,,    viii.  :— cr/ctay    tvap   avdpwwo's.      The   line   is   imitated   by 
Sophocles. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     123 

anything  that  is  original,  in  our  sense  of  the  word,  in 
Greek  poetry ;  we  meet  very  little  thought  stamped  with 
idios3'ncrasie3  of  a  peculiar  character.  But  we  meet  the 
ideas  to  which  we  are  accustomed  in  their  well-worn, 
half-obliterated  banality,  fresh  from  the  mint  of  human 
thought.  And  thus  that  sentiment  of  the  fleetingness 
in  all  things  earthly,  which  with  us,  from  its  very  depth 
and  breadth,  has  become  commonplace,  touches  the 
grandest  poetr}'  of  antiquity. 

For,  in  truth,  all  modern  literature  is  more  or  less 
impregnated  with  the  ideas  of  Greece,  and  we  meet 
here  at  first  hand  what  elsewhere  we  meet  at  second 
hand.  We  have  literatures  which  know  nothing  of  the 
classical  world,  but  all  to  which  we  give  the  name  of 
literature  absorbs  this  influence  from  a  thousand  sources, 
however  little  it  may  reproduce  its  form.  Shakespeare 
himself  is  but  the  most  perfect  blossom  of  the  Re- 
naissance culture  which  found  its  root  in  the  buried 
treasures  of  Greece,  and  all  that  has  attained  any 
perennial  hold  on  the  literary  mind  of  Europe  has 
hitherto  owed  its  power  to  this  magic  influence.  Other 
kinds  of  excellence  there  may  be  where  the  Greek  sense 
of  balance  and  harmony  is  wanting — philosophic  or 
scientific  thought,  theologic  earnestness,  historic  truth  ; — 
and  it  may  be  that  in  some  books  of  very  deep  value  it 
is  lacking.  But  we  cannot  say  that,  in  any  deep  sense, 
the  result  is  literary.  In  the  world  of  art  this  is 
obvious.  Dramatic  power  is  inseparable  from  intellec- 
tual disinterestedness,  and  intellectual  disinterestedness 
means  a  fine  sense  of  the  opposite  forces  that  mould 
character.  Art  can  live  only  in  the  leisure  of  a  mind 
not  occupied  by  any  sense  of  the  claim  of  the  Right  to 
continual  emphasis  and  unvaried  illustration.  Wherever 
we  meet  dramatic  power  we  meet  this  spirit ;  the 
temper    of   mii^.d    which    throws    itself   with    strenuous 


124  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

resolve  into  the  part  of  a  defender  of  right,  an  avenger 
of    wrong,    affords    the    dramatist    some    of    his    finest 
material,    but    is    itself   undramatic.      We    take    up    the 
Iliad  with  a  sense  of  escape  from   all  we  long  to  forget, 
because  it  is   a  picture  of  vivid,   stirring  life,  reflected 
in   the  still  waters   of  a  perfectly  dramatic   impartiality. 
Few  recognize  the  source   of  this   mingled   vigour  and 
repose,  but  it  is  felt  by  all.      The  Greek  poet   takes  all 
his  most   pathetic,  most  inspiring  images  from   the   foes 
of  Greece.      The  noblest  utterance  of  patriotism  and  the 
purest  picture  of  domestic  love  are  both  from  the  Trojan 
side ;   the   Trojan    King   sets   an   example   of  chivalrous 
courtesy ;   even    the    effeminate    Asiatic    prince    touches 
the  reader  by  his  candid  confession  under  the  rebuke  of 
his  heroic   brother.      The  intercourse  which   takes  place 
between  the  warrior  chiefs  in  the  intervals  of  battle  has 
nothing  fierce  or  hostile  ;   it  is  the  discourse  of  brave  men 
who  hope  to  kill   each  other,  but  who   in   the  meantime 
have  no  difficulty  in  recognizing  each   other's  nobility. 
This  makes  the   Iliad   not  a  national  but  a  human  epic. 
We  have  described   this    excellence   in  negative  terms, 
but    it    is    in    the    highest    degree    positive.      It    is    the 
secret  which   gives  brightness  of  colour  and  delicacy  of 
form  to  every   touch.      Achilles — Hector — Helen — they 
live  and  move   before  us,  because   their  images  are  un- 
blurred   by  any  rufQing   breeze,   because  a  fine   balance 
of  sympathies  keeps   the   poise   even   and   avoids  every 
disturbing   jar.       We    see     Greek     impartiality    at    its 
highest  if  we  turn  from  the  Greek  to  the   Persian  epic. 
The  poem  which  enshrines  the  legend  associated  with  a 
belief  in  Ahriman  and  Ormazd  is  indeed  full  of  interest. 
But  it  is  an  interest  for  the  student.      It  is  a  picture  of 
the  strife  of  good  and   evil.      The  contrast  between  the 
Hellenic    and    the    Persian    epics   strikingly    brings    out 
the  character  of  the  two  religions  which  they  express. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     125 

The  Shah-Nameh  is,  for  the  most  part,  a  series  of 
struggles  between  heroes  of  noble  virtue  and  monsters 
of  wickedness,  and  between  a  people  of  light  (Iran, 
the  Persian  race)  and  a  people  of  darkness  (Turan). 
Where  a  hero  falls,  it  is  through  the  temptation  of 
Ahriman.  Zohak,  the  serpent  king  who  bears  on  his 
shoulders  twin  snakes  sprung  from  a  kiss  of  the  Evil 
One,  has  yielded  to  impious  seductions ;  promises  of 
splendid  dominion  have  led  him  to  plunge  into  guilt,  and 
the  crimes  of  his  monstrous  double  nature  have  earned 
an  awful  punishment ;  he  is  not  to  be  speedily  slain,  but 
to  die  a  death  of  agony.  How  unlike  anything  in  the 
Iliad  !  Where  Homer  gives  us  fierce  anger  Firdusi 
gives  us  bitter  hatred.  Where  Firdusi  gives  us  a  com- 
bat of  saints  and  devils  Homer  gives  us  a  struggle  of 
hero  with  hero.  The  poem  that  opens  Greek  literature 
can  never  grow  old,  because  it  is  committed  to  no  tem- 
porary, no  local  emotion — it  sets  no  stamp  of  condem- 
nation on  any  actor  of  the  drama ;  it  claims  sympathy, 
in  turn,  for  all. 

This  we  may  say  of  the  poem  which  stands  on  the 
threshold  of  Greek  literature,  and  to  which,  to  a  certain 
extent,  we  may  say  that  Greece  owes  its  unity.  And 
then,  again,  we  may  say  it  of  that  work  of  literary  genius 
which,  of  all  that  has  been  bequeathed  us  by  Greece, 
has  least  of  the  poetic  spirit,  and  which  most  expresses 
the  antagonism  within  the  bosom  of  Greece.  Few  im- 
mortal works  treating  of  a  similar  subject  can  be  so 
unlike  as  the  Iliad,  and  the  history  which  Thucydides 
has  left  of  the  Pcloponnesian  war.  The  contrast  of 
poetry  and  prose,  of  the  spirit  of  simple  childlike  faith, 
and  of  cold  wary  scepticism,  of  glowing  fancy,  and  of 
realistic  effort  after  accurate  narration — all  these  arc 
brought  to  a  climax  when  we  set  the  two  works  together  : 
they  seem   to  belong  to  different  worlds.      And  yet  wc 


126  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

cannot  forget  that  they  belong  to  the  same  race.  We 
can  hardly  say  that  Thucydides  and  Homer  have  any- 
thing else  in  common,  but  they  are  alike  impartial.  It 
is  equally  impossible  to  discern  any  various  colouring  in 
the  sympathies  of  the  narrator  according  as  he  follows 
the  fortunes  of  those  with  whom  his  interests  were 
identified,  and  of  those  to  whom  they  were  opposed.  The 
narration  keeps  its  hard  disinterested  accuracy  whether 
it  sets  before  us  the  fate  of  Athenian  or  Spartan,  as  the 
poem  keeps  its  glowing  richness  of  colouring  whether 
it  paints  the  fortune  of  Trojan  or  Greek.  This  equality 
of  interest  cannot  be  more  absolute  in  the  one  case  than 
the  other,  but  it  is  far  more  striking  on  the  page  of  the 
historian  than  in  the  song  of  the  bard.  Homer  relates 
no  deed  of  the  Greek  army  that  may  be  set  by  the 
side  of  the  taking  of  Melos  as  a  specimen  of  ruthless 
barbarity ;  and  Thucydides,  even  in  that  part  of  the 
narrative  which  must  be  due  to  his  fancy,  shows  not 
the  faintest  temptation  to  soften  a  line  in  the  picture 
of  his  country's  crime.^  That  the  Athenians  slew  the 
adult  males  and  enslaved  the  women  and  children  of 
a  State  which  had  done  nothing  to  incur  their  enmity, 
was  a  fact  which  the  great  Athenian  writer  must  re- 
cognize ;  but  when  he  describes  the  pleadings  on  either 
side,  which  must  in  great  measure  be  due  to  his  own 
fanc}',  we  might  have  looked  for  some  indication  of  a 
wish  to  make  out  a  case  for  his  own  countrymen,  such 
as,  assuredly,  an  English  writer  would  betray  in  narrating 
the  bombardment  of  Copenhagen  or  the  fate  of  Drogheda. 
Assuredly  we  shall  not  find  it.  "  It  is  hard  indeed," 
the  Melians  concede,  "to  contend  against  your  power 
and  your  fortune  ;  yet  we  lose  not  our  faith  in  Divine 
aid,  for  we  are  innocent  and  confronted  with  the  un- 
righteous."     "  We  are  quite  easy  as   to  that,"  reply  the 

1  Thucyd.,  v.  89-105. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITES.     127 

Athenians.  "  It  is  certainly  a  law  for  human  beings  that 
they  should  take  who  have  the  power,  and  we  suppose 
this  law  holds  good  in  the  Divine  world  also."  What 
reader  would  not  suspect,  in  reading  that  dramatic  frag- 
ment, that  the  sympathies  of  the  writer  were  with  the 
vanquished  ?  Perhaps  in  some  sense  they  were,  but 
not  in  any  sense  that  made  Thucydides  less  of  an 
Athenian,  not  in  any  sense  that  shows  itself  in  one  word 
of  condemnation  when  he  comes  to  speak  of  the  cruel 
fate  of  those  whose  trust  in  Divine  aid  was  met  with 
utter  failure.  He  sympathized  with  the  Melians  only 
so  far  as  he  threw  himself  on  to  their  side  with  dramatic 
disinterestedness  of  attention,  only  so  far,  we  may  say, 
as  he  was  a  true  Greek. 

The  "  grand  impartiality  "  ^  of  Thucydides  is  not  only 
national,  it  is  personal.  For  twenty  years  the  great 
historian  was  an  exile  from  his  native  city.  I^le  was  a 
general  in  the  war  he  has  made  known  to  all  time,  and 
it  is  evident  that  he  was  banished  for  the  failure  to 
relieve  an  important  city  which  he  mentions ;  but  the 
two  facts  are  both  mentioned  so  slightly  that  the  reader 
has  to  discover  their  connection  himself.  Though  his 
chronological  method  is  one  of  somewhat  tiresome  accu- 
racy and  precision,  he  tells  us  of  his  own  exile  out 
of  its  proper  place,  and  in  a  mere  parenthesis  of  his 
narrative.  "  I  happened  to  be  in  exile  for  twenty  years 
after  my  command  at  Amphipolis,  and  thus  to  have 
great  advantages  for  ascertaining  the  facts  iVom  both 
sides,"  is  all  he  tells  us  about  it.  The  unfortunate 
command  which  led  to  this  punishment  is  told  with 
the  same  brief,  disinterested  lightness.  There  is  not 
a  word  in  the  few  lines  referring  to  it  which,  if  he 
had  left  out  "  the  present  writer,"  would  have  led  us  to 
think  he  was  speaking  of  himself.  A  historian  of  Greek 
^  Jowctl's  "Thucydides,"  vol.  ii.  p.  303,  note  26. 


128  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

literature  has  been  so  much  impressed  with  this  reserve, 
that  he  explains  it  by  supposing  it  to  be  due  to  the  con- 
sciousness of  guilt.  Thucydides  "neither  attempts  to  vin- 
dicate himself  nor  specifies  the  ground  of  his  sentence,"  ^ 
his  critic  thinks,  because  he  had  been  more  occupied  in 
looking  after  his  own  property  than  in  the  interests  of 
his  country.  The  fact  may  have  been  so.  There  is 
nothing  whatever  in  literary  impartiality  to  secure  poli- 
tical disinterestedness.  But  so  temperate  a  reference  to 
the  incident,  by  one  who  might  have  given  his  own 
colouring  to  the  narrative,  does  not  look  like  conscious- 
ness of  guilt ;  it  may  have  covered  such  a  feeling,  but 
what  it  expresses  is  the  reticence  demanded  by  that  fine 
sense  of  proportion,  which  gives  the  art  of  Greece  its 
immortal  predominance. 

If  history  shows  us  the  harmony  of  opposites,  in 
Greek  life,  as  a  momentary  and  swiftly  baffled  aspiration, 
in  philosoph}'-  and  in  literature  we  find  it  as  a  perennial 
spring,  which  no  frost  can  seal  and  no  drought  exhaust. 
We  may  associate  the  Greek  virtue — temperance — with 
the  productions,  not  of  genius,  but  of  talent.  To  us  it 
suggests  the  performance,  not  of  virtue,  but  of  respect- 
able mediocrity.  But  the  Greek  saw  in  this  idea  the 
key  to  all  that  is  finest  in  art,  noblest  in  virtue,  most 
desirable  in  experience.  Genius,  by  the  very  fact  that 
it  often  reaches,  never  craves  extravagance.  There  is 
a  profound  meaning  in  the  seemingly  fantastic  Greek 
speculations  on  the  principle  of  number  as  the  mystic 
root  of  orderly  and  developed  Being.  "  The  art  of 
measurement,"  says  Plato,  "  is  that  which  would  save  the 
soul ;  "  -  and  the  pupil  of  Plato  expanded  that  statement 
into  the  doctrine  so  well  known,  yet  so  little  understood, 

1  "A  Critical  History  of  the  Language  and  Literature  of  Ancient  Greece," 
by  William  Mure  of  Caldwell,  v.  40. 

2  Plato,  Protagoras,  356. 


GREECE,  AND  THE  HARMONY  OF  OPPOSITE S.     129 

of  the  golden  mean.  To  the  English  mind,  a  kind  of 
dulness  clings  round  the  notion.  We  have  it  sufficiently 
represented  in  our  achievement ;  what  we  crave  in  our 
ideal  is  something  different.  For  Greek  thought  the 
idea  of  the  mean  takes  in  the  moral  universe  the  place 
taken  in  the  physical  universe  by  that  law  which  marks 
out  the  path  of  the  planet ;  it  is,  in  like  manner,  a 
diagonal,  the  result  of  warring  forces.  What  draws 
the  spirit  one  way  was  to  them  no  more  evil  than 
what  draws  it  another.  Cowardice  drags  it  downwards  ; 
rashness  drives  it  away  from  its  true  centre.  A  wise 
manliness  finds  its  orbit  settled  by  the  contest  of  these 
two  conflicting  forces,  and  revolves  about  its  centre  with 
an  equal  attraction  and  repulsion  for  both.  All  vivid 
feelings  were  legitimate ;  their  harmony,  their  balance, 
was  the  only  conscious  need.  The  ideal  of  the  Con- 
science belonged  to  the  great  foe  of  Greece.  The  Hellenic 
spirit  welcomed  a// impulse,  but  impressed  its  own  delicate 
distinctness  on  all,  and  joined  the  Pantheistic  fervour 
of  India  to  Persian  definiteness,  with  a  wealth  of  illus- 
tration and  glow  of  feeling  that  belongs  to  it  alone, 
among  all  the  nations  of  the  earth. 


CHAPTER  IV. 
ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW. 

Greece  contains  so  much  more  than  the  ideal  common 
to  it  with  Rome,  that,  in  confining  our  gaze  to  the  hfe 
of  Greece,  we  do  not  see  clearly  the  contrast  between 
Ancient  and  Modern  thought.  The  race  that  is  dowered 
with  genius  can  hardly  exhibit  limitations,  even  when 
subject  to  them  ;  amid  the  rich  blossoming  of  distinct 
and  striking  individualities,  we  discern  with  difficulty 
that  a  person  was  hardly  regarded  as  what  we  mean  by 
an  individual.  But  the  ideal  of  antique  life  is  illus- 
trated as  much  by  Athenian  thought  as  by  Roman  life, 
or  is  only  less  illustrated  there  because  Greek  thought 
is  various  in  its  abounding  wealth  and  Roman  life  is 
meagre  in  its  simplicity.  All  the  grandeur  of  the 
classical  world,  Greek  or  Roman,  depends  on  a  sense 
of  corporate  unity,  which  appears  to  the  modern  intel- 
lect rather  the  goal  of  eminent  goodness  than  the 
possible  assumption  of  average  practical  life.  We 
hardly  reach  with  much  effort  that  sense  of  the  value 
of  organic  corporate  life  which  the  citizen  of  antiquity 
could  not  lose.  Among  us,  it  would  require  exalted 
virtue  to  make  the  tribe  or  the  nation  the  starting-point 
of  thought,  as  it  must  have  been  the  starting-point  of 
thought  to  an  average  Athenian  or  Roman.  The  object 
of  conservation  to  him  was  a  set  of  groups  ;  the  indi- 
vidual was  a  fraction  of  one  or  more  of  these  groups, 
not  an  entity  that  could  be  considered   in  himself.     The 


I 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  131 

mere  perception  that  a  certain  regulation  tended  to 
preserve  these  groups  gave  motive-power ;  there  was 
no  need  of  adding  to  it  (what  unquestionably  would 
be  needed  in  modern  hfe)  some  argument  to  show  that 
the  thing  thus  preserved  was  valuable. 

At  the  very  moment  at  which  these  lines  are  written 
(1887)  it  is  less  necessary  than  it  was  a  short  time  ago  to 
dwell  on  the  social  weakness  produced  by  modern  indivi- 
dualism. Perhaps  we  now  more  need  reminding  of  its 
strength.  But  this  reminder  points  out  the  difference 
of  the  two  ideals  quite  as  forcibly.  We  cannot  attain 
the  antique  unity  of  the  Family.  The  attempt  without 
this  to  merge  individuality  in  the  State  tends  to  deprive 
us  of  both  the  ancient  and  the  modern  unity.  When 
we  make  the  effort  we  are  hindered  as  much  by  our 
virtues  as  by  our  vices ;  we  are  neither  good  enough 
nor  bad  enough  for  the  thing  we  are  trying  to  do. 
At  our  best,  we  cannot  so  surrender  our  own  rights  ; 
at  our  worst,  we  cannot  so  trample  on  those  of  others. 
For  the  unity  of  the  State,  based  as  it  was  on  the 
unity  of  the  Family,  was  preserved  by  the  relegation 
of  all  the  perplexities  of  modern  civilization  to  a  region 
with  which  the  State  refused  to  concern  itself.  The 
fact  that  a  Greek  or  Roman  saw  all  Liberty  against 
a  background  of  slavery  is  as  important  as  the  fact 
that  he  meant  by  Liberty  no  mere  immunity  from  inter- 
ference, but  an  actual  share  in  a  corporate  unity  which 
preceded  and  would  survive  him.  Here  are  the  strength 
and  the  weakness  of  the  antique  ideal  side  by  side. 
The  Greek  or  Roman  was  better  than  the  modern 
Englishman,  so  far  as  he  was  vitally  the  member  of 
a  commonwealth.  lie  was  worse,  so  far  as  he  was  the 
member  of  a  dominant  caste.  It  was  no  proof  of  exalted 
virtue  in  him  to  merge  his  own  interests  in  those  of 
his  country  to  an  extent  which  would  require  exalted 


132  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

virtue  now  ;  but  neither  was  indifference  to  the  interests 
not  bound  up  in  this  great  dominant  claim  a  sign  of 
exceptional  hardness  of  heart,  as  it  would  be  with  us. 
The  best  among  the  ancients  disregarded  the  ills  of  all 
beyond  a  certain  enclosure,  as  the  ills  of  others  are,  in 
our  day,  disregarded  only  by  the  pre-eminently  selfish  ; 
but  they  aimed  at  the  welfare  of  all  within  that  enclosure, 
as  in  our  day  only  the  unselfish  aim  at  any  welfare  but 
their  own. 

What  we  have  said  of  the   abundant   and   almost   be- 
wildering wealth  of  Greek  ideas  is  eminentl}^  true  of  the  ; 
Greek  from  whom   all   philosophy  takes  its   start ;   amid 
the  tropical   luxuriance  of   Plato's   thought,   conceptions 
which  he  held   in  common  with   his  countrymen  are  not 
conspicuous.     But  it  is  striking  to  note  in  that  delineation                  -j 
of  an  ideal  State,  which  is,  perhaps,  the  fragment  of  ancient                  f; 
thought  most  familiar  to  modern  ears,  how  far  away  was 
the  Greek  starting-point  of  moral  speculation  from  ours. 
Among  moderns  no  one  would  set  about  answering  the                 i: 
question.    What    is    goodness  ?    by  discussing  forms  of 
government.      A  modern  writer  might  incidentally  illus- 
trate his  idea  of  goodness  by  pointing  out  what  form  of 
government  the   best  men  would  seek  to  establish  (and 
even    this    most    people    would    feel    a    matter   of    very 
questionable    relevance),    but    to    start    from    this    point 
would  be   impossible.      When   Socrates   is  made  to   say 
that  it  is  simpler  to  investigate  Righteousness  in  a  State 
rather  than   in   an  individual,^  his   hearers   see   as  little 
room  for  doubt,  as  if  he  had  said   that  they  could  judge 
better  of  a  man's  character  by  taking  in  the  whole  of  his 
life  rather  than  a  part  of  it.      An  Englishman  does  not 
think   the  thing  that  Plato  meant   by  the  righteousness 
of  a  State  less  important  or  real  than  Plato  did.     He  sees 
that   in   some  States  the  various   members   of  the  com- 

I 

^  Plato,  Rep.,  368,  9. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  133 

munity  keep  more  or  less  to  their  true  function,  and  in 
others  they  fail  to  do  so  ;  and  he  is  aware  that  the  differ- 
ence is  one  of  vital  importance.  But  he  would  deny  that 
the  quality  which  makes  a  nation  into  a  harmonious  com- 
munity is  the  quality  which  makes  a  righteous  man  ;  at 
all  events  he  would  never  begin  by  assuming  this.  And 
in  all  the  dialogue  there  is  no  hint  that  any  Greek  could 
even  see  as  a  difficulty  what  most  Englishmen  would  feel 
an  insuperable  objection. 

This  shifting  of  the  moral  centre  of  gravity  has 
affected  every  department  of  our  moral  being.  It  is 
recorded  in  change  of  desires,  of  aspirations,  of  tastes  ; 
it  is  discernible  in  the  new  associations  of  some  words 
relating  to  that  part  of  our  nature  which  we  should  have 
thought  permanent ;  it  tinges  with  colouring  unknown 
to  antiquity  names  which  denote  the  largest  objects 
of  human  desire.  Even  that  in  man  which  is  least 
changeable  is  not  entirely  unchanged  from  generation 
to  generation.  Liberty,  we  should  have  thought,  must 
always  have  had  the  same  meaning.  But  it  has  the  same 
meaning  now  and  2000  years  ago,  only  in  the  sense 
that  two  copies  of  the  same  outline  differently  coloured 
form  the  same  picture.  At  all  times  a  man  must  dis- 
like being  prevented  doing  what  he  chooses  to  do ; 
that  is  merely  saying  twice  over  that  he  chooses  to  do 
it ;  but  while  the  moderns  mean  no  more  than  this 
by  Liberty,  the  ancients  included  so  much  beside,  that 
the  whole  idea  was  different.  An  Englishman  thinks 
of  Freedom  as  something  that  is  to  be  a  limit  to  govern- 
ment ;  to  a  Greek  or  a  Roman  the  aim  of  limiting 
government  in  ord,cr  to  leave  scope  to  Freedom  would 
have  been  like  cutting  off  the  roots  to  leave  room  for 
the  branches.  Freedom  was,  in  their  view,  mainly  a 
share  in  government.  It  niiglit  include  other  advan- 
tages,   but    tlicy    were    insignificant    compared   to    this ; 


134  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

take  it  away,  and  it  would  have  been  difficult,  from  the 
ancient  point  of  view,  to  see  what  remained.  To  be 
free  was  not  so  much  a  condition  as  a  relation.  Liberty, 
in  the  modern  world,  is  a  part  of  the  democratic  ideal ; 
in  ancient  life  it  was  incurably  aristocratic.  It  was 
there,  an  unquestionable  privilege  of  the  few ;  it  is 
here,  the  inalienable  right  of  the  many.  Liberty  that 
is  not  liberty  for  all  is  something  that  the  modern  world 
regards  without  sympathy,  something  that  individuals 
may  desire,  as  men  may  desire  selfishly  to  possess  any 
good,  but  that  can  never  unite  them  in  a  common  aspira- 
tion or  close  their  ranks  in  a  firm  resistance.  To  the 
modern  mind  it  is  the  rightful  possession  of  the  human 
race,  and  in  any  sense  in  which  this  is  impossible,  it  is 
not  the  rightful  possession  of  any  one. 

When  we  turn  from  human  desire  to  human  admira- 
tion, this  change  of  feeling  becomes  yet  more  evident. 
We  should  more  accurately  represent  to  ourselves  the 
earlier  force  of  the  word  virtue  if  we  associated  it  with 
the  sense  still  in  use  in  which  we  speak  of  the  virtues 
of  plants  ;  it  is  that  which  makes  a  man  efficient ;  man- 
liness, valour,  distinction,  public  spirit — that,  in  short, 
which  tells  in  the  citizen.  We  may  almost  say  that  the 
modern  sense  is  the  very  opposite  of  this.  What  an 
ordinary  Englishman  means  by  virtue  is  that  kind  of 
excellence  which  does  not  tell  in  the  citizen.  No  one, 
for  instance,  would  speak  of  Nelson  as  a  virtuous  man, 
though  he  had  all,  and  more  than  all,  that  a  Roman 
meant  by  virtue.  What  speaks  most  of  the  change  is 
the  fact  that  virtue  has  even  altered  its  sex  ;  the  Roman 
would  have  found  it  difficult  to  associate  virtus  with  any 
possible  feminine  excellence  ;  the  Englishman  rarely  uses 
the  word  except  with  reference  to  women.  When  Cicero 
said  of  his   daughter,    "  Her  virtue    is   wonderful,"  ^   he 

1  "  Cujus  quidem  virtus  mirifica.      Quo  modo  ilia  fert  publicam  cladem  ! 


ROUE  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  135 

meant,  "  It  is  wonderful  to  see  so  much  manly  fortitude 
in  a  woman,"  and  accordingly  his  best  translator  has 
here  rendered  the  word  spirit  The  woman  had  no  place 
in  the  civic  world,  any  more  than  the  slave  had  ;  and 
the  civic  world  was  the  world  of  virtue.  Beyond  it, 
virtue  became  merely  a  negative  thing ;  the  woman 
could  be  a  criminal  as  the  slave  might,  and  as  a 
mother  she  was  capable  of  a  vicarious  lustre  which  the 
slave  could  not  share  ;  but  the  sphere  of  womanly  good- 
ness did  not  exist.  The  world  of  duty  was  wholly 
masculine. 

In  the  case  of  Virtue,  modern  association  has  changed 
manliness  into  womanliness ;  in  the  case  of  Freedom,  it 
has  changed  manliness  into  humanliness.  It  is  men  as 
human  beings  who  desire  Freedom  in  England,  France, 
and  Germany  ;  it  was  men  as  embodying  the  ideal  of 
manliness  who  desired  it  in  Greece  and  Rome.  On 
both  sides  we  have  an  expression,  more  or  less  distinct, 
of  the  great  watershed  which  divides  the  moral  life  of 
the  ancients  from  ours.  Political  duty  for  them  was 
duty.  Excellence  which  did  not  buttress  the  life  of  the 
citizen  was  to  their  eyes  almost  invisible.  Freedom 
which  did  not  mean  a  life  of  government  hardly  counted 
as  freedom,  and  the  life  of  government  meant  a  life  free 
from  the  cares  that  are,  on  the  modern  view,  the  lot  of 
average  humanity. 

The  change  we  are  considering  has  affected  the  moral 
world  in  its  widest  sense  ;  it  extends  to  a  region  where 
questions  of  right  and  wrong  are  out  of  sight  ;  it 
speaks  of  a  new  attitude  as  much  of  taste  as  of  con- 
science. Tiie  word  Nature  to  a  Roman  meant  human 
nature  ;  its  most  dignified  associations  were  those  of  the 

Quo  moflo  domesticas  tricas  !  "  (Cic. ,  Ad  Att. ,  x.  8).  .See  the  tr.inslation  of  this 
passage  in  the  "  Life  and  Letters  of  Cieero,"  by  the  kev.  G.  E.  jeans,  p.  247. 
C/.  QuEcst.  Tusc,  iL  18,  "  Appellata  est  ex  viro  viitus," 


135  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Senate  and  the  forum  ;  its  whole  scope  of  reference  lay 
in  the  desires  and  actions  of  men.  To  a  countryman  of 
Wordsworth's  the  word  suggests  the  shade  of  bird-haunted 
thickets,  the  trackless  breadth  of  moorland  ;  it  fills  his 
ears  with  the  rustle  of  the  wind  in  the  trees  or  the  wave 
on  the  shingle,  and  sways  his  mind  with  the  rhythm  of 
the  seasons,  the  pulsation  of  yearly  growth  and  decay. 
Every  image  is  for  our  generation  associated  with  the 
utterance  of  genius,  as  well  as  the  investigations  of 
thinkers.  Poetry  and  science,  foes  as  they  appear, 
have  worked  in  harmony  to  enrich  and  illustrate  the 
world  of  beauty  and  orderly  sequence  that  begins  where 
human  effort  ends.  We  see  this  change  very  clearly 
when  we  put  side  by  side  ancient  and  modern  specimens 
of  identical  feeling.  Socrates  did  not,  for  he  could  not, 
care  less  for  the  country  than  Dr.  Johnson  did,  but  Dr. 
Johnson  was  a  man  who  could  not  be  left  alone  with 
his  thoughts.  Many  whose  hearts  were  haunted  by 
something  unbearable  must  have  shared  his  clinging  to 
crowded  streets,  but  probably  no  modern  whose  spirit 
was  as  unclouded  as  that  of  Socrates  would  have  cared 
so  little  to  visit  that  grassy  bank  within  a  few  miles  of  the 
Acropolis,  where  the  waters  of  the  Ilissus  murmured 
through  the  shade  of  the  lofty  plane-trees,  and  shrubs 
framed  the  odorous  nook  with  clustering  blossoms, 
shutting  in  the  stroller  into  a  paradise  of  sight,  scent, 
and  sound.  So  at  least  the  Cockney  of  our  day  would 
feel  it,  and  so  did  Socrates  for  a  moment,  but  apparently 
for  no  longer.  He  acquiesces  in  the  scoff  of  his  com- 
panion, "You  are  really  just  like  a  tourist  with  3'our 
guide."  ^  "  Trees  and  country  places,"  he  urges  in  apolog}^ 
"  have  nothing  to  teach  a  learner."  To  the  cultivated 
inhabitant  of  Athens  or  Rome  the  country  might  be  a 
pleasing  scene  for  music  and  lovemaking,  or  a  prized 
1  ^auyoixitxf  TLvl  Kal  qvk  eVixwpiv  ioiKa^  (Plato,  Phaedrus,  230). 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  137 

source  of  wealth,  but  all  that  was  an  object  of  ordinary 
and  earnest  aspiration  was  left  behind  in  the  towns. 
The  enjoyment  of  rural  life  belongs  to  the  modern  world, 
where  the  unity  is  the  nation,  not  the  city  ;  where  the 
privacy  of  home  has  won  itself  a  long  tradition  of  rever- 
ence, where  the  passive  side  of  life  is  associated  with 
honour  and  picturesqueness,  and  the  city  has  fallen  so 
much  into  the  background  that  a  taste  has  arisen  for 
whatever  is  most  unlike  a  town. 

This  local  change  thus  gathers  up  and  symbolizes  the 
moral  change  between  the  world  of  antiquity  and  of  our 
own  day.  What  a  Greek  or  Roman  meant  by  a  good  man 
was  a  good  citizen.'^  A  good  man,  in  the  modern  concep- 
tion, may  possibly  be  a  very  indifferent  citizen  ;  a  good 
citizen  may  certainly  be  an  immoral  man.  Or  rather 
the  very  word  citizen  has  ceased  to  be  applicable,  and 
the  difficulty  of  finding  another  with  which  to  replace 
it  shows  that  the  relation  it  expresses  has  changed  its 
importance.  An  English  or  French  man  may  be  in  all 
private  relations  just,  truthful,  and  generous,  and  may 
take  very  little  interest  in  the  welfare  of  his  country. 
It  is  a  defect  in  him  that  he  fails  to  do  so,  no  doubt  ; 
still  a  man  may  have  some  good  qualities  and  not  all 
good  qualities.  But  how  much  more  than  this  we 
should  mean  if  we  were  to  speak  of  an  Athenian  as 
indifferent  to  tlie  welfare  of  Athens  !  The  difference 
between  him  and  a  similar  Englishman  is  twofold. 
In  one  sense  England  is  too  large  to  be  to  an  English- 
man what  Athens  was  to  an  Athenian  ;  in  another 
sense  it  is  too  small.  It  is  not  an  entity  that  can  be 
associated  with  definite  and   familiar  images,  with  ideas 

'  Tiicrc  is  a  passage  in  ,1  letter  of  Cicero's  to  I-cntulus,  Ad  Fam.  ix.  (quern 
bonum  civern  semper  habuisset,  bonum  viruni  esse  [)ateretur),  which  may  appear 
a  confutation  of  Ibis  statement,  I  believe  that  one  who  studies  the  whole  letter 
will  find  in  it  a  fresh  illustration  of  the  view  in  the  text,  but  it  docs  also  show 
that  Cicero  was  on  the  threshold  of  a  different  view. 


138  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

all  called  up  at  once  by  the  word  home.      It  requires 
some  power  of  abstraction  to  take  in.      And  then,  again, 
it  is   only  a  part  of  that  whole  which   a  modern  con- 
templates  as  making  just  the  same  sort  of  claim  that 
in   the   ancient  world   the  city  made    upon   the  citizen. 
The    nation    is  a  whole    at    once   more  vast    and    more 
incomplete  than  was  the  city.      It   loses   unity  both   as 
a  combination   of  many  classes  and   interests  and   also 
as  a   fraction  of  humanity.      It   refers   to   unities   below 
itself  and  a  unity  above  ;   and   though  it  has  a  unity  of 
its  own,  and  one  of  a   majestic  and  enduring  character, 
still  we  feel   that   many  causes   may  prevent   good  men 
from  entering  into  any  conscious  relation  with  this  unity  ; 
they  may  fail  to  respond  to  the  claim  which   it  makes, 
and  yet  be  worthy  of  much  respect.     But  a  Greek  who 
was    indifferent    to  political    duty  had   almost  no  other 
duty  to  fall  back  upon  ;   a  Roman  had  absolutely  none. 
Philosophy  did  present  to  a  few  spirits  some  such  alter- 
native among  the  nation  of  thinkers  ;  the  Athenian  could  . 
find  a  country  elsewhere  than  in   the  city  which  nestled  j 
at  the  foot  of  the  Acropolis.      But  in  the  very  mention 
of  such  an  alternative,  we  circumscribe  the  field  of  duty, 
for  average  mankind,  within  the  region  that  concerns  the 
relation  of  a  man  to  the  State  of  which  he  forms  a  part. 
We  cannot  follow  this  change  on  the  supposition  that 
it    is   simply    a    matter   of  addition    (if  we    regard    the 
duties   that   a   sense  of   individuality  has  added   to  the 
ancient  standard  as   the  most  important  element),  or  of 
subtraction  (if  we  think  that  of  the  political  energy  which 
we  have  lost  by  the  change.)      It  is   not  arithmetic  but 
chemistry  that  gives  us  its  type.     The  whole  of  duty  is 
modified  when  we  change  the  hierarchy  of  duty.      How 
significant  is  the  etymology  of  "  prerogative,"  the  section 
that  was  asked  first  for    its    opinion  !      There  lies   the 
whole  force  of  an  ideal.      Which  do  you  consult  first  ? 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  139 

Everything  else  will  be  different.  An  Englishman  is 
asked  first  whether  he  is  a  good  son,  a  good  father,  a 
good  husband  ;  if  he  be  all  these,  the  fact  that  he  is 
not  a  good  citizen  is  viewed  indulgently.  A  Greek  was 
asked  first  whether  he  was  a  good  citizen  ;  if  he  must 
answer  this  in  the  negative,  his  filial,  paternal,  conjugal 
excellence  went  for  nothing.  What  we  demand  first 
gives  the  keynote  to  duty ;  duties  are  not  merely  re- 
arranged, they  are  transformed  by  change  of  order. 
Those  influences  which  gave  the  ancient  State  its  sacred 
character  cannot  so  expand  their  area  as  to  take  in 
humanity ;  their  power  and  their  limitations  disappear 
together.  The  class,  the  nation,  even  the  human  race 
in  its  totality,  are  all  unfitted  to  succeed  the  classical 
ideal  of  the  State.  There  is  no  possible  human  group 
which  we  can  contemplate  as  the  Greek  contemplated 
the  city ;  no  man  can  feel  himself  a  part  of  the  human 
race  with  the  same  definiteness  of  loyal  reverence  as  an 
Athenian  felt  himself  a  son  of  Athens  or  a  Roman  of 
Rome.  And  yet  the  moment  we  fix  our  attention  on 
some  smaller  group  than  the  human  race,  we  encumber 
ourselves  with  a  problem  almost  as  strange  to  the 
ancients  as  the  differential  calculus ; — we  want  some 
code  as  to  our  demeanour  to  "  them  that  are  without." 
It  is  an  essential  part  of  this  ancient  ideal  that  only 
some  human  beings  should  have  rights.  The  city  was 
an  exclusive  unity  in  a  sense  in  which  no  modern  group 
is  exclusive.  We  cannot  look  at  the  world  or  at  the 
nation  as  the  Greek  looked  at  the  city ;  his  city  had  its 
slaves,  his  world  had  its  foes  ;  his  virtue  depended  on 
both.  Give  the  slave  and  the  enemy  rights  and  you 
need  a  new  starting-point  of  moral  thought. 

Slavery  has  been  a  part  of  modern  life  for  at  least 
as  long  as  it  was  of  ancient  life,  and  has  been  defended 
in  modern,  far  more  passionately  than   in   ancient  times. 


I40  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

But  the  whole  movement  of  modern  thought  has  been 
away  from  it.  It  has  been  defended  by  those  who  were 
interested  in  its  preservation.  In  ancient  times  there 
was  neither  defence  nor  attack.  When  Plato  drew  up 
a  constitution  for  an  ideal  State — a  State  so  far  removed 
from  all  actual  experience  that  no  mother  among  the 
governing  class  should  know  her  own  child — the  only 
change  he  suggested  in  reference  to  slavery  was  that  no 
Greek  should  enslave  a  Greek.  And  this  mild  measure 
of  reform  was  so  little  original  to  his  genius  that  it  had 
already  been  put  in  practice  by  one  of  the  Athenian 
generals  in  the  great  war  drawing  to  its  conclusion  at 
the  supposed  date  of  the  Dialogue.'^  Plato  only  conceived 
it  possible  to  imagine,  in  his  ideal  city,  such  a  modifica- 
tion of  slavery  as  a  countryman  had  already  carried  out 
amid  all  the  difficulties  of  actual  warfare.  Perhaps  no 
other  passage  shows  us  so  forcibly  how  deeply  slavery 
had  sent  its  roots  into  the  heart  of  all  ancient  thought. 
The  experience  of  the  teacher,  we  should  have  thought, 
would  have  been  no  less  suggestive  than  that  of  the 
soldier ;  the  life  of  Socrates  himself  might  surely  have 
shown  that  it  was  possible  for  a  man  to  lead  the  life  of 
a  freeman  with  hardly  any  recourse  to  the  labour  of  a 
slave.  But  it  was  not  so.  Greek  was  not,  in  the  ideal 
Greek  city,  to  enslave  Greek ;  the  men  who  shared  each 
other's  language  and  religion  were  not  to  strip  each 
other  of  all  that  made  life  worth  having ;  but  this  was 
all.  And  it  is  evident,  from  the  whole  history  of  the 
time,  that  to  men  reared  in  the  atmosphere  of  slavery, 
this  was  much. 

The  men  who  felt  so   differently  about  slavery  would 
feel   differently  about  much   beside.      It  would  form  the 

1  Plato,  Rep.,  469  ;  cf.  Xenoph.,  Hellen.,  i.  6, 14.  Callicratidas,  the  Spartan 
admiral,  who  refused  to  sell  Greek  prisoners  into  slavery,  succeeded  Lysander, 
B.C.  406. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  141 

mould  of  all  subordination  and  supply  the  associations 
of  all  power.  It  would  fix  the  position  of  those  who 
were  not  slaves  in  name,  but  who  were,  almost  as  much 
as  slaves,  cut  off  from  the  life  which  a  Greek  regarded 
as  alone  worth  living.  The  whole  artizan  class  was 
attracted,  as  it  were,  by  the  neighbourhood  of  slavery 
into  an  atmosphere  of  degradation.  Labour  was  servile  ; 
its  associations  all  carried  the  mind  towards  a  life  of 
bondage.  "There  is  nothing  disgraceful  in  work,"  says 
Hesiod,^  but  the  words  are  rather  a  protest  against  Greek 
feeling  than  an  expression  of  it.  The  hatred  of  labour 
was  stamped  on  the  very  structure  of  language ;  Greek 
denotes  labour  and  pain  by  the  same  word.  All  work 
rendered  political  life  impossible,  and  there  was  no 
interest  in  any  other.  The  union  of  professional  and 
political  life  is  a  discovery  of  the  modern  world ;  it 
belongs  to  representative  government.  What  we  mean 
by  the  Franchise  was  a  boon  that  a  Greek  would  have 
despised.  Once  every  three  or  four  years  to  take  part 
in  nominating  the  legislators  of  the  land  would  have 
been  to  his  imagination  a  very  paltry  advance  towards 
the  life  of  a  Freeman.  We  come  nearer  his  point  of 
view  in  regarding  all  Greek  citizens  as  members  of  Parlia- 
ment, as,  in  fact,  they  were.  Englishmen  feel  it  very  flat 
to  lose  this  keen  interest  when  once  they  have  shared 
it,  but  they  do  not  connect  the  loss  with  any  ideas  or 
disgrace.  They  know  that  a  man  may  lead  a  refined, 
liberal  life — the  life  of  a  gentleman  in  the  best  sense 
of  the  word — without  taking  any  part  in  the  work  of 
legislation.      But    the    loss    of  this    interest    deprived   a 

1  "  Works  and  Days,"  300.  C/.  Plato,  Charmides,  163,  for  a  curiously  vivid 
illustration  of  Greek  recoil  from  this  praise  of  industry  :—f/j.aOov  yap  nap' 
'11(tl6oov'  (s.iys  Critias)  os  iifv  ^pyov  5'  ouo^v  bveidoi'  oiVt  ouv  avrov,  .  .  .  d  rd 
Totai/ra  ouoivi  ftc  ivtiooi  <f>6.vai  dvai  ffKvTOTOfioOvTi,  &c.  Critias  thinks  that 
Hcsiod  could  not  possibly  have  had  such  work  as  the  shoemaker's  in  his  mind 
when  he  said  work  was  not  disgraceful. 


142  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Greek  of  all  that  was  worth   having.      The   associations 
of  slave  labour  took   the   heart   out   of  all  work.     And 
a  man  obliged   to  work   for  his   living  could   even  less   , 
have  taken  part  in  the  ancient   than   the  modern  Parlia-  / 
mentary   councils,   the  former    not   being  arranged,   like-. 
the  latter,  with  a  view  to  professional  life.      Hence  the  ' 
life  of  a  Freeman  stopped  where  industry,  as  we  under- 
stand the  word,  began.      On  the  one  hand  there  was  the 
life  of  politics,  on  the  other  that  of  slavery,  and  there  was 
no  other  difference   between  human   beings  which  could 
approach  in  importance  that  between  these  two  lives. 

Hence  the  division  between  the  rich  and  the  poor 
was,  in  a  political  point  of  view,  greater  in  the  ancient 
city  than  in  the  modern  State.  No  difference  between 
two  inhabitants  of  Athens  or  Sparta,  it  is  true,  can  have 
equalled  the  differences  that  separate  an  inhabitant  of 
Park  Lane  from  the  inhabitants  of  some  back  street,  as 
far  as  all  outward  circumstances  go.  But  the  develop- 
ment of  industrial  and  commercial  life  on  the  one  hand, 
and  on  the  other  that  of  representative  government, 
have  changed  all  the  associations  of  labour.  A  Duke's 
son  in  England  engages  in  employment  that  an  Athenian 
would  have  thought  disgraceful  for  any  freeman  ;  while 
those  who  would  hardly  have  ranked  with  freemen,  if 
we  take  in  all  the  associations  of  the  word,  assist  in 
the  nomination  of  the  governors.  We  must  empty  in 
imagination  the  chasm  which  has  thus  been  filled  up,  if 
we  would  understand  the  ancient  contempt  for  labour. 
It  is  the  foremost  thinkers  of  Greece,  who  formulate  in 
its  hardest  distinctness,  the  scorn  for  the  artizan  class 
which  means  virtual  slavery.  The  artizans,  Plato  tells 
us,  must  be  taught  that  they  differ  from  the  true  free- 
men of  a  city  as  wood  differs  from  gold.^     "  The  artizan,"   ) 

1  Plato,  Rep. ,  415.  This  passage  is  curiously  like  the  description  of  castes  in 
the  "  Institutes  of  Menu,"  but  it  is  also  unlike,  for  Socrates  says  : — ^ari  6'  ore 
tK  xpi'O'oi'  yevv-qduT)  hv  dpyvpovv.     But  the  guardians  were  to  judge  of  this. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  143 

says  Aristotle,  "  only  partakes  of  virtue  as  far  as  he 
partakes  of  slavery."  ^  They  both  felt  that  civil  life,  in 
the  true  sense  of  the  word,  must  be  something  excep- 
tional. It  would  be  a  gain  that  the  artizan  class  should 
be  reduced  to  slavery,  inasmuch  as  the  free  labourers 
seemed  a  specimen  of  that  chaotic  condition  which 
showed  what  all  society  would  be  if  a  share  in  free- 
dom ceased  to  mean  a  share  in  government.  The 
slave  stood  closer  to  civil  life  than  the  artizan,  since 
he  belonged  to  a  governing  famil}',  and  in  some  sense, 
therefore,  must  be  considered  more  of  a  participant  in 
the  blessing  of  freedom.  For  those  who,  by  the  decrees 
of  nature,  were  shut  out  from  taking  a  share  in  govern- 
ment the  next  best  thing  was  to  be  fully  and  entirely 
its  objects. 

We  cannot  too  often  remind  ourselves  of  the  difference 
between  the  sanction  of  reluctant  practical  acquiescence 
and  that  of  incorporation  in  an  ideal.  When  Disraeli 
called  the  rich  and  the  poor  the  two  nations,  he  pointed 
to  a  blot  on  our  civilization  which  all  reformers  desire 
to  remove.  But  when  Socrates  is  made  by  Plato  to 
use  the  same  language  about  the  "  two  States,"  he 
refers  to  a  division  which  his  ideal  was  to  exaggerate 
and  petrify.^  People  who  know  Plato  only  by  repute 
are  apt  to  imagine  that  the  regulations  as  to  women  and 
children,  which  are  all  that  they  know  about  his  "  Re- 
public," apply  to  the  bulk  of  his  citizens.  This  seems 
to  have  been  the  belief  even  of  so  diligent  a  student 
of  Plato  as  Sir  T.  More,  when  he  gave  his  version  of 
Plato's  romance  and  enriched  our  language  with  a  word 
which  commemorates   the  yearning   for  an   ideal   State. 

1  Ar.,  Pol.,  i.  13,  13  :— /caJ  roaovrov  f7rt/3dX\ei  (sc.  6  uoOXos)  dpcr^s  6Vov  irtp 
Kttt  SouXfiay. 

>  Plato,  kcp.,  422,  3  :— 5i/o  filv,  k&v  onovv  ■3,  &c.  He  thought  he  was  going 
to  get  rid  of  this  duality,  but  his  pupil  has  ail  readers  with  him  when  he  says, 
iv  fiiq.  yap  TriXtt  ovo  ttIi\u%  dcaYKaioi'  tlvM  {Ar.,  Pol.,  ii.  5,  p.  1254,  a.  24). 


144  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

It  is  a  natural  mistake,  and   one  which   a  hasty  perusal 
of  the  "  Republic  "  does  not  remove.     The  truth  is,  that 
Plato  took  so  very  little  interest  in  average  citizens  that 
we  may  almost  forget   their  existence  when  we  are  con- 
sidering his  political  ideas.      The  bulk  of  his  common- 
wealth   must,   like    any   other,    have    been    made    up   of 
those  employed  in  the  hard,  prosaic   work  of  life ;  and, 
as  he  himself  reminds   us,  every  single  class  among  his 
artizans    and    mechanics    must    have    outnumbered    the 
class  of  the  guardians  many  times  over.      And  yet  when 
Socrates  seems  to   be  speaking  of  the  citizens,  we  find 
that  he  always  means  the  rulers — the  aristocracy,  as  we 
should  best  name  them   if  we  wanted   to  keep  in  mind 
their   relative    proportion    to    the    rest.      The    habit    of 
mind   engendered   by   slavery   made  it   easy   for  him   to 
ignore   average   mankind    to   an    extent   that   a   modern 
finds  it  impossible  to  follow.      The  artizans,  the  agricul- 
turists, the  mechanics,  who  would  make  up  the  average 
body  of  citizens,  are  in   the   "Republic"  absorbed  into 
that  vast  atmosphere  of  slavery  which  encircles  the  life 
of  the  city  with  a   bulk  far  exceeding  its  own.      To   all 
intents  and   purposes   they  are  slaves.      They  have  no 
share  in  the  government ;   they  are  simple  objects  of  rule 
to    the   guardians,    whose   necessities    they   are   obliged 
to  supply,  and  whose  decisions  they  have  no  power  of 
influencing.       The    guardians    are    self-denying    beings, 
devoted  to  the  welfare  of  the  State ;   and  in  our  modern 
sense  they  may  be  regarded   as  less  free  than  any  other 
class,  for  all   those  oppressive  regulations  which  Plato 
had   adapted   from  the   discipline   of  Lycurgus  apply  to 
them  alone.      The  rest  of  the  citizens  are  to  be  treated, 
we   must    presume,   like    commonplace   mortals,   but   we 
hear  almost  nothing   about  them.      They  stand  side  by 
side  with  the  true  citizens  as  aliens  do,  and  thus  consti- 
tute a  sort  of  rival  State,  which  had  little  interest  for  the 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LA  W.  145 

philosophic  thinker,  but  in  which  the  modern  politician 
finds  the  main  object  of  his  care.  This  moral  insigni- 
ficance, to  a  mind  like  Plato's,  of  the  whole  artizan  class, 
measures  for  us  the  contagion  of  slavery  far  more  effec- 
tively than  any  severe  regulations  for  the  repression  of 
this  class.  No  cleft  is  so  deep  as  that  between  beings 
who  are  and  are  not  worth  the  effort  of  discipline. 

Greece  gathers  up  the  ideal  of  the  past  and  the  future. 
It  was  impossible  that  such  a  nation  should  be  other 
than  short-lived.  Of  that  brilliant  blossoming-time  of 
early  life  and  thought,  as  perhaps  of  the  blossoming-time 
of  all  that  is  most  precious  in  human  development,  we 
may  say,  if  we  measure  it  by  the  lifetime  of  nations, 
that  it  was — 

"  Momentary  as  a  sound, 
Swift  as  a  shadow,  short  as  any  dream  ; 
Brief  as  the  lightning  in  the  coUied  night 
That,  in  a  spleen,  unfolds  both  heaven  and  earth, 
And  ere  a  man  hath  power  to  say  '  Behold  !  ' 
The  jaws  of  darkness  do  devour  it  up. 
So  quick  bright  things  come  to  confusion." 

Two  long  lives,  indeed,  would  include  the  whole  of 
that  period  of  "  bright  things  "  which  has  left  the  trace 
of  its  lustre  so  deeply  impressed  on  the  thought  and 
imagination  of  all  subsequent  ages  that  v^e  are  apt  to 
forget  how  transitory  it  was  as  an  actual  fact.  Ancient 
life  was  not  constituted  for  any  "  balance  of  power."  Its 
genius  led  irresistibly  to  a  view  of  national  relations  in 
which  every  member  was  either  master  or  slave,  and 
the  life  of  a  nation  organized  on  an  ideal  other  than  this 
was  necessarily  brief.  Indeed,  it  is  just  this  element  of 
equality  which  explains  the  fugitiveness  of  Greek  life  ;  it 
was  the  amount  of  divergent  impulse  within  itself  that 
prevented  any  stable  unity,  and  left  it  a  prey  to  attack 
from  without.     The  whole  life  of  Greece  must  be  regarded 


146  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

as  a  sort  of  prophetic  rehearsal  of  modern  Europe,  before 
the  stage  was  cleared  for  that  drama  of  history  which 
forms  a  consecutive  whole. 

The  ideal  city  in  the  classic  essay  of  Greek  political 
genius  embodies  the  hard  and  narrow  exclusiveness  which 
belonged  to  ancient  politics.  But  this  exclusive  unity 
is  very  imperfectly  exhibited  in  the  life  of  Greece.  A 
rich  genius,  on  the  one  hand,  brings  out  individual  life 
into  compromising  predominance ;  on  the  other,  a  strong 
national  tendency  confuses  the  unity  of  the  city  by  suggest- 
ingthe  unity  of  the  race.  We  have  endeavoured  tomeasure 
the  tendency  towards  individual  distinctness  by  showing 
how  fierce  a  jealousy  watched  over  every  personality 
that  seemed  to  draw  the  eye  away  from  the  supreme 
oneness  of  the  State ;  we  have  sought  to  shadow  forth 
the  prophetic  element  which  was  embodied  in  the  life  of 
the  artist  people,  and  which  awakened  that  fine  repulsion 
by  which  genius  is  warned  to  turn  aside  from  the  soli- 
citations of  something  tempting  and  premature.  But  we 
see  the  tendency  more  clearly  than  the  checks  on  it. 
Greece  foreshadowed  both  the  individual  and  the  inter- 
national life  that  belong  to  the  modern  world.  Greek 
political  life  is  troubled  by  its  own  wealth  ;  it  seems  to 
have  realized  the  saying  of  Montaigne—"  Malheur  a  celui 
qui  est  en  avance  de  son  siecle  ! "  It  anticipates  in  its 
tiny  area  the  life  of  Europe,  and  shows  the  swift  decay 
that  follows  so  often  on  premature  development.  The 
state  of  antiquity  must  be  either  hamm.er  or  anvil.  But 
Greece,  with  its  system  of  varied  and  equivalent  interests 
and  its  common  ideas  and  beliefs,  presented  the  same 
kind  of  unity  and  the  same  kind  of  diversity  that  modern 
Europe  exhibits  on  a  larger  scale,  while  yet  it  occu- 
pied only  the  moral  stage  of  a  race  totally  unequipped 
for  relations  with  foreigners.  The  cities  of  Greece, 
hke   the  nations   of  Europe,   were    the  occupants   of  a 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  147 

common  platform,  from  which  they  looked  down  on  the 
barbarian  world,  and  within  which  each  member  felt 
himself  bound  to  his  fellows  by  the  close  and  inde- 
structible ties  of  a  common  race ;  but,  unlike  the  nations 
of  modern  Europe,  they  had  no  standard  for  the  mutual 
relations  of  such  members.  Europe  has  had  little  enough 
at  any  time,  it  is  true  ;  but  Dante's  dream  of  a  Holy 
Roman  Empire  throws  a  thin,  pure  ray  across  the  dust 
of  the  ages,  and  that  sense  of  human  brotherhood  which 
formed  the  vital  influence  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
begins  to  dawn  before  it  is  quite  extinct.  We  have 
always  been  struggling  towards  some  ideal  of  a  brother- 
hood of  nations.  The  ancient  world,  if  it  caught  sight 
of  such  an  ideal  for  a  moment,  had  to  struggle  away 
from  it. 

It  is  in  the  power  contrasted  with  Greece,  as  the  oak 
is  contrasted  with  the  blossom  of  a  day,  that  we  find 
this  ideal  of  inequality  and  exclusiveness  which  makes  up 
the  moral  code  of  antiquit}',  worked  out  consistently  and 
logically.  The  master  and  slave  view  of  human  life 
colours  not  only  the  individual  relations,  but  the  national 
ideal  of  the  Roman.  Here  are  no  Athens  and  Sparta  ; 
here  is  no  community  of  kindred  States  among  which 
rivalry  is  possible,  and  from  which  a  prophetic  genius 
might  conceivably  fashion  forth  some  such  expansion  of 
development  as  modern  Europe.  Here  in  that  civiliza- 
tion, under  the  shadow  of  which  we  must  look  for  the 
origin  of  ours,  the  belief  that  some  men  exist  for  the 
sake  of  others  is  worked  out  in  its  hardest  distinctness. 
Rome  is  to  rule  the  world,  and  Romans  alone  are  truly 
free.  Greece,  with  its  wealth  of  relations,  hesitated 
between  the  unity  of  the  city  and  of  the  nation,  and, 
belonging  to  that  ancient  life  in  which  there  was  no 
other  unity,  it  perished  in  the  struggle.  Rome,  in  its 
meagre  and  monotonous  development,  is  free  from  all 


148  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

such  perplexity ;  it  accepts  consistently  and  logically  the 
aristocratic  theory  on  which  ancient  society  is  based, 
and  carries  out  the  ideal  of  the  old  world  in  all  its  naked 
impressiveness.  It  is  here,  then,  that  we  must  seek  the 
true  moral  bearing  of  a  view  of  life  which  depends  in 
the  last  resort  upon  slavery.  Greece  shows  us  this,  but 
show  us  so  much  else,  that  in  Greek  life  we  do  not  see 
it  distinctly.  Rome  shows  us  this,  and  shows  us  little 
else.  As  we  turn  from  the  variety,  the  dramatic  effec- 
tiveness, the  light  and  shade,  the  strong  individuality  of 
Greek  history,  to  the  monotonous  onward  march  of  that 
in  which  it  is  swallowed  up,  we  cannot  but  feel  that 
here  the  life  of  antiquity  reaches  its  maturity.  The 
hesitation  of  a  rich  ideal  is  past,  and  the  leading  shoot, 
as  it  were,  is  allowed  a  free  development.  The  indi- 
vidual and  the  nation  are  alike  crushed,  and  the  unit}'' 
of  the  city  is  recognized  as  the  only  basis  of  right. 

Both  those  influences,  which  at  once  enrich  and  dis- 
turb the  course  of  Greek  development,  are  wanting  to 
Rome.  She  would  never  have  become  the  mistress  of 
the  world  if  there  had  been  an  ancient  Italy  in  the  same 
sense  as  there  was  an  ancient  Greece.  And  then,  again, 
Rome  has  no  personal  interest ;  the  Roman  character  is 
monotonous,  prosaic,  intellectually  commonplace,  want- 
ing in  vividness  and  individuality.  All  the  interest  of 
Roman  history  lies  in  its  victims ;  the  only  striking 
figure  it  shows  us,  till  we  reach  the  threshold  of  the 
modern  world,  is  that  of  Rome's  heroic  foe,  shattered  in 
the  attempt  to  save  his  country  from  being  pulverized 
beneath  her  tread.  The  blank  of  character  brings  out 
the  greatness  of  destiny.  The  valour  of  Romans  ex- 
plains insufficiently  the  sway  of  Rome ;  its  success 
suggests  some  supernatural  influence  seconding  their 
patriotism  by  a  hostile  demeanour  to  every  foe  and 
neutralizing  alike  the  power  of  genius  and  of  numbers, 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  149 

when  they  combined  against  the  elect  cit\^      Hannibal 
was  brought   to  seek  peace  by  being  taught  to  distrust 
the  fortune  of  his  race/  "  seeing  how  she  sports  with 
us  as  with  children  ;  "  but   Caesar  could   encourage  his 
soldiers  in  their  hour  of  despondency  "^  by  urging  them 
to  trust  in  his  fortune  no  less  than  in  his  prowess,  and 
the  dagger  of  the  assassin  could  not  confute  a  trust  com- 
memorated in   the  establishment   of  the   Empire.      The 
Fortune  of  Hannibal  shows  us  the  fitful  gleam  accorded 
to    the   adversary   of  Rome,   as   the   Fortune  of   Caesar 
shows  us  the  steady  blaze  shed  on   its   representative. 
The  historian  who  reviewed  the  progress  of  Rome  from 
its   summit   discovered   in   it  a  harmony  of  the  colossal 
and  the  minute  which  bore  witness  to  the  all-inclusive 
character  of  the  supernatural  power  to  which  it  was  due. 
The  genius  of  Rome  seemed  to  Plutarch  to  watch  over 
the  smallest  events  with  unfaltering  vigilance  and  over 
the  greatest  with  unimpaired  power.^      By  him  the  death 
of  Alexander  and  the  cackling  of  geese  in  the  Capitol 
were   equally   regarded   as    links    in    the    mighty  chain. 
In  his  eyes  the  premature  close  of  the  greatest  earthly 
career  was  not  more  distinctly  foreordained  with  a  view 
to  the  protection  of  the   State  which  that  career  might 
have  overshadowed,  than  was  the  hiss  of  frightened  fowl, 
preserving  the   city  from   enemies   more   numerous   but 
less  formidable.     Rome  is,  in  fact,  the  heir  of  Alexander,* 
succeeding  to   his   influence,   his    fame,   and,   above    all, 
his  Fortune.      This  brilliant  personality  condenses   and 
prefigures  the  part  that  Rome  is  to  play  in  the  world's 

'  In  his  address  to  Scipio  before  Zama  (Polybius,  Excerpt  xv.  i). 

»  CrEsar,  "  Uc  Bcllo  Gallico,"  i.  40  ;  Plutarch,  "  Dc  Fortune  Romanorum,"  6, 

'  Sec  his  treatise,  "De  KortunA  liomanorum,"  pi ssim.  Virtue  and  Fortune 
contest  the  authorship  of  Roman  greatness  ;  the  speech  of  Fortune  only  is  pre- 
served, and  was  ihercfonr,  one  imagines,  the  best.  For  the  gcjse  in  the  Capitol, 
c.  12  ;  for  the  d<;alh  of  .Mcxander,  c.  13. 

*  I'lutarch,  "  Dc  Alexandri  Magni  Fortuni  aut  Virtule." 


ISO  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

history,  and  the  antithesis  of  the  conquering  State  and 
the  conquering  hero  is  not  confused  by  any  striking 
heroic  figure  within  the  State  itself.  The  throne  is 
left  empty  for  supernatural  power  by  the  failure  of  any 
natural  claimant. 

In  truth,  it  is  first  with  the  rise  of  Rome  that  the 
History  of  Europe  may  be  said  to  begin.  The  history 
of  Greece  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  chapters  in  the 
biography  of  our  race ;  the  history  of  Rome,  so  far  as 
that  is  possible  to  a  series  of  very  important  events, 
would  be  allowed  by  most  readers  to  be  one  of  the  least 
interesting.  Yet  the  arid,  prosaic  narrative  is  a  part  of 
history  in  a  sense  that  the  vivid  drama  is  not.  It  would 
be  possible  to  know  the  outward  development  of  the 
modern  world  thoroughly,  and  not  to  know  that  Greece 
had  existed.  Philosophy  and  Literature  bear  its  record 
in  the  very  structure  of  their  growth,  but  History,  as  a 
connected  sequence  of  events,  finds  no  point  of  juncture 
between  the  life  of  Greece  and  that  of  our  own  day.  It 
blossomed  into  a  sudden  wealth  of  life  and  beauty,  withered 
as  suddenly,  and  dropping  a  hundred  seeds  into  the  bosom 
of  all  art  and  all  thought,  passed  away,  leaving  no  heir  in 
the  life  of  nations.  Rome,  on  the  other  hand,  lived  its 
hard,  narrow,  prosaic  life  as  a  member  of  the  genealogy 
of  modern  Europe.  History  is  inexplicable  if  it  omit  her 
life ;  we  shall  never  find  ourselves  at  home  in  France  or 
Germany,  or  even  in  England,  unless  we  know  Rome. 
And  we  may  say,  therefore,  that  the  idea  of  a  philosophy 
of  history  first  emerges  in  the  allegoric  conception  of  a 
Fortune  of  Rome.  The  expression  sounds  exaggerated, 
but  it  is  almost  copied  from  the  Greek  historian,  who 
tells  us  that  he  began  his  history  from  the  assured  pre- 
dominance of  Rome  because  this  is  the  very  start  of  all 
he  understands  by  History.  Before  that  time  he  could 
discern  only  a  desultory  narrative  of  unconnected  events  ; 


RO^fE  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  151 

after  it  History  assumes  ^  "  an  entire  and  perfect  body," 
to  which  the  Empire  State  has  supphed  a  heart.  All 
events  take  a  new  meaning  in  their  relation  to  the  goal 
which  then  appears  for  the  first  time.  Other  nations 
have  "  had  their  day  and  ceased  to  be  ; "  they  are  epi- 
sodes in  the  biography  of  the  race.  But  Rome,  when 
she  has  ceased  to  exist  as  a  ruling  power,  remains  as  an 
ancestral  reminiscence  ;  she'  bequeathed  to  the  world  the 
mould  of  Government  and  the  framework  of  a  Church. 
The  connection  of  such  a  State  with  divine  influence  is 
visible  from  the  first  ;  a  mysterious  power  seemed  to 
hover  over  the  small  spot  of  earth  hemmed  in  by  so 
great  a  multitude  of  enemies,  and  to  explain  its  triumph 
over  all. 

Hence  we  may  say  of  Roman  rule  that  it  is,  in  an 
important,  though  a  narrow,  sense,  a  preparation  for 
monotheism.  It  is  not,  as  in  Greece,  where  Mythology 
seems  to  provide  some  sort  of  rival  to  Law,  a  fount  of 
picturesque  imagery,  of  various  and  fanciful  legend  ;  it 
is  reticent,  prosaic,  sombre,  affording  little  food  to  the 
imagination,  and  no  point  of  crystallization  of  allegory  and 
mystic  thought.  But  it  tends  from  the  first  towards  unity. 
Its  abundant  abstractions,  evidently  mere  epithets  of  the 
supreme  power  of  which  Rome  appeared  the  incarnate 
expression,  reveal  its  true  meaning,  and,  prosaic  as  they 
are,  yet  prepare  a  place  for  the  One.  In  almost  all  moral 
aspects  we  may  say  that  Rome  was  a  sort  of  antitype  of 
the  God  made  known  by  Christ.  But  a  large  element 
of  awe  of  the  Unseen  is  non-moral.  Not  only  in  that 
just  law  which  Roman  dominion  was  always  defying 
even  while  it  spread  its  area,  but  even  in  that  very 
dominion  in  the  establishment  of  which  there  was  no 
attempt  at  justice,  and  sometimes  the  most  flagrant 
injustice,    there  yet    was    a    training    for   submission,    a 

'  cwfiaroeioi]  cvfipalyu  yhfaOai  tj/j'  'i(TTopU  v  ^Polybius,  i.  3). 


J 52  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

discipline  in  acceptance  of  the  inevitable,  which  de- 
velops capacities  needed,  and  only  fully  exercised,  in 
the  acknowledgment  of  the  One  Invisible  Ruler.  The 
power  of  Rome  was  not  elevating  in  any  spiritual  sense ; 
it  was  a  hard,  crushing  despotism.  But  even  a  hard 
crushing  despotism  is  more  tolerable  when  it  is  strong 
and  steady.  Tyranny  is  usually  a  fitful  thing ;  we  hardly 
recognize  how  much  easier  it  is  to  bear  when  it  is  per- 
fectly stable.  There  was  something  in  the  very  com- 
pleteness of  Roman  conquests  that,  to  a  certain  extent, 
softened  the  evil  of  conquest.  If  Freedom  be  the  first 
blessing  of  a  State,  surely  the  second  is  subordination 
to  a  conqueror  who  rules  the  world.  The  subject  thus 
escapes  the  cruelty  springing  from  fear — that  is,  the 
larger  part  of  all  cruelty. 

The  progress  of  a  conquering  nation  to  the  rule  of  the 
world,  the  gradual  attraction  to  itself  of  all  power,  the 
evolution,  as  it  were,  of  the  central  idea  of  history — all 
this  supplied  the  rule  of  Rome  with  potent  and  subtle 
allies,  captivating  to  the  imagination,  enthralling  to  the 
intellect,  even  of  those  whose  national  life  it  crushed. 
The  desire  for  unity  is  so  deep  in  the  human  heart  that-^ 
even  in  what  is  arduous  and  trying,  the  sense  of  a  plan, 
a  meaning,  brings  with  it  a  wonderful  alleviation.  It 
cannot,  indeed,  overcome  the  intensity  of  vivid  individual 
desire  ;  it  cannot  allay  the  fever  of  anguish  or  melt  the 
ice  of  a  hard  despair.  But  in  all  ordinary  human  trials 
it  will  be  found  that  there  is  a  wonderful  influence  in 
the  contemplation  of  a  large  enduring  reality,  the  sense 
of  a  link  with  the  past  and  the  future,  the  neighbourhood 
of  what  is  impressive  and  permanent.  It  may  exist 
where  there  is  no  love,  no  justice,  no  moral  nobility, 
and  yet  it  has  its  own  steady,  persistent  claim  ;  it  over- 
comes weak  resistance,  and  there  is  more  weak  than 
strong  resistance  in  the  world. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  i53 

The  rule  of  Rome  was  rarely  moral ;   it  was  some- 
times profoundly  immoral.     Nevertheless  its  irresistible 
onward  march  roused  a  profound  feeling  of  resignation 
when    once    it   obtained    any   submission    at    all.      That 
State  of  which  the  assured  predominance  was  the  central 
fact  in    the  world's    history  might  claim   from   its  sub- 
jects an    obedience    in  which    there  was   nothing  base. 
"The  Carthaginians  at  the  moment  of  their  fall  perished 
from   the  earth,   but  the   Greeks  look  on   at  their  own 
calamities,"  ^  exclaims  a  Greek,  with  a  sense  of  envy,  it 
would  appear,   for  the  victim  of  Rome  whose  fate  was 
that  of  more  absolute  ruin.      Yet  when  he  speaks  of  the 
conqueror  of  Greece  as  the  favourite  of  Providence,  the 
expression    is    neither    a  mere    flight  of  rhetoric  nor  a 
piece  of  abject  flattery,  but   a   simple  summing  up   in  a 
few  words  of  the   impression   made   by  the  records  he 
had   set  himself   to  interpret.       The   Fortune   of  Rome 
was   for   Polybius    no  partial    goddess,   though   she  had 
set  her  inexorable  decree  against  his   own  country,   but 
a  being  in  whose  predominance  there  was  a  claim   to 
allegiance  swallowing  up  even  the  claim  of  patriotism  ; 
the  State  was  marked  by  indications  of  Divine  care  so 
definite  and  overwhelming,  that  the  duty  of  submission  to 
its  sway  was  a  part  of  the  duty  of  submission  to  Heaven. 
Hence  it  arises  that  to   the  children  of  Rome   there 
seems  to  have  been   in  the  very  idea  of  dominion  that 
same  kind   of  fascination  which  ordinarily  belongs  only 
to  the  sense  of  its  exercise.      Occupying  the  summit  of 
an  elaborately   fortified  position,  not  only  secured  from 
invasion    by   the   eager  hope   kindled   in   the   circle   im- 
mediately  below,   but  strengthened   by   the  organization 
which    kept    up   within    the    citadel    itself    the    principle 
of  unreserved  subjection  and   irresponsible  control,  they 

'  Polybius,  Kxccrpt  xxxviii.   la.     Sec  an  excellent  article  in  the  Quarterly 
Review,  vol.  cxlviii. 


154  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

jwere  trained  by  every  influence  of  education  and  associa- 
'tion  to  join  perfect  liberty  with  dominion  as  part  of  the 
same  ideal.  Every  aspiration  to  escape  bondage  found 
itself,  by  the  necessity  of  things,  aiming  at  dominion. 
Independence  was  assumed  to  be  an  exceptional  con- 
dition of  humanity,  and  by  that  very  fact  was  invariably 
associated  with  rule.  While  to  us  the  question  is  always, 
Why  should  such  a  one  be  deprived  of  the  right  of 
control  over  his  own  acts  ?  to  them  it  was  rather.  Why 
should  he  be  endowed  with  it  ?  The  absolute  submis- 
sion which  every  one  owed  the  State  he  also  either 
owed  or  claimed  as  a  member  of  that  group  which  was 
the  unit  of  political  organization.  He  was  thus  taught 
from  his  earliest  hour  to  regard  irresponsible  control  as 
natural.  He  was  led  by  all  the  potent  and  subtle  in- 
fluences of  law  to  submit  to  or  to  exercise  this  dominion 
without  criticism  or  scruple.  Irresponsible  authority, 
unreserved  obedience,  were  the  two  poles  of  domestic, 
no  less  than  of  political,  relation.  The  "  Son  under 
Power  "  was,  against  his  father,  no  less  defenceless  than 
the  slave.  No  age,  almost  no  dignity,  ended  his  sub- 
jection ;  he  might  be  a  father  himself,  he  might  fill  the 
highest  offices  of  the  State — he  none  the  less  held  fife, 
liberty,  and  fortune  at  the  pleasure  of  another.  History 
describes  to  us  few  and  dubious  exercises  of  these  paternal 
rights,  but  what  may  be  done  has  always  some  relation 
to  what  is  done.  The  relation  of  the  most  indulgent 
father  to  the  most  independent  son  must  have  been  in- 
fluenced by  the  fact  that  if  the  parental  authority  had 
been  exercised  to  the  detriment  of  the  son's  life  or  liberty 
the  law  would  not  have  stepped  in  to  abridge  it.  We 
see  this  influence  of  legal  right  in  the  only  part  of 
English  law  which  contemplates  (or  did  contemplate  till 
very  lately)  the  exercise  of  control  over  mature  and 
blameless  human  beings — the  position  of  married  women. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  155 

This  is  a  fair  but  inadequate  illustration  of  the  effect  of 
the  Roman  patna  potestas.  The  English  law  takes  cog- 
nizance of  offences  within  the  relation  of  dependence  ; 
the  Roman  law  did  not  recognize  right  on  the  one  side, 
or  duty  on  the  other.  The  plea  which  has  more  than 
once  been  set  up  for  an  English  female  offender,  that 
she  could  not  refuse  to  obey  the  orders  of  her  hus- 
band, has  been  felt  by  every  one,  even  where  it  was 
not  overruled,  to  be  wholly  out  of  harmony  with  the 
spirit  of  our  legal  system.  But  when  a  Roman  officer  ^ 
was  accused  in  the  Senate  of  the  heaviest  crime  of 
which  it  could  take  cognizance — organizing  Civil  War — 
Tiberius,  not  speaking  with  authority  as  Emperor,  but 
pleading  as  an  anxious  and  careful  vindicator  of  the 
laws,  seems  to  have  carried  the  Senate  with  him  in  his 
decision  that  "  a  son  cannot  decline  the  comm.and  of  his 
father."  He  was  speaking  at  a  time  when  the  whole 
system  of  which  this  paternal  authority  was  the  keystone 
had  admitted  a  foreign  element,  when  there  was  another 
spirit  in  the  world,  and  the  whole  fabric  of  Roman 
greatness  was  about  to  enter  on  its  period  of  decay. 
Yet  even  then  it  appeared  to  a  conservative  that  dis- 
loyalty to  the  State,  great  as  was  the  crime,  had  no  pos- 
sible alternative  in  disobedience  to  the  Father.  "  There 
are  hardly  any  other  men,"  says  the  Roman  jurist,^  "who 
have  such  power  [over  their  sons  as  we  have."  It  was 
a  natural  result  that  no  other  State  had  such  power  over 
its  subjects  as  Rome. 

How  large  and  lofty  was  the  Roman  ideal  of  Obe- 
dience, compared  with  that  temporary  or  degrading 
submission  which  is  all  that  the  word  suggests  to  the 
average   mind   of   our   own   day,  is   seen   in   the   noble 

'  Marcus,  son  of  the  Piso  who  was  accused  of  poisoning  Gcrmanicus.     Sec 
Tac. ,  Ann.,  iii.  17. 
'  Gaius,  "Corp.  Jur.  Rom.  Ante-Just.,"  §  55. 


156  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

words  of  Cicero,  when  he  speaks  of  the  incomplete 
virtue — what  we  should  call  Duty — as  typified  by  the 
obedience  of  the  soldier,  a  loyal  but  difiicult  obedience, 
and  contrasts  it  with  that  moral  rightness  which  is 
higher  than  duty,  when  a  man  is  made  aware  of 
a  claim  that  unites  kindred  with  authority,  and  meets 
it  with  the  obedience  of  a  son.^  Perhaps  there  is  no 
passage  in  classical  literature  that  comes  so  near  the 
spirit  of  Christianity  ;  yet  it  is  no  more  than  the  per- 
fection of  that  sense  of  membership  which  was  the 
starting-point  of  political  life  in  antiquity,  and  which 
Rome  first  disentangled  from  all  admixture  and  brought 
out  in  its  naked  simplicity.  In  the  life  of  Rome  was 
fulfilled  the  command  with  promise  made  to  the  chosen 
people  ;  she  taught  the  honour  of  the  Father,  and  the 
da^^s  of  her  children  were  long  in  the  land.  In  truth, 
union  of  the  command  with  the  promise  is  no  excep- 
tional grant  to  a  favoured  race,  but  a  permanent  law 
of  human  society.  The  generations  of  man  are  thus 
"  bound  each  to  each  in  natural  piety  ;  "  the  nation  has 
the  foundations  of  a  religion.  It  is  rooted  in  the  order 
that  is  permanent. 

And  while  this  central  claim  for  an  unlimited  subjec- 
tion— the  power  of  the  Father — gave  Roman  dominion 
its  keynote,  we  have  not  less  to  remark  the  political 
wisdom,  perhaps  never  absent  from  this  high  standard 
of  domestic  obedience,  which  taught  Romans  to  secure 
their  dominion  by  setting  off  every  added  shade  of  liberty 
against  a  background  of  subjection,  and  thus  rousing  a 
vivid  appreciation  for  every  grant  by  bringing  it  into  a 
close  proximity  to  vain  desire.  Unbuttressed  by  con- 
cessions, privilege  would  be  short-lived ;  the  many  ex- 
cluded would  not  quietly  confront  the  view  included  if 
these  two  parties  stood  face  to  face.      If  a  system   of 

1  Cicero,  Quaest.  Tusc,  ii.  22. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  157 

privilege  is  to  be  durable,  the  harshness  of  contrast 
must  be  broken,  the  transition  from  power  to  weakness 
must  be  made  to  seem  natural  by  being  gradual ;  a 
neutral  zone  must  intervene  between  the  privileged  and 
unprivileged,  keeping  up  hope  in  the  last  body,  and 
assigning  a  set  of  defenders  to  the  first.  The  disfran- 
chised world  was  not  homogeneous ;  the  compromise  it 
exhibited  between  entire  independence  and  entire  sub- 
jection it  also  repeated  within  its  own  limits,  and  carried 
out  in  a  graduated  approach  to  the  position  of  aspiration 
and  envy.  A  dawn  of  Roman  right  preceded  its  full 
concession,  and  Rome  had  always  a  band  of  subjects 
who  were  in  that  most  favourable  position  for  loyalty 
— in  sight  of  coveted  advantages  only  just  be3^ond  their 
reach.  Perhaps  in  enumerating  all  that  was  tangible 
in  these  advantages  we  hardly  exhaust  the  attractions 
of  Roman  citizenship.  There  is  a  kind  of  satisfaction 
in  association  with  a  favoured  race  which  escapes  the 
analysis  of  Logic  ; — which  may  be  connected  with 
the  instinct  in  our  nature  that  turns  in  weariness  from 
the  transitoriness  of  things  to  whatever  presents  any 
show  of  permanence,  and  takes  the  mind  into  the  far 
past  and  the  distant  future.  Nor  must  we  leave  out 
of  sight  the  alloy  of  mere  vulgar  feeling,  which  gave 
the  compound  no  small  share  of  its  firmness  and 
strength.  As  we  watch  the  invasion  of  this  platform 
of  privilege  by  the  excluded  class,  the  successive  devices 
by  which  the  defenders  endeavoured  to  render  their 
concessions  meaningless,  and  the  strange  transforma- 
tion by  which  the  sons  of  the  victorious  assailants  are 
found  among  the  most  resolute  defenders  of  the  coveted 
vantage-ground,  wc  arc  forced  to  realize  that  in  the  idea 
of  privilege  there  is  something  which  objects  of  desire, 
in  themselves  far  more  excellent,  cannot  rival.  We  see 
that  in  the  evolution  of  national  life  what   is  desirable 


1 58  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

is  always  at  first  confused  with  what  is  exceptional, 
and  we  thus  learn  to  accept  as  an  inevitable  phase  of 
social  development,  that  husk  of  ungenerous  denial  which 
guards  the  kernel  of  almost  all  righteous  claim. 

When  we  cross  the  chasm  which  formed  the  most 
characteristic  division  of  the  old  world  we  realize  the 
full  power  of  this  exclusive  ideal,  and  its  darkest  influ- 
ences. Another  people,  distinguished  by  no  mark  of 
complexion,  dress,  or  cultivation,  were  separated  from 
the  children  of  Rome,  among  whom  they  dwelt,  by  the 
barrier  of  legal  helplessness.  We  underrate  the  import- 
ance of  slavery  in  the  ancient  world  when  we  replace 
in  imagination  our  domestic  servants  by  slaves.  The 
free-born  Roman  had  no  monopoly  of  cultivation.  Few 
pursuits  which  in  our  day  absorb  and  reward  the 
attention  of  the  professional  class  were  unrepresented 
in  the  slave-gang  of  a  wealthy  Roman.  A  writer 
who  has  made  the  subject  his  study  h^s  given  his 
opinion,  borne  out  to  some  extent  by  the  low  price  of 
books  at  Rome,  that  what  the  press  performs  for  modern 
life  was  effected  for  the  ancient  world  by  slavery. ■"• 
What  a  world  of  thought,  feeling,  hope,  and  fear, 
shut  out  from  all  large  interests  of  life,  is  implied  in 
the  fact  that  it  is  possible  to  suppose  the  slaves  under 
the  Empire  as  active  in  diffusing  literature  as  the  print- 
ing-press !  The  friend  and  fellow-worker  of  the  cultured 
thinker  of  antiquity  was  the  specimen  of  a  class  that 
had  no  rights."  We  need  no  harrowing  pictures  to  make 
us  believe  in  the  forlorn  condition  of  a  people  legally 
defenceless ;  such  a  condition  is  painted  for  us  by  the 
tone  of  allusion  to  cruelties  in  men  who  were  not  other- 
wise   cruel.      The    philosophic    historian    records,^   with 

1  See  a  note  in  Merivale's  "  Roman  Empire,"  vi.  233, 

2  Tiro,  Cicero's  freedman,  is  believed  to  have  edited  his  letters, 

3  Tac,  Ann,,  xiv.  42-45.     Their  only  crime  was  their  failure  to  prevent  the 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  159 

apparent  sympath}^,  the  arguments  by  which  the  mas- 
sacre of  four  hundred  innocent  slaves  was  justified 
in  the  Roman  Senate,  as  a  measure  of  expedienc}', 
about  the  same  time  that  Seneca  was  reminding  his 
correspondent,  with  an  eloquence  doubtless  meant  for 
posterity,  that  "  he  whom  thou  callest  slave  is  sprung 
from  the  same  race  as  thyself."  The  most  humane, 
perhaps,  of  all  classic  writers  expresses  a  certain 
sympathy  with  an  example  of  heartless  cruelty  that 
will  to  many  readers  appear  more  odious — the  cruci- 
fixion of  a  poor  Sicilian  shepherd  who  had,  at  a  time 
when  the  use  of  weapons  was  forbidden  to  slaves, 
rid  the  country  of  the  ravages  of  a  fierce  boar.-^  What 
Tacitus  and  Cicero  could  record  without  protest  must 
have  been  possible  to  every  Roman.  The  cruelties  they 
sanctioned  with  their  sympathy  were  not  the  excesses 
of  bad  men,  but  the  illustrations  of  an  ideal. 

The  structure  of  Roman  dominion  rests  on  a  fusion 
of  the  loyal  obedience  of  the  son  and  the  hopeless 
subjection  of  the  slave.  The  legal  system  which 
graduated  and  defended  civic  right  shows  the  skilful 
blending  of  both  which  made  them  work  to  a  common 
end.  A  sense  of  separateness,  unsoftened  by  any  ad- 
mixture of  that  sense  of  a  common  humanity  present 
to  some  degree  in  almost  all  modern  feeling,  is  ex- 
hibited to  us  in  slavery ;  and  it  is  vain  to  deny  that 
here  Rome  and  the  whole  antique  world,  but  Rome  in 
a  special  sense,  had  a  simplicity  of  strength  lacking 
to  all   modern   government.      We  may  almost  say  that 

ruurdcr  of  ihcir  master  by  one  of  tlieir  number.      The  indignation  of  the 
populace  at  this  barbarity  almost  occasioned  an  imeute. 

1  Cicero,  "  In  Vcrrem,"  v.  3.  At  least,  he  says  that  some  will  think  this  hard, 
but  he  declares  himself  "  maluisse  Domitium  (the  proutor)  crudelem  in  anim- 
advcrtcndo  quam  in  practcrmittendo  dissolutum  videri."  He  preferred  that 
a  public  benefactor  should  be  rewarded  with  the  cross,  rather  than  that  a  slave 
should,  at  a  critical  momt-nt,  be  trusted  with  a  hunting-spear.  I  know  of  no 
other  passage  which  so  vividly  illustrates  what  is  hateful  in  slavery.  f 


i6o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Rome  drew  from  slavery  the  strength  that  any  modern 
Government  would  gain  if  its  poor  suddenly  became 
satisfied.  True,  the  slave  sometimes  made  Rome  feel 
that  he  was  not  satisfied.  But  the  insurrection  of  a 
Spartacus  did  hardly  as  much  to  diminish  the  power 
of  government  as  the  discontent  of  the  least  discontented 
peasantry  of  the  modern  world  does.  It  was,  while  it 
lasted,  a  terror  and  a  danger.  But  an  insurrection  does 
not  sap  the  strength  of  the  nation  if  it  does  not  in  any 
degree  enlist  the  sympathy  of  the  upper  class.  Spartacus, 
in  any  modern  State,  would  have  had  sympathizing  ad- 
mirers in  the  Senate.  We  can  hardly  conceive  that  it 
never  entered  into  the  heart  of  a  Roman  to  hesitate  in 
his  desire  for  the  defeat  of  the  slaves.  Probably  the 
only  result  of  their  approach  to  success  was  to  weld  the 
structure  they  attacked  into  a  closer  unity.  Not  a  single 
arm  was  paralyzed  by  the  doubt  whether  the  blow  was 
just.  We  might  be  favoured  by  Nature  with  abundant 
harvests,  and  by  Fortune  with  prosperous  trade ;  all 
legislative  concession  might  be  made  to  the  lower 
class,  all  but  the  inevitable  privileges  of  the  higher 
abolished — and  still  we  should  not  have  reached  that 
position  of  convenient  and  secure  independence  which 
the  Romans  gained  by  being  steeled  against  pity.  Per- 
fect justice  in  poor  and  rich  alike  would  be  needed 
before  we  should  reach  the  disentanglement  from  all  our 
difficulties  that  they  gained  by  perfect  injustice,  by  a 
repudiation  of  all  those  feelings  and  ideas  on  which 
justice  is  founded. 

The  contrast  of  Rome  and  Greece  is,  in  this  respect, 
almost  as  instructive  as  the  contrast  of  Rome  and  Eng- 
land. Both  the  precept  of  the  Platonic  Socrates  and 
the  example  of  Callicratidas  show  us  that  when  one 
Greek  enslaved  another  there  must  have  been  a  latent 
doubt    as    to    the    right,    than    which    nothing    can    be 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  i6i 

more  numbing  to  vigorous  action.  The  double  vision 
which  hovered  before  the  mental  eye  makes  a  sure 
aim  impossible.  May  vvc  smite  our  enemies  fearlessly  ? 
What  is  meant  by  we  ?  The  second  question  pre- 
vents all  clear  answer  to  the  first.  Englishmen  en- 
gaged in  strife  with  Africans  or  Asiatics  know  some- 
thing of  the  feeling  which  the  Greeks  had  only  just  begun 
to  feel  in  strife  with  each  other.  But  they  had  begun 
to  feel  it ;  and  its  disturbing  influence  is  shown  in  the 
distraction  and  desultoriness  of  Greek  history.  This 
hesitation  between  the  unity  of  the  city  and  that  of  the 
nation  made  a  place  for  that  which  opposes  all  true  unity, 
the  centrifugal  impulse  of  Party.  A  nation  under  this 
impulse  is  on  the  path  to  a  swift  decay.  But  in  Rome 
there  was  something  stronger  than  party  spirit.  The 
civil  wars  passed  away,  and  left  the  whole  world  em- 
braced in  an  organism  to  which  Rome  supplied  a  heart. 
And  the  good  and  evil  of  human  nature  both  contributed 
so  much  to  the  unity  of  this  organism  that  we  can  hardly 
say  which  formed  its  strength. 

This  double  element  is  discernible  in  the  characteris- 
tic bequest  of  Rome  to  the  world.  Roman  Law  is  the 
sole  product  of  Roman  thought  that  bears  any  stamp  of 
originalit}'.  The  artist  people  have  left  their  records  in 
work  that  has  taken  its  place  as  the  perennial  model  of 
humanity  as  to  form  ;  with  Rome  the  idea  of  Law,  as 
separate  from  laws,  may  be  almost  said  to  begin.  Yet 
the  Roman  law,  in  its  narrowest  sense,  the  civil  law  of 
Rome,  was  a  consecration  of  all  that  is  narrow  and  ex- 
clusive ;  it  embodied  the  spirit  that  is  willing  to  inhabit 
a  paradise  "  haunted  by  shrieks  of  far-off  misery  ;  "  it 
was  an  elaboration  of  the  ideal  of  privilege.  This  forms 
no  part  of  the  Roman  law  known  to  modern  Europe  ;  it 
withered  away,  while  Roman  law  in  its  wider  sense — 
the  prx'torian  law,  by  which  justice  was  administered  to 

L 


1 62  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  subjects  of  Rome — grew  to  its  maturity.  The  latter 
was  the  nurse  of  a  liberal  justice,  the  mould  of  a  high 
morality,  the  philosophic  teacher  of  political  wisdom  and 
guardian  of  national  life.  It  supplied  to  all  the  countries 
beneath  Roman  rule  a  pattern  of  righteous  dealing  be- 
tween the  governors  and  governed — a  pattern,  indeed, 
which  its  administrators  neglected  and  ignored,  but  which 
none  the  less  remained  as  a  rebuke  to  their  injustice, 
and  a  goal  of  all  true  efforts  to  carry  out  the  ideal 
dominion  of  Rome.  And  it  included  within  its  impartial 
embrace  the  whole  civilized  world.  An  Athenian  obeyed 
a  law  that  many  Greeks  regarded  as  a  thing  external  to 
any  loyalty  of  theirs.  The  law  of  the  Roman  had  all 
the  universality  of  a  law  of  nature,  and  perhaps  we 
should  never  have  had  the  latter  expression  if  there  had 
not  existed  a  State  which  possessed  a  realm  so  wide  and 
a  sway  so  irresistible,  that  its  laws  gained  the  association 
of  natural  powers,  and  thus  passed  into  their  type. 

Hence  the  moral  legacy  of  Rome  to  the  world  is 
that  of  submission  to  law.  Translated  into  intellectual 
language,  this  becomes  the  central  principle  of  physical 
science ;  and  little  as  the  Romans  cared  for  physical 
science,  it  is  in  the  first  great  poem  written  in  their 
tongue  that  we  see  this  central  conception  first  steadily 
grasped  and  consistently  retained.  Nothing  can  be  more 
characteristic  of  the  Roman  spirit  than  the  poem  of 
Lucretius,  and  nothing,  surely,  that  was  written  more 
than  2000  years  ago  is  so  full  of  the  ideas  and  beliefs  of 
modern  thought.  It  is  unscientific  in  this  sense,  that  it 
shows  a  fundamental  misconception  of  the  right  method 
of  science ;  it  assumiCs,  in  common  with  the  whole  of 
antiquit}',  that  reason  and  not  experience  is  to  supply, 
as  well  as  to  sift  and  arrange,  the  data  of  physical 
theory ;  and  it  betrays  an  indifference  to  detail  which 
vividly  illustrates  the  result  of  this  false  view.      But  so 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  163 

pregnant  is  the  thought  which  forms  its  nucleus  that, 
perhaps,  the  mistaken  notions  with  which  it  is  associated 
only  bring  out  its  importance  the  more  forcibly  ;  for  the 
scope  and  force  of  a  truth  come  out  vividly  in  its  power 
to  swallow  up,  as  it  were,  the  mistakes  which  cluster 
round  it.  The  poem  is  the  first  manifesto  of  that  school 
of  thought  which  we  know  as  Positivism,  the  belief  that 
the  investigation  of  nature  begins  with  the  renunciation 
of  those  spiritual  conceptions  which  lead  man  on  to  the 
search  for  truth,  and  appear  to  his  infant  mind  as  the 
appointed  guide  throughout  the  journey.  The  analysis  of 
the  mental  evolution  of  the  race  into  epochs  characterized 
by  the  successive  dominance  of  the  three  ideas  of  Will,  of 
Cause,  and  of  Force,  and  thence  named  the  Theologic,  Mcta- 
physic,  and  Positive  stage  of  thought,  has  been  hailed  as 
one  of  the  widest  generalizations  ever  won  to  science.  But 
it  is  present  in  germ  in  a  poem  by  a  thinker  who  had  no 
more  idea  of  the  experimental  method  which  we  almost 
identify  with  science  itself  than  he  had  of  using  the  micro- 
scope. Yet  he  was  the  herald  of  scientific  principle  ;  and 
though  no  man  of  science  ever  consulted  his  work  as 
an  authority  for  a  single  fact  or  law,  yet  all  may  turn  to 
it  for  the  statement  of  principles  and  the  expression  of 
feelings  which  give  to  science  its  light  and  its  atmosphere. 
The  "  cosmic  emotion  "  of  our  latest  thought  is  there  in 
its  fulness  ;  and  of  all  who  have  found  a  religion  in  the 
contemplation  of  nature,  none  ever  was  a  more  fervent 
and  devout  worshipper  than  the  poet  of  whom  we  can 
hardly  say  that  he  knew  a  single  one  of  its  laws. 

What  Lucretius  felt  in  nature  was  the  spirit  of  law, 
of  which  Rome  was  the  embodiment.  He  did  not,  in- 
deed, consciously  recognize  what  we  could  call  law  in 
nature ;  what  lie  did  recognize  there,  was,  if  we  look  at  it 
from  our  point  of  view,  a  mere  privation  of  law.  But  to 
him  Chance  was  (almost  the  contrary  of  what  it  is  to  us) 


364  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  negation  of  the  arbitrary  element,  of  which  all  Will 
was  the  expression.  To  an  Englishman  the  type  of 
orderly  action  is  Will,  and  Chance  is  a  mere  negation 
of  Will  ;  but  to  the  Roman,  Will  was  the  disorderly 
interrupting  agency,  Chance  was  that  general  tendency 
of  things  which  makes  for  order,  if  only  it  be  not  inter- 
fered with  by  the  irregular  impulse  of  human  passions. 
Just  as  Fortune  had  brought  out  of  the  atomic  life  of 
separate  cities  the  vast  structure  of  the  Roman  dominion, 
so  Chance  had  from  the  rain  of  atoms  evolved  the 
stately  fabric  of  the  Universe  and  the  elaborate  life  of 
civil  society.  The  process  of  evolution  between  this 
beginning  and  the  Roman  Empire  was  imperilled 
only  by  the  desultory  impulses  of  individual  desire 
and  aversion ;  and  Lucretius  lived  in  the  da3^s  when 
this  individual  agency  was  assuming  large  and  tur- 
bulent proportions,  when  the  passions  of  a  Marius  and 
a  Sulla  seemed  to  threaten  the  very  existence  of  the 
one  State  of  the  world.  His  early  life  was  passed  amid 
the  terrors  of  sedition  and  the  horrors  of  civil  blood- 
shed. In  childhood  he  may  have  trembled  at  the  days 
of  slaughter  which  followed  the  return  of  Marius  ;  in 
boyhood  he  must  have  shuddered  at  the  months  of 
assassination  which  followed  the  return  of  Sulla  ;  the 
conspiracy  of  Catiline  renewed  these  memories  in  his 
ripe  manhood  ;  and  his  life  closed  amid  the  turmoil 
which  associated  itself  with  the  name  of  Clodius  and 
the  tremors  of  the  coming  civil  war.  He  lived  when  the 
dread  of  individuality,  which  animated  so  much  of  ancient 
life,  was  justified  by  ebullitions  of  terrible  hatred,  deadly 
revenge,  reckless  ambition  ;  when  it  would  seem  as  if 
the  first  necessity  of  a  State  was  to  get  rid  of  its  great 
men.  To  him  Will  was  the  destructive,  not  the  con- 
structive, agency.  He  saw  in  nature  an  escape  from 
its  dominion,  and   when   he  eagerly  explained   away  all 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAU\  165 

purpose  in  the  Universe,  he  was,  little  as  we  can  sym- 
pathize with  the  feehng,  making  room  for  that  orderly 
impulse  of  law  so  deeply  rooted  in  his  mind  that,  like 
the  atmosphere,  it  rushed  in  to  fill  every  vacancy,  and 
seemed  present,  wherever  the  agency  of  man  was  with- 
drawn. The  object  of  his  poem  is  well  marked  in  a  few 
lines  ^  where  he  describes  the  effect  of  watching  a  review 
from  a  distance,  and  after  painting  the  tumult,  the  glitter, 
and  the  movement  of  the  mighty  legions,  ends  with  the 
touch  of  quiet : — 

"  Yet  sees  the  traveller  from  the  mountain's  height 
The  hurryir.g  crowds  as  some  still  speck  of  light," 

It  was  his  object  to  contemplate  the  hurrying  crowds  of 
life  from  that  remote  height  where  their  distracted  move- 
ment was  reduced  to  rest  and  their  vehement  tumult  was 
still. 

Hence  the  tone  of  delight  in  which  the  poet  set  forth 
a  scheme  of  life  which,  though  it  must  be  accepted  if  it 
be  certain,  could  never,  we  should  have  thought,  be  an 
object  of  any  higher  feeling  than  despairing  resignation. 
No  divine  hope  could  be  too  great  for  the  burst  of  apoca- 
lyptic joy  with  which  Lucretius  brings  this  scheme  for- 
ward. The  new  Jerusalem  descending  out  of  Heaven 
is  hardly  hymned  with  more  mystic  rapture  than  the 
emptied  world  from  which  all  divinities  have  been 
banished — the  world  which  in  the  opinion  of  the  singer 
was  then  first  delivered  from  the  shadow  of  human 
jealousy  and  malignancy,  falsely  projected  upon  the 
heavens.  The  power  and  the  weakness  of  the  poem 
are  strikingly  illustrated  by  its  effect  on  its  most  illus- 
trious reader  of  modern  times.  It  was  a  favourite  study 
with  Frederick  the  Great,  and  was  recommended  by  him 

1  Lucrclius,  "  iJc  R<Tum  Natura,"  ii.  323-332.     I"  ulial  follows  I  am  miicli 
indebted  10  .M.  Martha's  study  of  this  poem. 


1 66  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

to  a  bereaved  friend  as  a  manual  of  consolation.  Yet 
when  he  turned  to  it  in  his  own  troubles,  he  discovered 
it  to  teach  only  that  evil  was  necessary  and  remedies 
were  futile.^  The  great  general  was  probably  far  nearer 
the  intellectual  position  of  the  Roman  poet  than  is  any 
reader  of  our  day  ;  he  too  had  been  delivered  from  an 
oppressive  bondage,  associated  with  a  religion  powerless 
to  elevate  and  purify,  potent  only  to  narrow  and  harden 
the  soul.  He  must  have  come  much  nearer  to  the  rap- 
ture of  escape,  as  from  a  galling  prison,  expressed  in 
this  Pagan  psalm,  than  almost  any  Christian  who  has 
ever  read  the  poem.  And  yet  even  he  found  it  potent 
only  for  the  ills  of  his  neighbour ;  it  broke  down  as 
a  remedy  for  his  own.  The  Pagan  King,  the  friend 
of  Voltaire,  was  too  Christian  for  the  consolations  of 
Lucretius,      He  felt  as  a  Pagan  of  our  day  : — 

"  Je  souffre,  11  est  trop  tard  ;  le  monde  s'est  fait  vieux. 
Une  immense  esp^rance  a  traverse  la  terra 
Malgrd  nous  vers  le  ciel  il  faut  tourner  les  yeux  ; " 

or,  at  all  events,  it  was  no  gospel  to  him  in  the  hour  of 
defeat  to  be  told  that  there  was  no  Heaven  which  could 
meet  glances  either  of  hope  or  of  dread, 

A  modern,  whether  he  be  Christian  or  Pagan,  brings 
to  this  poem  the  inheritance  of  all  that  reverence  for  per- 
sonal life  which  has  been  developed  through  Christianit}^ 
The  immense  hope  of  the  world  has  passed  into  his  soul, 
if  not  as  a  belief,  then  as  an  irremovable  contrast  to 
every  other  belief ;  it  has  fixed  the  cravings  of  his  heart 
even  when  it  has  not  touched  a  single  conviction  of  his 
mind.  The  infinite  future  it  has  opened  to  every  soul 
has  remained  as  a  yearning  when  it  has  vanished  as  an 

1  "  C'est  iin  palliatif  pour  les  maladies  de  I'ame,"  he  wrote  to  D'Alembert  on 
the  death  of  Mile,  de  Lespinasse.  "Je  n'y  ai  trouv^  que  la  necessity  du  nial 
et  I'iiiutilit^  du  remede,"  he  answered  D'Argens,  under  the  discouragement  of 
defeat  in  the  Seven  Years'  War. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  167 

expectation  ;  nothing  can  close  that  vista ;  and  the  hope 
of  Heaven,  that  has  thrilled  many  a  heart  cold  beneath 
the  sod,  survives  in  other  forms  in  those  who  scoff  at  it 
as  folly  or  argue  against  it  as  delusion.  It  is  hard  for 
us  to  put  ourselves  in  the  place  of  men  who  had  neither 
the  hope  itself  nor  an}'  of  the  visions  or  regrets  into 
which  it  is  transformed — men  to  whom  the  world  of  the 
citizen,  with  its  finite  claims,  filled  the  horizon  of  interest 
and  became  the  nurse  of  all  desire.  And  perhaps  it  is 
specially  difficult  to  realise  this  in  the  poem  of  Lucretius, 
because  its  tone  is  in  many  ways  so  modern.  The  sub- 
ject— the  physical  scheme  of  the  Universe — is  the  great 
interest  of  our  day,  and  the  way  in  which  Lucretius 
regards  it  constantly  reminds  us  of  the  very  fashion  of 
the  hour.  But  this  resemblance  is,  to  a  great  extent, 
misleading.  The  poet  has  all  the  indifference  of  a 
Roman  to  physical  science,  in  itself.  His  purpose  is 
wholly  negative ;  all  his  concern  is  to  banish  that  idea 
of  Divine  agency  which  we  should  represent  to  our 
minds  far  more  clearly  as  a  sj^stem  of  interference  than 
of  government ;  and  far  from  bringing  him  into  harmony 
with  our  modern  ideas,  this  aim  prevented  his  keeping 
abreast  with  the  foremost  physical  speculation  of  his  own 
da}'.  We  find  him  both  anticipating  and  rejecting  the 
ideas  that  have  been  ratified  by  Science,  and  it  is  hard 
to  say  whether  we  may  learn  most  from  his  latent  Dar- 
winism, or  from  his  scorn  of  the  idea  that  is  associated 
with  the  great  name  of  Newton,  and  which  was  in  some 
dim  fashion  manifest  to  his  contemporaries. 

Men  make  their  way  up  the  mountain  of  truth,  as 
up  every  other  mountain,  by  a  perpetual  zig-zag.  The 
progress  of  Science  is  the  result  of  oscillation  between 
oppositcs  ;  it  has  turned  alternately  to  the  organic  and 
the  mechanical  view  of  nature,  alternatives  perhaps 
brought  home  more  clearly  to  the  imagination  when  con- 


l6S  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

trasted  as  personal  and  impersonal.  We  see  them  most 
sharply  contrasted  in  the  great  scientific  battle  of  our  day. 
Many  of  us  were  taught  in  our  childhood  that  the  reason 
why  a  horse  and  an  ass,  for  instance,  were  as  like  each 
other  as  they  are,  was  the  will  of  the  Creator.  This 
can  hardly  be  called  a  scientific  theory  ;  it  was  rather 
accepted  by  scientific  men  as  the  boundary  of  science ; 
but  it  was  so  accepted  within  living  memory  by  the 
scientific  world.  Then  came  the  doctrine  familiar  under 
the  name  of  Natural  Selection,  and  we  were  all  taught 
that  the  reason  why  a  horse  and  an  ass  w-ere  alike  was 
their  descent  from  a  common  ancestor  ;  and  the  reason 
they  were  different  was  that  small  hereditary  variations 
had  proved  useful  in  the  struggle  for  life.  Now  this 
latest  triumph  of  science  marks  its  swing  towards  the 
impersonable  view  of  nature.  Nothing  can  be  more 
unlike  the  action  of  human  will  than  the  production 
of  these  small  variations,  useless  for  the  most  part, 
and  the  wasteful  destruction  of  the  greater  part  of  what 
is  produced.  Accordingly  we  find  that  Lucretius  here 
speaks  the  language  of  modern  science.  Accident,  he 
says,  originated  all  kinds  of  varieties  of  structure  (that 
he  made  them  great  instead  of  small  has  nothing  to 
do  with  the  argument),  and  those  only  were  pre- 
served which  were  fitted  to  the  condition  of  things  in 
which  they  found  themselves.^  The  exposition  must 
be  discerned,  whenever  any  one  can  look  at  it  without 
prejudice,  as  an  unquestionable  anticipation  of  the  great 
scientific  theory  of  our  day.  But  now  go  back  two  cen- 
turies nearer  to  Lucretius,  to  the  widest  generalization, 
perhaps,  that  science  has  ever  achieved — the  discovery  of 
gravitation.      This  was  a  swing  to  the  other  side,  a  turn 

1  Lucretius,  "  De  Rerum  Natura,"  v.  837,  77.  I  once  showed  the  passage  to 
Mr,  Darwin,  but  the  dialect  was  too  unscientific  for  him,  and  I  do  not  think  he 
recognized  it  as  the  anticipation  of  his  own  views. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  169 

in  the  zig-zag  that  brings  the  traveller  very  near  the 
idea  of  personal  action.  We  can  hardly  enunciate  the  law 
Avithout  using  words  that  belong  to  the  personal  world. 
'•  The  most  perfect  vacuum,"  says  a  modern  writer/ 
"  ma}'  be  truly  said  to  be  full  of  this  influence,"  which, 
though  so  subtle,  so  impalpable,  that  it  needs  the  utmost 
efforts  of  genius  to  demonstrate  its  existence  and  its 
laws,  "  is  yet  a  necessary  concomitant  of  matter."  Now 
here,  surely,  we  are  on  the  borders  of  the  spiritual  world. 
Imagine  yourself  hearing,  for  the  first  time,  that  at  mid- 
night, when  the  whole  bulk  of  earth  shut  off  the  sun's 
light  and  heat,  its  gravitation  was  still  acting  on  every 
particle  of  matter  in  the  dark  hemisphere,  and  whirling 
it  through  space,  and  you  would  feel  as  if  what  was 
described  must  be  supernatural  Will.  And  it  is  evi- 
dent that  this  resemblance  to  personal  agency  impelled 
Lucretius  to  scorn  that  dim  vision  of  the  law  of  gravi- 
tation which  was  present  to  his  contemporaries  ;  it  is 
ridiculed  by  him  as  an  absurd  fiction,  ascribing  the  "  love 
of  a  centre  " "  to  entities  of  which  the  chief  thing  he 
wanted  to  say  was,  that  they  felt  no  love.  His  pas- 
sionate desire  to  expunge  from  nature  all  relation,  all 
resemblance  even,  to  human  agency,  to  sweep  it  clear, 
as  it  were,  of  every  organic  tendency,  would  have  made 
our  modern  science  appear  to  him  almost  as  full  of  im- 
personations as  ancient  mythology.  We  are  startled  to 
find  the  anticipator  of  the  origin  of  species  by  natural 
selection  rejecting  the  theory  of  the  four  elements  ;  a 
theory  which,  already  preached  by  one  whom  he  calls 
"  tiie  holiest  of  men,""  lasted   till   it  was  absorbed  into 

'  The  Bishop  of  ('arlislc,  in  the  Nineteenth  Century  Review,  December  1886. 

*  "  Haud  igitur  possunt  tali  ratione  teneri 
Res  in  concilio  inedii  cuppedine  viclae." 

— De  Rerum  Natiira,  i.  1081,  2. 

S'-c  the  whole  argument  against  gravitation  from  1052. 
*  i.e.,  liinpcdoclcs :  Ibid.^  i.  712-733. 


I70  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  chemistry  of  the  eighteenth  century,  and  laid  the 
basis  of  the  idea  of  chemical  action.  It  is  set  aside  in 
favour  of  the  most  childish,  the  most  meagre  scheme  of 
the  age,  simply  because  it  was  the  most  inhuman.  The 
perpetual  rain  of  atoms  rushing  downwards  through  void 
space  was  surely  the  most  reduced  apparatus  a  philo- 
sopher could  concede  to  his  scheme  of  the  Universe. 
But  it  was  this  rigid  parsimony  which  was  the  attraction 
of  his  scheme  to  a  mind  seeking,  above  all  things,  the 
impersonal.  We  see  the  anthropomorphism  of  our  scien- 
tific ideas  when  we  contrast  them  with  his ;  we  are 
forced  to  realise  that  it  is  not  less  in  the  world  without 
than  the  world  within  that  we  have  grown  more  personal. 
He  would  have  found  no  repose  in  a  world  composed 
of  our  molecules,  with  their  attractions  and  repulsions  ; 
ridiculous  figments,  as  it  would  have  seemed  to  him,  of 
love  and  hatred.  His  atoms  were  as  unlike  as  possible 
to  persons,  and  that  was  all  he  asked  of  them.  This 
meagre  simplicity  was  exactly  what  his  spirit  craved. 
It  was  the  ideal  of  the  one  State  of  the  world.  All 
special  tendency  found  its  analogue  in  that  individual 
feeling  which  Rome  set  itself  to  crush,  and  which,  when 
it  could  not  crush,  it  feared.  Sulla  and  Marius  embodied 
the  individual  agency  on  its  darker  side,  while  the  dagger 
of  Brutus  was,  as  it  were,  already  sharpening  to  express 
the  defiance  of  Rome  to  their  noblest  successor.  Rome 
enforced  a  barren  uniformity,  and  this  was  the  idea 
carried  out  by  the  Roman  poet. 

The  poem  of  Lucretius  is  an  expression,  in  a  prosaic 
and  protestant  form,  of  that  idea  of  a  Holy  Order  which 
we  have  seen,  at  its  highest  pitch,  in  the  speculations  of 
Indian  theosophy.  His  reader  is  often  reminded  of  these 
speculations.  He  finds  the  same  yearning  for  a  deep 
repose,  the  same  consciousness  of  a  possible  deliverance 
from  all  the  restlessness  of  life,  in  a  surrender  to  nature. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LA  W.  171 

Lucretius  did  not  deny  the  existence  of  the  Gods  ;  he 
rather  saw  in  them  the  models  for  man.  They  live 
apart  from  all  desire  and  fear,  in  a  profound  repose. 
Man  too  might  reach  their  repose  if  he  would  enter  into 
their  vision  of  reality,  if  he  would  cease  from  those 
impulses  of  ambition,  of  avarice,  of  revenge,  which  are 
the  invaders  of  human  life,  not  its  legitimate  rulers ;  if 
he  would  recognize  the  realm  of  law,  which  is  to  him  a 
prison  when  he  endeavours  to  escape  from  it,  but  when 
he  accepts  its  restraints,  the  most  blessed  home.  The 
Indian  ideal  of  Resignation  pervades  the  whole  poem  ; 
Nature  stretches  her  compassionate  arms  towards  the 
feverish  sons  of  man,  and  w-oos  them  to  repose  on  that 
calm  bosom  that  knows  not  love  or  hate — knows  onl}'- 
what  to  the  Roman  took  the  aspect  of  Law.  But  we 
have  passed  from  the  East  to  the  West,  and  man  needs 
Resignation,  not  to  live,  but  to  die.  Life  is  finite ;  man 
has  to  accept  its  limits.  The  nation  that  has  left  its 
memorials  in  the  long  straight  roads  that  led  to  the  city, 
the  aqueducts  that  brought  it  water,  the  triumphal  arch 
that  spoke  its  glories,  had  no  hope  of  a  Hereafter.  That 
was  associated  with  terror  and  dread.  Rome  had  no 
mysteries.  The  Roman  poet  rebukes  the  desire  of  life 
beyond  the  grave,  as  the  Indian  would  have  rebuked  it 
if  he  could  ever  have  imagined  it  to  exist.  But  the 
desire  offended  the  Roman  not  only  because  it  expressed 
that  arrogance  of  individualism  which  to  both  races  was 
equally  abhorrent,  but  because  it  embodied  a  yearning 
after  the  Infinite,  which,  while  it  was  the  very  breath 
of  life  to  the  Indian,  was  the  seed  of  all  disorder  to  thd 
definite  positive  spirit  of  the  prosaic  Roman  race. 

The  ideal  of  Lucretius  is  the  indifference  of  Natural 
Law  to  human  desire.  He  has  a  few  passages  of  ex- 
quisite pathos,  passages  which  foreshadow  tlic  tender 
liuman  sympathies  of  Gray,   the  pure,  delicate,  natural 


172  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

sympathies  of  Wordsworth.  Nothing  in  poetry  is  more 
full  of  a  subdued,  hidden  pity  than  the  hnes  in  which 
he  describes  the  wanderings  of  the  cow  whose  calf  has 
fallen  at  the  altars  of  superstition.^  Nothing  is  more 
full  of  a  deep  sense  of  human  love  and  its  frail  tenure 
than  the  description  which  the  English  reader  knows  in 
the  beautiful  but  still  inferior  imitation  by  Gray  : " — • 

"  For  thee  no  more  the  cheerful  hearth  shall  burn, 
And  busy  housewife  ply  her  evening  care, 
No  children  run  to  lisp  their  sire's  return, 

And  climb  his  knees  the  envied  kiss  to  share." 

But  these  passages  cannot  be  called  characteristic  of 
Lucretius  ;  or,  at  least,  they  are  characteristic  only  as 
the  rare  gleams  when  a  finer  self  seems  to  break  through 
the  habitual  self.  They  are  not  the  utterance  of  his  con- 
tinuous thought.  His  habitual  theme  is  the  dominance 
of  Law,  and  this  interpolation  of  pity  almost  interrupts 
it ;  it  is  a  modulation  into  a  key  which  must  be  quitted 
before  the  original  theme  can  be  taken  up. 

When  we  turn  to  Virgil  we  find  that  the  interpolation 
has  become  the  theme.  The  feeling  that  touched  the 
earlier  poem  with  streaks  of  tender  irrelevance  expands 
to  colour  the  whole.  Virgil  sings  the  growth  of  Rome, 
as  Lucretius  the  formation  of  the  Universe ;  there  is  a 
kindred  nature  in  the  theme,  but  the  note  of  triumphant 
dominion  in  the  Roman  has  dropped  into  a  note  of  sad 
submission  in  the  Italian.  All  the  interest  of  Roman 
history,  we  have  said,  lies  in  its  victims.  Virgil  gives 
that  interest  its  supreme  expression.  He,  the  dispos- 
sessed Italian,   with  the  longing  for  his  Mantuan  home 

^  Lucretius,  "  De  Rerum  Natura,"  ii.  352-366. 

2  "Jam  jam  non  domus  accipiet  te  Iseta,  neque  uxor 
Optima,  nee  dulces  oceurrent  oscula  nati 
Praeripere,  et  tacita  pectus  dulcedine  tangent." 

— lb.  iii.  S94. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  173 

always  in  his  heart,  and  3-et  with  a  deep  acquies- 
cence in  tliat  Imperial  rule  which  implies  a  world  of 
such  mournful  exiles  as  himself,  was  marked  out  alike  by 
Fate  and  Nature  as  the  poet  of  Resignation.  This  is 
the  clue  to  his  mystic  charm  ;  this  explains  his  strange 
legendar}'  position  as  the  herald  of  a  faith  of  which 
he  never  heard,  and  in  which  he  would  probably  have 
taken  a  merely  literary  interest  if  he  had  heard  of 
it.  The  ideal  of  obedience,  of  surrender,  is  the  seed 
of  all  that  has  made  him  immortal.^  In  his  resolute 
avoidance  of  originality  he  stands  alone  among  the  great 
poets  of  the  world.  No  other  name  known  to  succeed- 
ing generations  belongs  to  an  avowed,  unvarying  imi- 
tator ;  Virgil's  commentators  supply  us  with  the  Greek 
original  of  almost  every  important  passage ;  it  is  as 
if  Goethe  had  piqued  himself  on  having  produced 
perfect  German  adaptations  from  Corneille  and  Racine. 
The  literature  of  Greece  filled  the  whole  horizon  of  the 
intellectual  world  for  the  conquerors  of  Greece ;  to 
adapt,  to  embod}^,  to  imitate,  was,  they  thought,  the  only 
possible  intellectual  aim  for  themselves.  The  Roman 
took  towards  Greek  literature  the  kind  of  attitude  which 
English  faith  has  taken  towards  that  of  Judaea ;  origi- 
nality would  have  been  regarded  as  equally  an  error  in 
both  cases.  The  very  word  by  which  the  Church  has 
designated  false  doctrine  expresses  the  Roman  dread 
of  originalit}^ ;  a  heresy  is  a  "  choice."  The  spirit  of 
orthodoxy  discourages  originality.  Ultimately,  perhaps, 
it  will  not  be  found  that  the  ages  of  orthodoxy  have  been 
tiiosc  deficient  in  originalit}' ;   but,  for  good  and  for  ill 

'  "Una  salus  victis  nullam  spcrarc  salutem." — A''.n.  ii.  354. 
1  his  line,  which  gives  the  ^luieid  its  keynote,  miglit  well  have  been  taken  ns 
a  motto  by  the  subject  of  Rome.     Note  also  the  deep  religious  feeling  which 
makes  Anchises  at  first  refuse  to  leave  Troy  : — 

"  Me  si  coelicoln;  voluisscnt  duccrc  vitam  : 
lias  niihi  scrvasscnt  scdes." — lb,  ii.  6.^1  643. 


174  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

alike,  the  fact  is,  that  wherever  orthodoxy  exists,  all 
thought  stamped  with  individual  impulse  is  at  a  certain 
disadvantage.  And  the  fact  that  Roman  writers  found 
their  orthodox  model  in  Greek  literature  explains  what 
might  almost  be  called  the  servile  element  in  Virgil ;  his 
intellectual  submission  to  Greece  explains  and  illustrates 
the  spirit  that  brought  a  world  into  subjection  to  the 
dominion  of  Rome. 

We  see  in  Lucretius  the  rapture  with  which  the  idea 
of  Law — the  influence  that  moulds  and  penetrates  all 
Roman  thought — is  hailed  when  contrasted  with  images 
of  disorderly  impulse  and  caprice ;  we  discern  the  spirit 
of  science  in  that  first  energy  of  distinctness  and  of 
narrow  limitation  which  is  given  by  protest  against  the 
spirit  of  superstition.  In  Virgil  this  reverence  for  order 
is  even  deeper,  but  it  is  less  logical.  It  is  deeper,  for  it 
demands  that  continuity  with  the  past  which  surely  is  a 
test  of  a  true  order.  It  accepts  history  as  a  witness  for 
man's  nature  no  less  trustworthy  than  science  ;  it  cherishes 
the  fragment  of  truth  hidden  in  the  legendary  lore  of  the 
past,  and  never  rejects  any  fiction  that  may  prove  a  husk 
of  the  smallest  fact  or  a  vehicle  of  the  vaguest  truth. 
And,  at  the  time,  it  welcomes  with  an  eager  homage 
the  great  idea,  to  sorne  extent  inconsistent  with  the  other, 
of  Natural  Law.^  There  is  no  care  for  an  exact  harmony 
between  these  two  divergent  tendencies,  only  a  fearless 
reverence  for  both,  and  a  dim  feeling  of  some  underlying 
reality  deeper  than  either.  A  vague  Pantheism  har- 
monizes the  world  of  mythology  and  the  world  of  science, 
and  enables  the  poet  to  tread  in  the  footsteps  of  Lucretius, 

^  Compare,  for  instance,  Geo.  i.  60-62  : — 

"  Continue  has  leges  asternaque  foedera  certis 
Imposuit  Natura  locis,  quo  tempore  primum 
Deucalion  vacuum  lapides  jactavit  in  orbem." 

These  lines  are  exactly  divided  by  a  complete  change  in  the  point  of  view. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  175 

and  yet  to  remain  a  constant  and  reverent  visitor  in  the 
domain  that  Lucretius  hated.  The  poet  who  best  inter- 
prets him  to  the  Enghsh  reader  is  Wordsworth.  Nature 
draws  from  both  the  Itahan  and  the  Enghsh  poet  the 
solemn  dehght  of  confronting — 

"  A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts  ;  a  sense  subhme 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man  : 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things."  ^ 

In  these  noble  lines  we  have  no  more  than  a  full  and 
fluent  expression  of  a  feeling  that  meets  us  more  than 
once  in  brief  and  broken  hints  from  the  earlier  poet. 
The  intervening  2000  years,  the  birth  and  death  of 
nations,  the  development  of  a  new  faith — all  these  leave 
the  religion  of  nature  substantially  unaffected  ;  it  is  more 
diffuse  in  Wordsworth  than  in  Virgil,  but  that  is  all. 

On  the  one  hand  this  feeling  melts  into  sympathy 
with  the  old  mythology,  on  the  other  it  passes  into 
admiration  for  the  orderly  sequences  of  nature  ;  so  that 
the  two  feelings  which  in  the  mind  of  Lucretius,  as  in 
that  of  so  many  a  religious  thinker  of  our  day,  seem 
hopelessly  opposed,  were  harmonized  by  Virgil's  vague 
Pantheism,  harmonized  more  fully  than  is  possible  to 
any  one  who  looks  back  from  our  present  position,  and, 
watching  the  conflict  of  Religion  and  Science  through  so 
many  centuries,  sees  the  argument  of  each  side  tested 
by  the  keen  acid  of  hostile  criticism.      Thus  Virgil  has 

'  W  (jnliworib,  "Tinturn  Abbey."  Tho  quolofi  lines  are  almost  a  transla- 
tion of  tliratldrcss  of  Anchiscs  to  /l-lneas  (/En.  vi.  724-729),  but  purliaps  Words- 
worth was  not  thinking  of  Virjjil  when  he  wrote  it. 


176  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

far  more  sympathy  with  the  scientific  spirit  than  Words- 
worth ;  there  is  in  him  no  touch  of  scorn  such  as  that 
uttered  in  Wordsworth's  "  Poet's  Epitaph  "  : — 

"  Physician  art  thou  ? — one,  all  eyes, 
Philosopher  !  a  fingering  slave, 
One  that  would  peep  and  botanize 
Upon  his  mother's  grave  ?  " 

To  Virgil  there  would  be  nothing  jarring  in  the  juxta- 
position of  any  possible  interest  in  nature  and  any 
possible  human  sorrow  ;  the  harmony  of  Natural  Law- 
was  to  him  the  fitting  theme  of  the  bard,  partly  because 
individual  human  sorrow  was  a  slighter  thing  to  the 
ancients  than  to  us,  but  partly  also  because  the  laws 
of  nature  were  something  deeper.  Thus  the  lay  which 
excites  enthusiastic  admiration  from  weary,  storm-tossed 
guests  contains  the  explanation  of — 

"The  various  labours  of  the  wandering  moon,  ' 
And  whence  proceed  the  eclipses  of  the  sun  ; 

The  original  of  men  and  beasts,  and  whence  ,' 

The  rains  arise,  and  fires  their  warmth  dispense,  ■ 

And  fixed  and  erring  stars  dispose  their  influence  ;  • 

What  shakes  the  solid  earth,  what  cause  delays  |, 
The  summer  nights  and  shortens  winter  days."  ' 

The  feeling  which  here  binds  the  poet  to  Lucretius 
separates  him  from  Wordsworth ;  it  is  as  unlike  any 
modern  poet  to  find  in  Natural  Science  the  material 
of  Poetry  as  it  is  unlike  Homer.  The  choice  of  such 
a  subject  marks  the  dawn  of  scientific  thought  and  the 
twilight  of  classical  poetry.  But  Virgil's  yearnings  after 
science  were  not  stronger  than  his  love  of  the  legendary 
past ;  his  devout  sense  of  the  Divine  Presence  that 
animated  Nature  did  not  conflict  with  a  sort  of  belief  in  t 

the  Gods  of  Greece,  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  with  a  deep 

1  ^neid,  i.  746,  Dryden's  translation. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  177 

reverence  for  the  natural  laws  that  seemed  to  his  fore- 
runner an  effective  and  welcome  substitute  for  the  pre- 
sence of  anything  that  had  been  thought  Divine. 

For  he  stood  at  that  point  in  History  in  which 
the  idea  of  a  universal  dominion  gathered  up  into 
itself  the  philosophy,  mythology,  and  science  of  the 
world.  The  idea  of  Law  in  nature,  which  to  his  fore- 
runner was  mainly  a  negation  of  personal  will  in  na- 
ture, was  to  him  the  real  presence  of  a  spirit  of  order, 
penetrating  the  whole  of  nature,  and  infusing  its  own 
impulse  into  all  life.  It  is  the  spirit  which  sets  every- 
thing in  its  place  and  brings  the  "  perpetual  edict "  of 
a  Catholic  rule  to  regulate  the  varied  sphere  of  human 
achievement.  This,  we  may  say,  is  the  ideal  of  the  Uni- 
versal Empire,  as  it  passed  into  the  ideal  of  the  Universal 
Church  ;  and  so  far  as  the  Roman  Empire  became  uni- 
versal, it  was  because,  to  some  extent,  it  did  embody 
this  principle,  upholding  Law  against  individual  tyranny. 
This,  at  least,  was  the  aspect  under  which  such  spirits 
as  those  of  Virgil  were  able  to  submit  themselves  to  its 
dominion.  That  central  influence  which  makes  natural 
one,  that  great  idea  which  in  our  day  has  dawned  upon/ 
the  world  as  the  correlation  of  force — the  idea,  that  is,A 
of  an  energy  underlying  all  phenomena,  identical  under  1 
various  forms — this  idea,  translated  into  the  political  ' 
world,  finds  its  best  symbol  in  such  an  empire  as  that 
of  Rome,  as  it  represented  itself  to  its  best  men.  And 
the  mind  of  the  great  Italian  poet  reflects  this  ideal  both 
in  the  natural  and  the  human  world.  Nature  is  a  stern 
ruler,  relaxing  no  severity  of  claim  in  pity  to  human 
weakness  ;  man  must  serve  her  by  arduous,  unvarying 
toil,  carrying  on  a  perpetual  warfare  (as  it  seems  to  him) 
against  some  hostile  power  which  seeks  to  withhold  from 
him  the  produce  of  the  soil,  and  from  which  he  is  designed 
to  wrest   it   by   vigorous  struggle.       But   this   arduous 

M 


178  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

struggle  is,  in  truth,  the  task  appointed  by  a  beneficent 
ruler,  and  in  this  seeming  strife  man  is  truly  engaged 
with  a  "most  just"  being,  who  requites  all  trust  with 
rich  payment/  The  steadiness,  the  law-abiding  spirit 
of  nature  haunts  Virgil's  mind  with  an  image  of  repose 
deeper  than  the  sense  of  arduous  toil  which  also  belongs 
to  it.  The  two  are  sometimes  i [logically  combined,  but 
they  have  an  actual  harmony.  Virgil  is  in  this  the  true 
exponent  of  his  nation.  The  Latin  language  first  contains 
the  word  by  which  we  express  fortitude  in  toil ;  industry 
was  an  expression  unknown  to  the  Greek  tongue,  and 
where  it  seems  indicated  in  Greek  phrase  the  eulogium 
is  almost  an  apology.  The  race  which  first  awakens  to 
the  majesty  of  law  also  first  sets  forth  the  dignity  of 
toil ;  the  two  ideas  are  correlative  ;  in  the  verse  of  Virgil 
we  find  both  set  to  music. 

The  same  combination  of  submission  to  a  severe 
lawgiver  and  loyalty  to  a  steadfast  law  is  found  in  his 
philosophy  of  life.  The  power  that  decides  on  the 
destiny  of  nations  is  also  stern  and  ruthless  ;  often  it 
seems  cruel.  Virtue  and  piety  win  no  obvious  reward  ; 
the  sympathy  of  the  poet  takes  one  course,  and  the 
decision  of  Providence  another.  There  is  no  writer  who 
more  than  Virgil  enlarges  on  the  text,  "  God  moves  in 
a  mysterious  way."  Trust  in  a  lying  Greek  brings  on 
the  ruin  of  Troy,  and  no  God  interposes  to  avenge  the 
treachery  which  has  requited  compassionate  aid  with 
ruin.  Dido  suffers  for  taking  pity  on  ^Eneas,  as  Priam 
for  taking  pity  on  Sino,  and  the  hospitality  of  Latinus 
involves  his  country  in  the  miseries  of  war.  As  long  as 
we  look  to  the  merits  and  the  fate  of  individuals,  all 
is  confusion  ;  we  see  nothing  but  injustice  and  wanton 
cruelty.  But  from  the  moment  when  the  ghost  of 
Hector  ^  appears,  in  all  the  horror  of  the  fall  of  Troy,  to 

1  Georg.,  ii.  459.  "  ^neid,  ii.  270. 


i 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  179 

announce  the  rising  of  a  new  city  whose  foundations  were 
to  be  eternal,  the  glory  of  Rome  closes  every  vista,  and 
supplies  a  purpose  for  all  that  was  bewildering  and  a  jus- 
tification of  all  that  is  harsh.  We  see  no  loving  Father, 
not  even  a  just  judge,  as  far  as  individual  fate  is  concerned. 
But  we  do  see  a  single  ruler,  a  single  plan,  a  single  goal ; 
we  see  in  the  distance  the  great  idea  of  a  central  interest 
and  historic  purpose  in  life,  enough  to  give  dignity  and 
strength  to  resignation,  if  not  enough  to  give  life  to  hope. 
And  if  the  ways  of  God  are  stern  and,  except  by 
reference  to  a  distant  future,  inexplicable,  the  char- 
acteristic quality  of  ideal  man  is  a  tender  compassion, 
embracing  all  that  is  weak,  all  that  is  sad,  all  even  that 
is  repulsive.  This  is  the  dominant  impression  of  the 
JEneid.  The  fall  of  Troy,  narrated  by  a  survivor  of  the 
royal  family,  prefigures,  in  all  its  incidents  of  pathos  and 
horror,  the  fate  of  that  city  whose  Queen  hears  the  tale ; 
it  llings  its  lurid  light  on  the  long  train  of  victims 
to  the  great  Power  whose  rise  is  yet  announced  with 
religious  reverence,  as,  in  a  special  sense,  the  agent  of 
the  Divine  Will.  Dido  and  Turnus,  the  Carthaginian 
Queen  and  the  Italian  Prince,  gather  up  the  claims  of 
all  the  vast  world  that  was  to  be  crushed  by  Rome,  and 
embody  all  that  sympathy  with  the  vanquished  and 
unhappy  which  we  feel  latent  in  every  line.  Many  a 
minor  touch  fills  in  the  music  with  its  own  subtle  varia- 
tions ;  we  are  taught  to  feel  for  the  hunted  deer^  that 
flics  to  die  at  the  feet  of  the  mistress  vi^ho  has  tended 
him,  tiie  generous  steed  that  shares  the  ardour  of  tlic 
fierce  Mezentius^  and  alone  attracts  his  affections;   even 

^  "  Saucius  at  quadrupes  nota  intra  tecta  rcfugit 

Successitque  gemens  stabulis,  quoestuque  cruentus 
Atquc  imploranti  similis  tectum  onine  replebat." 

— /Kncid,  vii.  500  502. 

2  "  Haud  dcjectus  cquum  duci  jubct.     Hoc  decus  illi 
lioc.solamcn  cx\x\."—IbiJ.,  x.  858-85i;. 


I  So  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

for  the  monster  Polyphemus,^  followed  by  the  flock  whose 
devotion  forms  his  sole  consolation,  and  the  picture  of 
whose  attachment  to  him  brings  images  of  gentleness 
into  what  is  most  savage.  Much  of  all  this  may  be 
found  in  Homer,  but  the  change  of  tone  from  Homer 
is  made  the  more  striking  by  the  similarity  of  their 
material,  and  in  proportion  as  the  reader  appreciates  the 
song  of  each  he  feels  the  chasm  which  divides  them. 
Nothing  can  be  more  unlike  the  cheerful  bustle  of  the 
earlier  singer  than  the  plaintive  pathos  of  his  imitator. 
As  we  read  the  Iliad  we  think  of  Hector,  of  Achilles,  of 
Priam.  As  we  read  the  iEneid  we  think  of  Virgil.  We 
feel  alwa3^s  in  the  poetry  of  Virgil  just  that  neighbour- 
hood of  a  suffering  human  soul  that  it  is  refreshing  to 
miss  in  the  poetry  of  Homer.  A  mist  of  unshed  tears 
seems  to  haunt  the  stream  of  his  genius.  Sorrow,  and 
endurance,  and  patience  weave  themselves  into  the  very 
web  of  his  verse.  He  gives  a  voice  to  the  unhappy,  the 
vanquished  ;  in  touching  the  inmost  heart  with  a  sense 
of  pity,  he  lightens  the  burden  of  humanity  by  reminding 
us  that  we  bear  it  in  common. 

Here  we  have  an  explanation  of  the  fact  that  Virgil 
has  become  a  legendary  precursor  of  Christianity.  In 
choosing  him  as  his  guide  through  the  mysteries  of  the 
unseen  world,  Dante  was  not  giving  him  a  totally  new 
position,  but  expanding  many  a  hint  in  the  previous 
history  of  his  fame.^    It  appears  a  strange  destiny  which 

1  "  Monstrum  horrendum,  informe,  ingens,  cui  lumen  ademptum. 
****** 
Lanigerse  comitantur  oves  ;  ea  sola  voluptas 
Solamenque  mali." — ^Eneid,  iii.  658-661. 

The  word  solamen,  twice  applied  to  an  animal,  and  in  each  case  expressing 
the  feeling  with  which  it  was  regarded  by  a  fierce  and  cruel  nature,  seems  to  me 
to  open  a  vista  of  wonderful  tenderness  and  pity,  quite  unlike  anything  else  in 
ancient  literature. 

"  As,  for  instance,  the  fact  that  Constantine  read  Virgil's  Fourth  Eclogue  at 
the  Council  of  Nice,  and  the  legend  that  St.  Paul  came  to  weep  at  his  tomb. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  i8r 

has  transformed  the  careful  revivahst  of  a  past  rehgion 
into  the  prophet  of  one  that  was  in  the  future ;  but,  in 
fact,  these  two  things  are  closely  connected  ;  it  is  his 
reverence  towards  the  past  which  forms  his  affinity  with 
Christianit}'.  The  idea  of  this  affinity  is  true  in  so  deep 
a  sense  that  the  falsehood  in  its  legendary  translation 
may  be  called  unimportant.  He  has  translated  the 
blessing  on  the  poor  into  sympathy  with  the  van- 
quished ;  he  has  made  failure  pathetic,  and  lifted  resig- 
nation into  the  region  of  heroic  endeavour.  We  have 
compared  Virgil  with  Wordsworth,  and  it  may  be  said 
that  the  poem,  where  Wordsworth  has  clothed  the  idea 
of  Christian  resignation  in  a  classic  dialect,  is  no  more 
than  the  expansion  of  a  few  words  from  the  ^neid. 
Laodamia,  the  wife  whose  love  calls  back  her  husband 
across  the  barrier  of  death,  sa3's  in  many  words  only 
what  Creusa,  the  wife  whose  love  causes  her  herself  to 
pass  that  barrier,  says  in  a  few  : — "  Why  this  immo- 
derate grief,  beloved  spouse  ?  It  is  the  W'ill  of  God."  ^ 
Not  the  will  of  one  without  whom  no  sparrow  falls 
to  the  ground,  in  whose  e3'es  our  hairs  are  all  num- 
bered. Such  a  will,  if  we  can  for  a  moment  discern  it, 
craves  our  embrace  rather  than  our  resignation.  The 
fate  that  tore  Creusa  from  passionate  devotion  was  the 
will  of  one  who  was  not  loving,  not  exactly  just,  certainly 
not  careful  to  apportion  the  sufferings  to  the  needs  of 
each  one.  But  it  was  a  will  fixed  on  a  design  including 
a  vast  benefit  to  the  human  race — the  incorporation  of 
the  civilized  world  in  a  single  system  of  law  and  order, 
the  establishment  of  a  single  rule  that  was  to  give  peace 
to  a  storm-tossed  world.  And  for  such  an  aim  it  was 
worth  while  to  suficr  and  to  perish  ;  the  sacrifice  would 
be  made  by  any  one  who  could  realize  that  gain  of  which 
it  was  the  price. 

'  ^neid,  ii.  775,  6. 


1 82  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  end  was  worth  the  means,  on  the  whole.  But 
in  that  end  there  is  no  compensation  for  the  sufferers. 
Rather  the  sufferers  do  but  shadow  forth  as  individuals 
what  nations  must  endure  under  the  stern  dominion 
which  the  Gods  prepared.  The  pangs  of  Dido  prefigure 
and  embody  the  pangs  of  Carthage  :  the  Queen  perishes, 
as  her  city  is  to  perish  ;  and  the  very  words  in  which 
the  Trojans,  entreating  her  shelter,  deprecate  the  idea  of 
hostile  intentions  toward  her  people,  seem  to  reflect  upon 
the  barbarous  policy  to  be  carried  out  against  her  city 
by  the  descendants  of  those  to  whom  she  gives  a  gene- 
rous shelter.-^  The  dominion  towards  which  the  whole 
action  of  the  story  moves  on  was  one  of  crushing 
severity,  and  this  thought  seems  never  out  of  the  mind 
of  the  poet,  who  treats  it  as  an  ordinance  of  Heaven. 
Nevertheless  he  contemplates  the  stately  structure  with 
awe  that  is  not  servile  ;  he  feels  it  to  belong  to  that  order 
of  colossal  events  which  must  be  explained  by  Divine 
purpose,  and  in  that  light  submission  takes  the  aspect  of 
a  religious  duty.  The  craving  of  his  soul  is  for  repose. 
His  storm-tossed  spirit  poured  its  yearnings  into  the 
wail  of  his  wandering  hero,  and  he  uttered  as  aspirations 
after  the  unbuilt  Rome  that  desire  for  the  staple  Empire 
which,  after  the  long  earthquake  of  the  civil  wars,  he 
imagined  and  desired  with  passionate  need  as  the  very 
presentation  and  embodiment  of  the  City  of  God.  There 
is  a  passage  in  the  ^Eneid  that  bears  the  comparison  it 
invites  with  one  of  the  most  striking  parts  of  the  Old 
Testament.  When  the  servant  of  Elisha,  terrified  at  the 
crowd  of  hostile  Syrians,  turns  to  his  master  for  comfort, 
he  is  answered  by  the  prayer  that  his  eyes  may  be  opened, 
and  by  the  sight  of  the  chariots  of  fire  that   form  the 

1  "  Non  nos  aut  ferro  Libycos  populare  Penates 
Veuimus,  aut  raptas  ad  littora  vertere  prsedas." 

— ^neid,  i.  526. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  183 

invisible  guards  of  the  Holy  Cit3^^  The  revelation  to 
/Eneas  by  his  Divine  mother  of  the  invisible  host  come 
not  to  guard  but  to  destroy  the  city  of  doom  would 
be  felt  not  less  full  of  significance  and  poetry  if  w^e 
could  make  the  comparison  fairly.  True,  the  vision  of 
Elisha  is  full  of  triumph,  and  that  of  ^neas  has  the 
aspect  of  despair.  But  at  the  core  of  that  despair  lies 
a  hope  capable  of  infinite  expansion.  The  gods  have 
indeed  deserted  Tro}^ ;  "  Let  them  that  are  in  Judaea  flee 
unto  the  mountains  "  is  the  warning  prefigured  no  less 
clearly  than  the  vision  of  Elisha  is  recalled.  But  the  fall 
of  Troy  no  less  than  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  precedes  a 
mystic  resurrection  ;  from  its  ashes  shall  arise  a  city 
not  unworthy,  in  the  imagination  of  Virgil,  to  be  set 
beside  all  that  is  loftiest  in  human  achievement.  The 
severity  of  Heaven,  interpreted  by  Divine  Love,  must 
be  at  all  times  an  idea  full  of  hope  and  consolation.  But 
many  influences  when  Virgil  wrote  prepared  the  mind  of 
humanity  to  receive  this  idea  with  a  peculiar  welcome. 
He  saw  glimmering  in  the  future  a  mystic  vision  of 
Peace  ; "  his  heart  was  stirred  by  yearnings  after  a  blessed 
unity  of  all  life  and  all  nature,  and  found  this  unity  for 
the  first  time  suggested  by  the  world  without.  Human 
history  embodied  the  idea  of  purpose,  and  Will  suggests 
even  when  it  does  not  express  Love,  The  mere  wide- 
reaching  habit  of  submission  to  central  power,  the  stately 

'  II.  Kings  vi.  17.     Compare  Alncid,  ii.  601,  ff.  : — 
"  Xon  tibi  Tyndaridis  facies  invisa  Lacasnaj 
Culpatusve  Paris  ;  divum  inclementia,  divum, 
Has  cvertit  opes,  stcriiitque  a  culmine  Trojani. 
Aspicc,  namquc  omncni,  C|u;x,'  nunc  obducta  tuenti 
Mortales  hebctat  visus  tibi,  ct  humida  circuni 
Caligat,  nubem  eripiam. " 

*  "  Magnus  ab  integro  sacclorum  nascitur  ordo 
Jam  nova  progenies  cqjIo  demiuitur  alto. 
Jam  redit  ct  Virgo,  rcdeunt  Saturnia  rcgna." 

— Ec.  iv. 


i84  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  growing  fabric  of  universal  Law,  claimed  a  sort  of 
reverence  that  passed  into  religion.  Whether  the  dying 
request  of  the  poet  to  destroy  his  poem  was  due  in  any 
measure  to  some  dim  prophetic  anticipations  of  the  ver- 
dict of  History  on  the  Empire,  whether  some  flash  of 
the  inspiration  of  genius  revealed  to  him  the  fugitive 
and  injurious  character  of  that  dominion  his  Jove  had 
pronounced  eternal,  we  cannot  say.  He  was  fastidious, 
aspiring,  exacting  in  his  ideal ;  his  poem  had  not  received 
its  last  touches  ;  perhaps  that  was  all.  But  if  the  other 
feeling  had  come  in,  it  would  have  thrown  a  strange  light 
on  his  relations  to  his  own  time,  and  to  that  which  was 
to  succeed  him. 

When,  therefore,  Virgil  hails  the  foundation  of  the 
Empire  with  a  record  of  the  legendary  past  full  of  mere 
fiction,  and  yet  containing  a  prophecy  of  its  eternity, 
we  must  not  look  upon  him  as  a  courtly  sycophant 
inaugurating  the  new  art  of  flattery  by  a  prostitution 
of  genius.  Virgil,  belonging  by  blood  and  bound  by 
sympathy  to  the  conquered  Italian  race,  while  culture 
and  friendship  attached  him  to  the  court  of  Augustus, 
was  fitted  to  express  both  a  true  loyalty  for  a  ruler  of 
Rome,  and  a  deep  sympathy  for  its  subjects  and  victims. 
The  two  feelings  seem  inharmonious,  and  in  this  nine- 
teenth century  after  Christ  perhaps  they  are  so.  We 
look  back  upon  a  long  course  of  struggle  between  the 
rulers  and  the  ruled,  and  discern  that  no  earthly  power 
is  the  rightful  claimant  of  uncritical  submission  from 
mature  human  beings.  We  see  that  the  great  unity 
which  Virgil  welcomed  was,  in  the  long  course  of  things, 

1  "  His  ego  nee  metas  rerum  nee  tempora  pono ; 
Imperium  sine  fine  dedi. 

****** 
Nascetur  pulchra  Trojanus  origine  Cassar 
Imperium  oceano,  famam  qui  terminet  astris." 

— yEneid,  i.  278-287. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  1S5 

the  foe  of  Liberty  without  being  the  friend  of  Peace. 
While  we  cannot  but  recognize  the  sway  of  Rome  as 
an  important  and  indispensable  stage  in  the  evolution  of 
European  civilization — as  divine  in  the  sense  that  that 
whole  evolution  is  divine — we  see  also  that  the  antagonism 
of  barbaric  invasion  was  divine  in  just  the  same  sense, 
and  brought  its  own  contribution  to  the  life  of  modern 
Europe.  And  this  would  have  been  to  Virgil  like  saying 
that  good  and  evil  were  both  divine.  He  saw  a  great 
unity  impressed  on  all  life  ;  and  though  he  felt  a  keen  and 
almost  oppressive  sympathy  with  the  life  that  was  crushed, 
still  he  never  faltered  in  the  conviction  that  loyalty  was 
due  to  this  unity,  and  that  the  sacrifice  was  made  for  an 
adequate  object.  And  then  to  recognize  that  this  unity 
was  to  be  broken  up,  that,  so  far  as  it  was  to  endure,  it 
was  to  pass  into  the  realm  of  the  Invisible,  and  that  even 
as  a  Church  it  was  again  to  become  an  object  of  attack 
from  the  healthy  national  life,  and  of  repulsion  to  the  true 
individual  conscience — this  was  impossible  to  any  one 
who  hailed  the  Empire.  It  was  not  impossible  to  hate 
and  oppose  it,  but  to  see  as  much  of  its  Divine  purpose 
as  Virgil  did,  and  also  to  see  that  it  was  to  be  swept 
away,  was  a  discernment  only  possible  to  the  reverted 
gaze  of  History.  To  anticipate  the  verdict  of  History 
on  his  own  time  would  not  help  a  man  of  genius  to 
express  and  explain  it.  Doubtless  the  verdict  of  tlistor}-' 
will  contain  all  that  is  true  in  his  expression.  But 
Virgil  could  not  have  told  us  what  the  Roman  Empire 
was  if  he  saw  what  it  was  to  become.  We  arc  not 
meant  to  judge  any  stage  of  life  from  the  point  of  view 
of  our  successors.  Looking  back,  we  see  good  every- 
where, and  evil  everywhere.  If  the  men  of  the  time 
had  seen  this,  life  would  be  even  more  desultory,  more 
purposeless,  than  it  is. 

We  gain  a  clue  to  the  whole  meaning  of  the  change 


1 86  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

that  was  coming  over  the  world,  and  to  Virgil's  part  in 
producing  and  responding  to  it,  when  we  note  the  place 
that  woman  takes  in  the  ^neid.  The  Iliad  is  a  story 
of  men.  Women  take  a  large  part  in  it,  as  in  all 
vivid  dramas  of  life.  But  they  are  mere  subordinates 
— the  pictures  of  Andromache,  of  Helen,  beautiful  as 
they  are,  occupy  the  background  of  interest ;  they  are 
mere  accessories  to  the  male  actors.  Helen,  though 
she  ought  to  be  the  principal  person  of  the  drama,  is 
a  faint,  delicate  sketch,  and  for  the  greater  part  of  the 
poem  we  are  inclined  to  forget  her  altogether.  But 
when  we  turn  to  the  ^Eneid  the  whole  action  depends 
on  female  influence.  Its  most  impressive  figure  is  the 
Carthaginian  queen;  its  central  Deity  is  the  Divine  mother. 
The  worship  of  the  Virgin  seems  in  the  greater  part  of 
the  poem  just  trembling  into  life ;  it  is  one  of  the  many 
respects  in  which  Virgil  may  be  considered  in  a  double 
sense  the  poet  of  Rome.  The  image  of  motherly  love, 
glimmering  through  the  storms  of  life  with  a  continual 
reminder  of  Divine  care,  and  a  continual  claim  on  human 
submission,  more  prefigures  that  element  in  Christian 
faith  which  was  welcomed  by  the  world  with  the  most 
urgent  sense  of  need,  than  any  of  the  loftiest  utterances 
of  Greek  religion.  Homer  knows  nothing  of  it;  the 
tragedians  only  hint  at  it ;  the  mysteries  may  have 
cherished  it,  but  it  attains  its  first  literary  expression 
in  Virgil  ;  and  nothing  surely  distinguishes  more  clearly 
the  purity  of  his  character  and  refinement  of  his  genius 
than  the  transformation  of  the  ignoble  temptress  of  the 
Iliad  into  that  ideal  of  almost  omnipotent  power  shown 
forth  in  beneficent  tenderness,  which  Christendom  for  so 
many  ages  accepted  as  its  guiding  star.-^ 


1  Any  one  who  will  read  carefully  the  last  part  of  ^neid  ii.  from  589  will  dis- 
cover the  suggestion  of  a  "  Holy  Family" — the  Divine  Mother,  the  child  with 
the  nimbus,  and  the  mystic  Star.     See  note  at  end  of  volume. 


ROME  AND  THE  REIGN  OF  LAW.  187 

The  worship  of  the  Divine  mother  links  in  wondrous 
harmony  the  worlds  that  lie  beneath  and  above  humanity. 
In  the  mother's  love  some  ocean  seems  to  break  through 
the  shallow  vessel  which  holds  ordinary  love,  as  though 
the  Infinite  came  welling  through  the  limitations  of  indi- 
vidual human  nature ;  what  exalted  virtue  hardl}^  pro- 
duces in  any  other  relation,  the  mere  conditions  of  phy- 
siology seem  to  ensure  between  the  mother  and  child. 
Here  we  seem  to  have  reached  a  law  wider  than 
humanity ;  here  we  come  down  to  the  primal  rock  of 
sentient  nature,  and  discern  the  elements  of  morality  that 
are  older  than  man.  It  needs  the  barest  hint  of  permis- 
sion to  justify  worship,  where  such  an  ideal  passes  into 
the  Divine  world.  Out  of  a  few  scanty  mentions  in  the 
Gospels,  some  of  them  apparently  conveying  a  distinct 
warning  against  the  tendency  which  fed  upon  them, 
Christendom  made  itself  a  goddess,  and  transformed  its 
3'earnings  after  what  Goethe  calls  "  the  eternal  womanli- 
ness "  into  the  legend  of  a  Virgin  Mother.  The  subjects 
of  Rome  v^^elcomed  a  mother  in  the  Heavens  ;  on  earth 
they  knew  only  a  hard  master,  and  the  Divine  Father 
had  associations  that  shut  out  love.  The  transforma- 
tion of  the  goddess  of  lawless  self-pleasing  love  into  the 
goddess  of  a  maternal  compassionate  love,  forms  the 
clue  to  the  power  of  Virgil  over  the  ages  that  were  to 
come  ;  it  shows  us  the  imitator  of  Homer  as  the  teacher 
of  Dante ;  the  transformation  of  the  classical  into  the 
Christian  ideal  of  life.  The  elevation  of  woman  is  the 
symbol  of  all  that  is  most  vital  in  that  change;  the 
new  meaning  given  to  the  passive  side  of  life  comes  out 
in  the  new  honour  paid  to  the  passive  sex,  and  the 
elevation  of  that  sex  into  the  Divine  world. 

When  Virgil  wrote,  the  virtues  even  of  the  slave  were 
emerging  into  a  development  whicli  Christianity  was 
shortly  to  recognize  and  adopt.      Obedience  to  steady 


iS8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

systematic  power,  whether  the  power  be  in  its  own  nature 
good  or  evil,  does  bring  out  some  valuable  qualities 
which  nothing  else  can  develop,  and  the  list  of  Christian 
martyrs  records  the  stored-up  force  of  generations  of 
patient,  resolute  endurance.  The  death  in  the  amphi- 
theatre that  witnessed  to  the  faith  of  Christ,  witnessed 
also  to  power  bequeathed  by  men  who  had  no  faith  to 
enlighten  their  last  moments  with  visions  of  an  opening 
Heaven.  The  victim  of  Roman  cruelty,  whose  only 
protest  was  the  cry,  "I  am  a  citizen  of  Rome,"  ^  died 
in  a  spirit  that  prepared  his  successors  in  calamity  to 
triumph  in  their  citizenship  of  the  Heavenly  City ;  for 
the  sense  of  some  dim  justice  accessible  in  the  name  of 
the  City  has  a  real,  though  a  remote,  relation  to  the 
love  and  power  manifest  in  the  death  of  Christ.  Not 
only  so ;  the  spirit  of  fortitude  thus  developed  spread 
beyond  the  limits  of  those  ideas  by  which  it  was 
nourished.  When  we  read  of  female  slaves  enduring 
the  extremity  of  torture  rather  than  betray  the  unhappy 
mistress  they  could  not  save,"  or  finding  strength  to 
end  life  under  the  very  hands  of  the  tormentors  lest 
the  exquisite  anguish  should  wring  from  half-conscious 
lips  denunciations  of  those  who  were,  as  the  historian 
reminds  us,  not  bound  to  the  sufferer  by  blood,  and 
hardly  by  acquaintance,^  we  feel  that  the  new  consecration 
of  suffering  and  of  weakness,  the  message  of  the  Cross, 
was  realized  by  those  who  had  never  heard  it.  Rome, 
the  tyrant  of  the  world,  taught  the  lesson  of  Christ ; 
under  its  stern  and  often  cruel  rule  was  learnt  the 
power  of  submission ;  and  that  power  was  ready,  when 
adopted  by  a  new  faith,  to  renew  the  world. 

1  Cic,  "In  Verrem,"  V.  62,  2  Tac,  Annals,  xiv.  60. 

3  Epicharis,  a  freedwoman,  in  the  conspiracy  of  Piso.  ' '  At  illam  non  verbera, 
non  ignes,  non  ira  eo  acrius  torquentium  ne  a  femina  spernerentur,  pervicere 
quin  objecta  denegaret  "  {Ibid.,  xv.  57).  It  is  one  of  the  few  passages  in  which 
the  historian  shows  a  certain  sympathy  with  tlie  victim. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  AGE  OF  DEATH. 

The  law  of  human  progress  is  a  complex  one.  Change 
makes  itself  manifest  at  first,  mainly  as  loss.  A  nega- 
tive succeeds  a  positive  stage,  and  it  is  only  after  long 
patience  that  we  find  the  new  life  develop  into  some 
reminiscence  of  the  old.  The  perfection  of  manhood 
contains  the  perfection  of  childhood,  but  boyhood  seems 
often  a  mere  breaking  awa}''  from  all  that  is  pure  and 
beautiful  in  the  earlier  stage.  Youth  is  negative,  criti- 
cal ;  the  trust  of  the  child  reappears  only  in  the  trust  of 
maturity.  The  caterpillar  has  far  more  life  than  the 
chrysalis,  and  if  our  knowledge  stopped  with  that  stage 
of  growth  we  should  believe  that  growth  was  death. 
The  three  conditions  which  we  may  here  discover  as 
distinct  stages  in  an  upward  progress  are  dimly  visible 
in  history.  The  change  of  moral  ideal  from  ancient  to 
modern  life  may  be  roughly  described  as  a  substitution 
of  the  aims  of  the  individual  for  those  of  the  citizen,  a 
transference  of  hope  and  fear  from  corporate  to  per- 
sonal achievement.  The  transition  takes  place  by  the 
same  law  of  development  as  that  which  transforms  the 
zoophyte  into  the  animal  ;  it  is  a  change  from  a  lower 
to  a  higher  form  of  life  ;  the  gain  is  immense  and  obvious. 
In  our  own  day  the  deadliest  war  and  the  worst  explo- 
sion of  crime  alike  bear  witness,  that  ordinary  men 
now  recognize  a  relation  among  human  beings  as  such, 
of  which  the  best  men  of  antiquity  had  no  conception. 


I90  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Nevertheless,  when  we  compare  our  sense  of  union  with 
theirs,  we  shall  often  see  the  loss  more  clearly  than  the 
gain,  even  after  eighteen  centuries  of  growth.  Perhaps 
the  wider  union  can  never  be  recognized  as  the  narrower 
was  ;  perhaps  the  large  ideal  must  always  appear  vacilla- 
ting and  imperfect,  when  it  is  compared  with  the  small. 

Much  more  shall  we  feel  this  if  we  return  to  the  period 
that  intervenes  between  the  ancient  and  modern  world  ; 
to  that  age  which  we  may,  according  to  our  point  of 
view,  call  the  death  of  the  city,  or  the  birth  of  the  nation. 
In  the  dark  winter  that  intervenes  between  the  autumn 
and  the  spring,  the  instincts  which  measured  the  vital 
strength  of  antiquity  had  much  less  scope  than  they 
have  now.  The  nation  is  not  the  dominant  interest  that 
the  city  was,  but  still  in  modern  life,  as  in  ancient  life, 
men  have  felt  themselves  part  of  a  whole.  Only  in  the 
epoch  of  transition  was  there  no  bond  from  man  to  man, 
except  that  which  united  one  man  to  all  men.  Men 
have  never  been  so  isolated  since  then.  Christianity  has 
always  been  a  strong  binding  influence,  if  also  a  strong 
dividing  influence ;  but  at  its  dawn  there  was  in  the 
whole  world  no  binding  influence  except  that  which 
included  the  whole  world.  For  while  the  union  of  the 
city  or  of  the  nation  is  a  vital  reality,  that  agglomeration 
which  makes  up  an  Empire  is  strong  by  means  of  negation 
only  ;  it  lives  on  the  crushed  lives  of  the  races  that  are 
submitted  to  it;  and  the  moment  they  awaken  to  energetic 
self-assertion  it  must  perish.  It  marks  a  complete  blank 
of  national  life.  The  dominion  of  Roman  imperialism 
was  indeed  the  occasion  of  a  new  sense  of  individual 
life,  a  sudden  and  yet  permanent  illumination  of  those 
relations  which  bind  man  to  man.  But  the  bond  which 
unites  one  man  to  all  men  is  a  weak  thing  if  it  stand 
alone.  The  sense  of  human  kindred,  if  it  know  no 
gradation,  is  powerless   to  overcome   the  repulsions   of 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  igr 

self-interest  or  aversion,  and  to  weld  separate  individuals 
into  a  whole  that  can  withstand  shocks  from  without. 
Even  in  the  best  men  of  that  time  (who,  indeed,  may  be 
reckoned  among  the  best  men  of  any  time)  we  do  still  dis- 
cern, that  meagreness  of  moral  life,  that  poverty  of  organic 
relation  which  in  other  representatives  of  the  age  comes 
out  in  every  utterance,  and  which  is  stamped  upon  the 
history  of  this  period  in  characters  that  none  may  ignore. 
For  the  history  of  the  first  three  centuries  of  our 
era  is  inexplicable  without  a  constant  recollection  of  this 
moral  poverty.  The  rule  of  the  bad  Roman  Emperors  is 
remembered  as  a  t3'pe  of  cruel  and  oppressive  tyranny, 
even  by  persons  who  have  no  equally  definite  ideas  of 
any  other.  Perhaps  the  dominion  of  a  Nero  was  not 
really  so  oppressive  to  the  body  of  the  people  as  that 
of  many  less  celebrated  tyrants ;  but  still  we  have  to 
account  for  the  strange  paralysis  that  lay  on  the  minds 
of  those  distinguished  men  who  did  suffer  and  could 
have  resisted.  Other  tyrants  have  been  supported 
either  by  the  spell  of  genius  or  the  authority  of  here- 
ditary claim.  Genius  in  the  first  century  after  Christ 
seemed  extinct,  and  inherited  authority  was  an  idea  asso- 
ciated with  barbarism  and  opposed  to  all  the  glorious 
memories  of  the  past.^  The  tyrants  of  the  Roman  Empire, 
the  most  widespread  tyranny  the  world  has  ever  known, 
were  as  devoid  of  energetic  character  and  resolute  will 
as  of  the  prestige  of  tradition.  They  had  as  little  legi- 
timate claim  as  Napoleon,  and  as  little  genius  as  the 
Bourbons.  Yet  as  we  read  how  they  were  obeyed,  we 
feel  as  if  they  must  have  possessed  something  which  all 
modern  tyrants  have  lacked.  Brave  and  guiltless  men, 
when  their  death  was  decreed  by  the  Emperor,  heard  in 
vain  the  appeal  of  what  would  seem  the  irresistible  voice 

^  "  IJrly-m  Komam  a  priiicipio  rcges  habucrc.     Libcrtatcm  et  consulatum  L. 
liruiui  iniiiiuii." — lac,  Ann.,  i.  i. 


192  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  common  sense  to  make  use  of  the  common  sympathy 
and  the  common  danger ;  -^  they  submitted  to  the  doom 
in  resisting  which  they  would  have  found  thousands  of 
comrades ;  they  even  inflicted  it  with  their  own  hands 
at  the  imperial  order.  The  history  of  the  Roman 
Empire  is  as  much  a  problem  as  a  narrative.  Why 
should  a  General  who  had  enlarged  the  boundaries  of 
Roman  dominion  fall  on  his  spear  at  the  command  of 
Nero  ?  "-^  Why  should  the  virtuous  sages  he  sent  to  the 
scaffold  bow  to  his  will  as  to  something  divine  ?  ^  The 
answer  is  as  certain  as  it  is  instructive.  Because  on  the 
side  of  the  oppressor  was  an  ideal  of  corporate  unity,  and 
on  the  side  of  the  victim  was  nothing  but  himself.  The 
traditional  loyalty  to  the  State  had  been  transferred  to 
a  succession  of  parvenus,  and  the  filial  obedience  rendered 
by  the  citizen  of  the  Republic  was  succeeded  by  the 
servile  obedience  rendered  by  the  subject  of  the  Empire. 
The  Emperor  had  no  true  strength,  but  there  was  no 
other  strength  than  his.  While  his  victims  were  mere 
individuals,  in  him  was  incarnate  the  ideal  of  the  past ; 
he  represented  the  dead  Commonwealth ;  and  noble 
spirits,  like  the  faithful  hound,  keep  a  long  watch  beside 
a  corpse. 

The  power  of  resisting  tyranny  lies  in  the  sense  of 
some  organic  union  between  its  victims.  The  common 
suffering  of  individuals  does  not  of  itself  make  them 
into  a  unity.  If  they  feel  that  nothing  is  injured  but 
themselves,  they  may  indeed  resist  what  is  intolerable ; 

1  As  Rubellius  Plautus,  who  incurred  the  jealousy  of  Nero,  and  was  its 
unresisting  victim,  A.D.  62.  See  Tac,  Ann.,  xiv.  58,  59  ;  cf.  appeal  to  Piso,  xv. 
59  ;  and  the  lament  of  the  historian,  xvi.  16. 

2  Corbulo,  the  conqueror  of  the  Parthians,  thus  killed  himself,  A.D.  67. 

3  See  Seneca,  "  De  Tranquillitate  Animi,"  xiv.  3,  for  a  strilving  instance  of 
this  adulation  in  the  case  of  Canus  Julius,  whom  Seneca  calls  one  of  the  greatest 
cf  men,  and  who  thanked  Caligula  for  sending  him  to  the  scaffold.  The  most 
striking  case  of  ignoble  submission  is  mentioned  by  the  same  writer,  as  shown 
to  the  same  prince  by  a  Roman  knight  named  Pastor  ("  De  Ira.,"  ii.  33). 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  193 

but  exactly  in  proportion  as  they  are  good  and  generous, 
they  will  be  slow  to  disturb,  for  the  sake  of  any  concern 
personal  to  themselves,  the  advantages  produced  by  any 
kind  of  settled  order.  An  injury,  if  it  be  not  a  wrong, 
is  ahva3's  more  gladly  endured  than  resisted  by  a  noble 
nature  ;  it  is  the  generous  flame  of  indignation  alone 
which  can  fuse  the  varied  elements  of  individual  suffering 
into  the  unity  that  makes  a  multitude  formidable.  And 
thus  no  number  of  individuals  will  possess  a  common 
strength,  if  they  are  united  onl^''  by  impulses  that  slacken 
in  the  heart  of  every  man  in  proportion  as  he  is  un- 
selfish. When  men  have  arisen  in  successful  revolt, 
they  have  felt  something  more  than  that  tyranny  was 
painful ;  they  have  been  united  by  the  sense  that  the 
t^'rant  had  abused  a  sacred  trust,  that  he  could  be  called 
to  account  for  the  charge  of  a  sacred  deposit.  They 
have  represented  some  corporate  unity ;  they  have  felt 
themselves  bound  together  by  a  common  race  or  a 
common  faith.  When  there  is  no  binding  influence  on 
the  side  of  the  victims  but  that  common  wish  for  life 
and  ease  which  is  felt  by  every  man,  while  on  the 
side  of  the  oppressor  there  is  even  the  ghost  of  a 
great  idea,  the  one  will  be  strong,  and  the  many  almost 
powerless. 

Hence  that  ideal  of  resignation,  which  we  have  seen 
in  Virgil  as  the  moral  bequest  of  Roman  dominion,  came 
under  the  Empire  to  gather  to  itself  all  the  moral  energy 
of  the  nation,  and  men  were  strong  only  in  the  virtues 
of  the  slave.  As  we  look  at  the  outward  history  of  the 
time,  we  can  remember  only  what  is  equally  true,  that 
they  were  weak  in  his  vices.  Wc  cannot  in  any  other 
period  bring  forward,  either  on  so  large  or  on  so  small 
a  scale,  illustrations  of  a  general  servility.  We  need 
it  to  explain  the  submission  of  a  world  ;  we  discern  it 
also  in  the  minutest  habits  of  polite  society.      No  other 

N 


194  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

period  has  possessed  an  important  and  influential  class 
of  men  who  had  once  occupied  the  position  of  menials, 
and  having  exhibited  the  abjectness  of  slavery  as  shown 
in  the  cringing  dependent,  revealed  its  other  side  in  the 
insolence  of  the  upstart,  and  the  cruelty  that  is  bred  of 
inherited  fear.  A  slave  utters  the  loftiest  aspirations 
of  that  age  ;  its  freedmen  show  forth  its  warnings.  The 
business  of  life  was  servility  ;  those  must  have  succeeded 
best  who  had  known  its  lowest  depths.  Thus  the  spirit 
that  made  the  Empire  possible  was  exercised  and  de- 
veloped in  all  social  intercourse ;  and  politeness  showed 
itself  in  a  series  of  attentions  not  unlike  those  of  the 
upper  servants  of  a  luxurious  household  to  a  pampered 
master  (only  that  in  our  age  some  of  them  vv^ould  be  to 
the  taste  of  hardly  any  one).  A  sort  of  inverted  sub- 
servience seems  to  have  found  satisfaction  in  attentions 
void  of  all  other  object  than  the  manifestation  of  servilit}^; 
those  men  who  made  the  world  tremble  showed  most 
clearly  the  tastes  engendered  by  slavery.  "  Tremble 
before  the  slave  when  he  bursts  his  fetters,  not  before 
the  freeman,"  says  Schiller,^  and  the  lesson  has  never 
been  better  illustrated  than  by  the  society  of  the  Roman 
Empire.  The  distinction  between  the  freedman  and  the 
freeman  was  one  the  Roman  of  that  age  could  never 
forget ;  it  is  one  he  has  left  recorded  in  deeds  and  words 
which  convey  its  meaning  to  all  time."^ 

1  "  Vor  dem  Sklaven,  wenn  er  die  Kette  bricht, 
Vor  dem  freien  Menschen  erzittert  nicht." 

— Schiller,  "  Die  Worte  des  Glaubens." 

-  The  writers  who  seem  to  me  to  bring  out  most  forcibly  the  tendencies  of  a 
servile  society,  reinforced  from  the  ranks  of  slaves,  are  Martial  and  Seneca, 
chiefly  the  former.  I  should  not  think  so  many  begging-letters  were  contained 
in  any  other  book  belonging  to  literature  as  in  his  epigrams  ;  they  are  a  testi- 
mony o  universal  habits  of  mendicancy,  which  make  his  gross  flattery  of 
Domitian  [e.g.,  i.  17,  28)  a  comparative  trifle.  But  perhaps  the  most  striking 
single  llustration  of  this  servile  spirit,  as  it  was  encouraged  by  Stoicism,  is  the 
flattery  of  Nero  in  the  opening  of  the  Pharsalia,  i.  33-66.     If  all  the  miseries 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  155 

How  deeply  rooted  was  this  spirit  of  servility  is  shown 
by  its  hold  on  the  intellect  of  the  age.  Genius  has 
never  stooped  so  low  as  in  the  abasement  of  men  of 
letters  before  Nero  and  Domitian.  Perhaps  they  will, 
in  all  ages,  be  apt  to  be  found  on  the  side  of  submission ; 
students  are  generally  timid  in  the  face  of  revolutionary 
change.  They  are  apt  to  feel  that  the  din  of  civil  tumult 
interrupts  things  more  precious  than  it  can  ever  establish; 
and  men  trained  in  the  atmosphere  of  study  and  medi- 
tation find  it  easier  to  die  than  to  resist.  "  If  all  are 
grateful  to  him  whose  overruling  power  secures  un- 
troubled repose,"  says  Seneca,^  "  the  man  whose  leisure 
is  occupied  with  profound  and  fertile  meditation  will 
surely,  considering  to  whom  he  owes  this  priceless  trea- 
sure, be  ready  to  exclaim,  in  the  words  of  Virgil's  shep- 
herd, '  O  Meliboeus,  a  god  has  given  us  this  repose  ! ' " 
the  god  being  Nero.  Nor  did  he  grudge  his  life  as  the 
price  of  it,  when  the  claim  was  made  by  the  god  of  his 
ignoble  idolatry.  No  far-reaching,  deep-rooted  national 
life  made  a  background  and  shelter  for  the  separate 
individualities  which  had  formerly  owed  all  their  vigour 
and  beauty  to  such  a  support.  Whatever  survived  of 
the  belief  in  that  national  life  ranked  itself  on  the  side 
of  submission  to  Nero ;  whatever  suggested  resistance 
belonged  to  the  mere  unit.  The  ccmmDnplace  secular 
world  was  useful  only  as  a  husk  to  preserve  the  little 
kernel  of  Philosophy  ;  it  had  no  sacredness  of  its  own. 
The  only  important  duty  of  the  Prince  was  to  keep 
things  quiet,  in  order  that  the  Philosopher  might  think 
and  write  in  peace.  If  that  was  all  that  could  be  accom- 
plished by  the  best  of  princes,  it  is  not  surprising  that 
Nero  was  not  felt  to  be  the  worst. 

of  the  civil  wars  were  the  necessary  price  to  pay  for  tlie  blessing  of  Nero's  rule, 
says  the  nephew  of  Seneca,  they  were  well  worth  while.     The  first  three  books 
of  the  I'harsalia  were  published  in  A.D.  62. 
1  Epist.  73  ;  r/.  Virgil,  Ec.  1. 


1 95  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Men  know  little  of  the  meaning  of  a  true  Resignation 
when  they  imagine  it  to  be  the  foe  of  manly  activity,  of 
heroic  aspiration.  No  heroic  achievement  is  possible 
without  it  ;  nothing  great  was  ever  done  but  by  one  who 
knew  how  to  endure ;  in  all  achievement  lies  the  latent 
heat  of  renunciation.  But  a  true  resignation  implies  a 
worth}^  allegiance ;  it  implies  some  organic  unity  for  the 
sake  of  which  all  that  pertains  to  the  Self  may  be  resigned. 
The  dying  Socrates  preaches  such  a  resignation  when  he 
refuses  to  quit  the  prison  from  which  escape  is  easy,  and 
declares  that  the  laws  of  his  country  sound  in  his  ears 
like  some  strange  music  deafening  him  to  the  appeal  of 
his  eager  disciple,^  and  bidding  him  rather  endure  the 
worst  that  can  be  inflicted,  than  resist  the  claim  whose 
validity  he  feels  more  deeply  than  any  other  certainty. 
But  the  d3ang  Corbulo,  falling  on  his  sword  at  the  com- 
mand of  Nero,  preaches  the  very  opposite  lesson ;  he 
warns  all  who  follow  his  history  against  the  slavish 
spirit  that  prepared  a  world  of  victims,  and  set  a  monster 
on  the  throne.  He  shows  not  the  heroism  that  can  lay 
down  life  for  a  noble  cause,  but  the  weariness  and 
despair  that  found  it  easier  to  die  than  to  resist  any 
authority  clothed  with  an  appearance  of  legitimate  claim  ; 
he  measures  the  vacuum  of  hope  and  fear  that  remained 
even  for  a  brave  and  successful  soldier,  when  the  Com- 
monwealth had  ceased  to  exist. 

The  meagreness  and  poverty  of  the  private  life  of 
antiquity  is  best  seen  in  the  life  of  which  this  private 
side  was  richest.  Cicero  is  known  to  us  much  as  we 
know  the  hero  of  a  modern  biography ;  we  have  his 
intimate  letters,  as  well  as  his  public  utterances,  and 
know  his  private  opinions  almost  as  well  as  the  facts  of 

^  TCLi'Ta  ,  .  .  iyil)  00K(2  aKoveiy,  uianep  ol  Kopv^avrtuipres  ruiv  avKQiv  ookov- 
(jiv  aKOveiv,  koX  iv  f/xol  avTTj  i]  tjxtJ  to6tuv  tuiv  'Kb-^uv  /3o/x/3ei  /cat  Troiei  ti-q 
ovvaffdai.  Tuiv  dWuv  aKoveiv  (Plato,  Crito.,  54). 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  197 

his  history.  In  him  we  come  near  enough  to  the  hfe  of 
a  Roman  gentleman,  in  order  to  see  the  strange  gaps 
which  it  exhibits  as  compared  with  any  hfe  among  the 
cultured  classes  in  modern  times.  Perhaps  the  most 
striking  change,  from  this  point  of  view,  is  the  entire  lack 
of  what  we  mean  by  a  sense  of  honour.  We  must 
descend  to  an  uneducated  stratum  of  society  before  we 
reach  the  bhmtness  of  feeling  which  seems  to  have 
characterized  the  best  society  of  Rome.  When  a  letter 
not  addressed  to  himself  falls  into  the  hands  of  Cicero, 
and  he  wishes  to  know  what  is  inside  it,  it  seems  to  be 
the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world  to  break  the  seal 
and  peruse  its  contents.  The  only  approach  to  an  apology 
is  his  request  to  the  husband  of  the  writer,  to  whom  he 
mentions  the  fact,  never  to  let  her  know  what  he  has 
done.^  An  impertinent  footman  in  London  would  be 
more  embarrassed  by  the  confession  than  was  the  finest 
gentleman  of  Rome. 

The  same  moral  poverty  is  discernible  in  a  coldness 
and  coarseness  of  his  private  relations  in  other  ways. 
The  reader  comes  with  a  strange  shock  on  the  story  of 
his  second  marriage  ;  it  would  be  impossible  for  any 
equally  affectionate  modern,  to  have  divorced  a  wife  who 
had  been  in  tender  relations  with  him  for  thirty  years, 
and  immediately  married  a  young  heiress.  He  was 
evidently  the  most  warm-hearted  and  considerate  of 
kinsmen  ;  yet  his  father's  death  is  huddled  into  a  letter 
of  commissions  with  a  brevity  which  in  an  intimate 
communication  an  Englishman  would   feel  jarring  in  the 

1  .See  Cic,  Ad  .\tt.,  v.  11.  The  letter  he  opened  was  one  from  Pilia,  the 
wife  of  Atticus,  perhaps  referring  to  the  eonjugal  troubles  of  his  brother, 
(Juintiis,  wlio  was  married  to  Atticus's  sister.  "  Accepi  fasciculum  in  quo  erat 
epistola  I'iliae,  abstuh,  aperui,  legi,"  is  his  straightforward  account  of  the  matter. 
Another  time  he  tells  Atticus  that  he  had  advised  his  nephew  alw.ays  to  open 
and  read  any  letter  to  his  (the  young  man's)  father— "Si  quid  forte  sit  quod 
opus  sit  sciri  "  (Ad  Att.,  vi.  3). 


198  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

announcement  of  almost  any  death  among  kindred  ;  and 
the  betrothal  of  his  beloved  TuHia  is  mentioned  with 
just  the  same  apparent  carelessness.  It  is  hardly  pos- 
sible to  doubt  that  Cicero  was  an  excellent  son  ;  it  is 
certain  that  he  was  an  excellent  fother;  but  private 
relation  was  evidently  a  slighter  thing  to  him  than 
it  is  to  an  average  man  in  modern  England  or  France. 
Certainly  the  lack  of  delicacy  was  not  personal ;  there 
never  was  a  nature  more  adapted  than  that  of  Cicero  for 
all  the  fine  shades  of  feeling  by  which  intercourse  is  kept 
pure  and  eas3^  But  he  belonged  to  a  race  that  had  no 
moral  attention  for  any  private  relation,  inasmuch  as  it 
took  no  interest  in  any  individual  claim.  Everything  in- 
dividual was,  as  it  w^ere,  considered  in  a  hurry ;  the  im- 
portant business  of  life  summoned  thought  away  to  other 
realms,  and  the  group  of  sentiments  and  impulses  which 
make  up  the  moral  standard  of  refinement  and  culture 
were  as  little  dreamt  of  among  the  refined  and  cultivated 
classes  of  Rome  as  in  modern  Europe  among  those  crushed 
by  penury,  and  dulled  by  arduous  and  unremitting  toil. 
In  his  life  we  see  the  difference  between  a  private  hfe 
enriched  by  a  long  tradition  of  moral  interest,  and  one 
which  is  a  mere  parenthesis  in  the  life  of  the  citizen. 

But  the  interests  of  the  citizen  came  to  an  end. 
This  bare  and  meagre  life  became  the  only  one.  And 
men  were  thus  driven  back  for  the  first  time  on  the 
meaning  of  the  word  Self.  There  were  only  two  objects 
of  attention  in  the  whole  world  which  could  be  regarded 
as  a  unity.  The  first  was  that  vast  Empire  which  en- 
folded in  its  rigid  embrace  so  various  a  group  of  races 
that  it  might  well  seem  to  include  all  humanity ;  the 
second  was  the  soul  of  man.  Nothing  came  between 
that  could  be  called  One.  Athens,  Sparta,  Thebes — 
all  that  gathered  up  the  glorious  memories  of  the  past ; 
Gaul,  Britain,  Spain — all  then  known  of  that  which  pre- 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  199 

figured  the  development  of  the  future,  were  ahke  mere 
fragments  of  the  Empire ;  none  could  form  the  focus  of 
any  inspiring  hope  ;  any  attempt  to  discover  such  was 
associated  with  disappointment.  As  for  the  Empire 
itself,  it  was  far  too  vast  and  too  various  to  exercise  in 
any  practical  sense  the  political  capacities  and  energies 
bequeathed  from  days  when  the  life  of  the  City  was  a 
reality.  That  statel^^,  satisfying  life  had  passed  away, 
leaving  no  successor.  There  was  for  the  subject  of  the 
Empire  a  sense  of  repose,  of  security,  which  the  citizen 
of  antiquit}'  had  never  known  ;  but  that  which  had  made 
life  worth  living  was  gone  utterly.  What  could  occupy 
the  void  left  by  such  a  bereavement  ?  Only  that  which 
was  a  unity  in  even  a  deeper  sense  than  the  City  had 
ever  been  ;  that  which  is  the  very  type  of  oneness  ;  that 
which  each  man  means  when  he  says  "  I."  There  we 
reach  not  only  a  unity,  but  the  Unity.  It  may  be 
thought  that  it  is  in  so  special  a  sense  tJie  Unity  that 
there  could  have  been  no  period  of  history  at  which 
men  made  the  discovery  that  it  was  so,  but  we  think 
thus  only  when  we  fail  in  historic  imagination.  The 
correlation  of  our  moral  being  is  no  less  complex  than 
that  of  our  ph3'sical  organism,  and  here  also  we  shall 
find  loss  and  gain  hand  in  hand.  "  When  the  seeds  in 
our  fruits  become  atrophied,"  says  Darwin,  "  the  fruit 
itself  gains  largely  in  size  and  quality."  In  the  evolu- 
tion of  our  modern  life  this  process  has  been  inverted, 
and  when  we  return  to  the  i^ich  civil  life  of  antiquity, 
we  find  that,  as  compared  with  our  own,  it  had  a  similar 
price.  Nothing  is  so  hostile  to  the  spiritual  life,  at  any 
time,  as  the  political ;  nothing  so  entirely  calls  away 
attention  from  the  problems  of  the  inward  world  as 
the  responsibilities  of  the  statesman  ;  and  we  might 
call  every  citizen  of  antiquity  in  some  sense  a  states- 
man.    We  must  exaggerate  all  political  interest,  we  must 


200  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

enormously  diminish  all  other  interest,  before  we  can 
appreciate  the  absorbing  power  of  the  life  of  the  State 
on  a  citizen  of  Athens.  Thus  only  shall  we  understand 
the  immense  fund  of  intellectual  energy  released  and 
craving  exercise  when  the  Old  World  came  to  an  end  ; 
thus  only  enter  into  the  meaning  of  those  emphatic  plati- 
tudes, as  they  seem  to  us,  which  meet  us  in  the  more 
earnest  writings  of  this  time.  Platitudes  to  the  reader 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  to  the  writer  of  the  first  or 
second  they  are  original  and  striking  thoughts.  If  we 
could  imagine  ourselves  entering  upon  moral  questions 
of  which  we  found  no  hint  in  the  New  Testament,  we 
should  put  ourselves  in  the  position  of  those  writers 
who  at  this  time  began  to  investigate  a  world  of  reflec- 
tion, of  emotion,  of  intellectual  interest,  on  which  Plato 
had  hardly  touched.  It  was  in  very  truth  to  them  the 
entrance  on  a  new  world. 

The  citizen  of  Athens  or  Rome  had  felt  himself  to 
derive  all  his  worth  from  his  relation  to  an  invisible 
being  which  preceded,  and  would  survive,  him — the 
State.  The  life  that  he  most  prized  was  a  life  that  he 
believed  immortal,  and  it  was  his  participation  in  this 
which  gave  value  to  his  own.  The  subject  of  the 
Roman  Empire  could  cherish  no  such  belief.  He  stood 
in  no  relation  to  any  city,  for  Rome  had  ceased  to  be  a 
city — she  was  a  world.  He  was  no  longer  a  portion 
of  any  other  life ;  he  felt,  for  the  first  time,  that  he 
must  be  himself  a  whole.  He  could  not  any  longer  say 
IVe  with  any  fulness  of  meaning ;  he  began  to  realize 
what  it  is  that  each  man  means  when  he  says  /.  As 
the  fruit  withered,  the  seed  detached  itself.  It  is  not 
that  this  was  a  time  of  vigorous  individuality ;  quite 
the  reverse.  There  was  less  individuality  during  the 
two  centuries   to  which  these  remarks  chiefly  apply  ^  in 

1  ?.if.,irom  the  death  of  Virgil,  19  B.C.,  to  the  death  of  Marcus  Aurehus, 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  201 

the  whole  civiHzed  world  than  there  was  during  the  life 
of  Greece,  within  a  region  about  as  large  as  Wales. 
But  as  men  missed  the  exceptional  endowment,  they 
learned  to  prize  that  universal  quality  of  which  it  is  no 
more  than  the  conspicuous  exhibition.  Everywhere  the 
exceptional  was  changing  to  the  universal.  The  proud 
privilege  of  Roman  citizenship  was  vulgarized  by  the 
intrusion  of  a  mob  ;  even  the  distinction  of  bond  and 
free,  though  not  in  the  slightest  degree  weakened  in 
practice,  was  beginning  to  be  felt,  by  the  foremost 
thinkers  of  the  da}',  out  of  harmony  with  the  true  ideal 
of  humanity.  The  idea  of  the  State — that  which  is 
essentially  limited,  that  which,  according  to  the  con- 
ditions of  ancient  life,  was  connected  with  something 
exceptional,  inasmuch  as  it  could  not  include  in  its 
organic  framework  every  human  being  who  came  under 
its  sway — this  idea  was  giving  way  to  the  most  ex- 
pansive, the  most  widely  inclusive  that  is  known  to 
abstract  thought,  the  idea  of  Nature. 

A  man  had  felt  himself  called  on  to  live  as  a  citizen  ; 
he  was  now  bidden  to  live  according  to  Nature.  The 
injunction  is  little  more  than  an  epitaph  on  the  ideal  of 
ancient  life,  and  when  it  has  been  repeated  in  the  modern 
world,  it  has  lost  half  its  meaning.  From  the  most  con- 
crete object  of  human  103'alty  the  men  of  that  day  turned 
towards  the  most  abstract.  The  city  was  indeed  an  invi- 
sible reality,  but  those  outward  images  with  which  it  was 
associated  were  small  and  definite  almost  beyond  w^iat  a 
modern  can  bring  himself  to  realize.^  Nature,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  the  vaguest  idea,  perhaps,  that  we  associate  with 
a  single  word.     It  is  strange  to  reflect  that  about  two  thou- 

180  A.n.  The  half-century  which  saw  the  invasion  of  Xerxes,  500-450  c.c, 
)ias  a  far  greater  wealth  of  character  and  genius. 

1  The  minute  range  of  impressive  associations  is  vividly  brought  homo  to 
the  reader  by  the  whole  of  the  Q'Idipus  at  Colonus,  One  constantly  imagines 
distances  ten  times  as  great  as  the  reality. 


202  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

sand  years  after  the  belief  of  Life  according  to  Nature  came 
to  men  as  a  gospel,  John  Stuart  Mill  devoted  an  Essay, 
left  behind  as  the  expression  of  his  latest  thought,  to  ask — 
What  is  Nature  ?  How  could  the  Roman  Stoics  have  felt 
it  any  gain  to  live  according  to  something  of  which  Mill, 
looking  back  on  many  centuries  of  other  people's  study 
of  it,  and  his  own  long  life  of  studying  their  opinions, 
declared  that  he  did  not  know  what  it  was  ?  Because 
the  word  came  to  them  as  the  symbol  of  a  sudden 
expansion  of  moral  aim  which  was  best  expressed 
by  the  vaguest  of  names.  It  started  them  on  a  new 
path ;  it  carried  them  far  away  from  that  which,  they 
clearly  saw,  should  be  left  behind.  It  came  with  the 
irresistible  charm  of  a  new  inspiration  to  men  cumbered 
and  shackled  by  the  ruins  of  the  old ;  it  left  the  old 
barriers  out  of  sight,  and  men  for  the  hour  asked  no 
more.  To  inhabit  the  city  of  Zeus  ^  instead  of  the  city 
of  Cecrops  seemed  a  wonderful  expansion  given  to  all 
possibilities  on  which  the  heart  of  man  could  dwell ;  and 
in  their  recoil  from  what  was  narrow,  the  men  of  that 
day  failed  to  discern  that  in  removing  the  limitations 
of  their  ideal  home  they  deprived  it  of  all  form.  They 
escaped  from  the  river  to  the  ocean,  and  forgot  that 
the  change  would  leave  them  without  guidance  till  they 
learned  to  guide  themselves  by  the  stars. 

The  breeze  of  their  own  high  aims,  to  a  certain 
extent,  served  to  direct  them.  The  words  of  all  thinkers 
in  the  age  we  speak  of  were  full  of  a  lofty  humanity. 
The  extreme  Radicals  of  our  own  day  do  not  go  beyond 
them  in  their  recognition  of  the  truth,  ignored  or  denied 
by  heroic  Greece,  that  the  sacred  thing  in  man  is  his 
humanity.  But,  indeed,  that  belief  is  so  entirel}'-  a  com- 
monplace of  our  day,  that   the  only  difference  between 

^  "Fjicetvo^  fj.h  rprjcri  iruXi  cplXr)  KiKpowo?  av  be  ovk  (pe7s  &  voXi  (jiD\-q  At6s  ; — 
Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus,  iv.  23. 


THE  A  GE  OF  DEA  TH.  203 

the  highest  Tory  and  the  broadest  Radical  is  as  to  the 
fitness  of  their  respective  schemes  for  bringing  this 
fundamental  truth  into  practice.  "  When  you  have 
come  to  my  age,  my  dear,"  said  Sir  Walter  Scott  to 
his  daughter,  who  had  spoken  of  something  as  "  vulgar  " 
which  he  thought  undeserving  of  contempt,  "  you  will 
thank  God  that  everything  which  is  supremely  precious 
is  common."  He  was  essentially  a  Tory ;  his  genius 
was  quickened  and  stirred  by  all  that  was  exceptional ; 
the  pomp  of  chivalry  kindled  his  imagination,  a  tawdry 
imitation  of  it  ruined  his  life;  yet  that  gentle  rebuke  to 
his  child  expresses  the  deepest  part  of  his  ideal  ;  to  the 
very  core  of  his  being  he  felt,  and  rejoiced  to  feel,  that 
all  which  is  supremely  precious  is  common.  There  is 
the  ideal  of  the  modern  world  ;  in  the  ages  of  classic 
antiquity  the  best  of  men  had  just  as  little  S3'mpathy 
with  it  as  the  worst  had. 

If  we  judge  by  men's  words,  we  should  say  that  in 
the  first  century  of  our  era,  the  latter  standard  was  in 
its  fullest  maturity  substituted  for  the  earlier.  If  we 
judge  by  their  deeds,  we  should  say  that  the  new  day 
had  not  yet  begun  to  dawn.  Seneca  preaches  a  morality 
that  our  own  time  has  not  surpassed  ;  and  he  may  have 
been  a  listener  to  that  debate  in  the  Senate  which  decided 
on  the  slaughter  of  400  innocent  slaves.^  But  we  must 
not  think  that  words  without  deeds  are  necessarily 
empty  of  all  meaning.  The  birth  of  the  Enthusiasm  of 
Humanity  is  a  great  epoch  in  tlie  moral  life  of  man, 
even  though  wc  must  date  it  by  words  only.  That 
enthusiasm  seemed  in  some  sense  a  greater  thing  then 
than  it  does   now.      The  very  fact   that  people  did   not 

1  But  that  debate  shows  also  that  tlie  feeling  of  the  minority  was  growing 
stronger.  "  Nemo  unus  contra  ire  ausus  est,"  says  the  Historian,  after  giving 
the  arguments  for  severity,  "  ita  dissonae  voces  respondebant,  nunierum  .  .  . 
ac  plurimorum  indubilam  innocenliam  miserantiutn  "  (.'\nn.,  xiv.  45).  This 
was  A.I).  60. 


204  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

act  upon  it  kept  it  from  perilous  shocks.  We  have 
seen,  after  eighteen  centuries  of  the  ideal,  what  it  can- 
not do;  to  the  Roman  Stoics  it  seemed  omnipotent.  It 
may  be  said,  that  to  us,  as  to  them,  its  true  powers 
are  untried  ;  but  it  has  at  all  events  been  in  the  modern 
world  a  standard  of  life  steadily  advancing  in  claim, 
influencing  always  what  men  wish  to  seem,  and  some- 
times, therefore,  what  they  wish  to  be.  Eighteen 
hundred  years  ago  nothing  was  known  of  the  diffi- 
culties of  philanthropy ;  the  idea  was  unfamiliar,  the 
attempt  to  carry  it  out  was  unheard  of.  It  was  possible 
to  think  that  the  attempt  would  unite  the  human  race 
with  a  firmer  cohesion  than  that  which  bound  the  Roman 
oligarchy  of  the  past,  that  it  would  bring  into  a  unity 
such  as  that  of  Rome  all  that  claimed  the  name  of 
man. 

•^  The  fact  that  an  old  ideal  is  perishing  must  always 
be  a  stronger,  or  at  least  a  more  obvious,  moral  influence 
than  the  fact  that  a  new  one  is  coming  into  life.  A  death 
is  more  impressive  than  a  birth.  We  always  see  what 
we  are  losing  more  clearly  than  what  we  are  gaining ;  we 
never,  indeed,  see  what  we  have  possessed  so  clearly  as 
in  the  moment  of  losing  it.  Hence  we  find  impressed 
on  these  first  centuries  of  our  era — the  age  between  the 
secure  establishment  of  the  Empire  and  that  of  Chris- 
tianity— a  set  of  feelings  and  beliefs  that  we  best  sum 
up  in  describing  it  as  the  Age  of  Death.  The  words 
may  be  taken  quite  literally.  All  life  seems  at  that  time 
to  have  been  coloured  by  an  anticipation  of  its  end. 
Why,  the  reader  asks  continually,  this  new  sense  of  im- 
pressiveness  in  Death  ?  How  can  it  be  more  significant 
to  one  generation  than  to  another,  that  man  is  snatched 
away  from  all  work  and  interest,  often  before  he  has 
come  to  any  full  discernment  of  their  purport,  almost 
always   before  he   is   ready   to    depart  ?      The    sense  of 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  205 

hurry  in  life  must  be  almost  coeval  with  humanity ; 
wherever  men  have  lived  they  must  have  found  Death 
as  much  the  interruption  as  the  close  of  Life.  Why  at 
this  time  do  we  come  upon  the  sort  of  occupation  of 
mind  about  Death  which  usually  occurs  only  on  the 
discovery  of  a  new  truth,  which  would,  if  it  were  pos- 
sible,  suggest  that  it  was  new  in  the  world  ?  Because 
in  an  important  sense  Death  was  new.  It  had  been  for 
the  first  time  in  history  recognized  as  an  influence  in  the 
career  of  nations.  The  citizen  of  the  old  world  shared 
in  the  perennial  life  of  a  commonwealth,  and  had  no  ear 
for  those  lessons  of  mortality  which  did  not  touch  the 
deeper  life.  The  subjects  of  the  Empire  had  learnt  that 
the  perennial  life  was  not  eternal.  The  new  scope  given 
to  the  fact  of  mortality  brought  in  this  new  impressive- 
ness  to  the  close  of  human  life.  Nothing  is  so  impres- 
sive as  Death  itself,  and  therefore,  for  those  who  live  in 
the  full  blaze  of  literary  expression,  nothing  is  so  trite 
as  reflections  about  Death.  But  to  the  men  of  the  first 
and  second  centuries  these  reflections  came  like  a  new 
revelation.  An  Englishman  looking  back  on  the  vicissi- 
tudes of  the  seventeen  centuries  which  separate  us  from 
the  thinkers  of  that  time  is  not  more  struck  than  they 
were  with  the  fact  that  a  State  can  perish — is  not  so 
much  struck  with  it.  All  the  variety  of  illustration  inac- 
cessible to  them  which  we  possess  of  that  truth  does  not 
equal  in  impressiveness  the  mere  fact  itself,  when  it  was 
recognized  for  the  first  time.^ 

1  See  the  well-known  letter  of  Scrvius  Sulpicius  on  the  death  of  Tullia,  from 
which  Cicero  declares  himself  to  have  derived  much  consolation,  'Ep.  ad 
Diversos  (Ernesti),  iv.  5  : — "  Post  me  crat  TF.sjina,  ante  Megara  :  dextra  Pirxus 
.  .  .  quae  oppida  qiiodam  tempore  florentissima  fuerunt."  The  English  reader 
knows  the  passage  in  "  Childe  Harold  " — 

"  The  Roman  saw  these  tombs  in  his  own  age, 
The  sepulchres  of  cities,  which  excite 
Sad  wonder,  and  his  yet  surviving  page 
The  moral  lesson  bears,  drawn  from  such  pilgrimage." 


2o6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  influence  of  the  idea  was  curiously  strong  in 
opposite  directions.  We  have  to  describe  it  in  language 
of  candid  paradox ;  death  seems  never  to  have  been 
feared  so  much,  or  so  little.  It  was  accepted  with  an 
acquiescence  in  ordinary  times  unknown,  except  in  as- 
sociation with  some  lofty  and  inspiring  cause,  and  it 
was  even  voluntarily  sought  to  a  degree  that  is  pro- 
bably unique  in  the  world's  history.  At  the  same  time, 
it  was  dreaded  as  it  had  never  been  in  the  heroic 
days  of  antiquity,  and  men  of  genius  were  ready  to 
commit  any  baseness  to  escape  it.  The  dread  was 
strong  enough  to  lead  the  poet  of  the  civil  wars  to 
denounce  his  mother,^  the  preacher  of  fine  Stoic  morality 
to  connive  at  the  murder  of  the  Emperor's  mother,  yet  it 
collapsed  the  moment  it  might  have  inspired  vigorous 
action.  Death  occupied  men's  minds  with  a  sway 
which  could  change  in  a  moment  from  terror  to  fascina- 
tion ;  the  General  who  fell  on  his  sword  at  the  Emperor's 
command  was  probably  ready,  unless  he  was  unlike  the 
other  great  men  of  the  time,  to  have  saved  his  life  at  the 
expense  of  that  of  his  own  kindred.  Although  some- 
thing had  gone  out  of  the  world  which  made  life  worth 
living,  that  did  not  give  men  courage  to  face  Death  in 
resolute  resistance ;  on  the  contrary,  there  is  no  age 
when  it  seems  to  have  been  so  abjectly  feared. 

It  is  but  another  way  of  saying  that  Death  had 
obtained  a  new  hold  on  men's  minds  to  add  that  the 
problem  of  a  life  beyond  Death  had  begun  to  take  new 
significance.  It  is  easy  not  to  think  of  Death,  but  who 
an  think  of  Death  and  not  ask  whether  it  be  the  end 
of  desire  and  fear,  or  a  great  crisis  in  the  development 
of  all  desires  and  fears  ?  Thus  the  general  disintegra- 
tion and  decay  which  made  Death  an  object  of  attention 

1  See  the  account  of  Lucan's  treachery  in  the  conspiracy  of  Piso  (Tac,  Ann., 
XV.  56),  and  of  Seneca's  acquiescence  in  Agrippina's  murder  (Ann.,  .\iv.  7). 


THE  A  GE  OF  DBA  TH.  207 

quickened  the  yearnings  after  immortality  into  new 
vividness.  We  see  them  pierce  the  husk  of  vs^orldly 
frivohty ;  ^  we  find  them  in  the  vivid  recognition  given  to 
the  hopes  cherished  by  those  races  witli  which  Rome 
was  now  for  the  first  time  coming  into  contact,  and  to 
whom  belonged  the  world  of  the  future.  Death  was, 
the  Romans  discovered,  regarded  by  the  mystic  priests 
of  the  Gauls  as  "  an  incident  in  a  long  life,"  ^  and  the 
poet  who  was  afterwards  to  attempt  to  buy  his  life  at 
so  hideous  a  price  records  their  confidence  with  a  sigh 
of  envy.  Why,  it  may  be  asked,  should  the  successor 
of  Virgil  envy  the  Druids  a  faith  which  Virgil  was  to 
confirm  in  Dante  ?  The  expression  we  have  quoted 
explains  it — an  incident  in  a  long  ///<?.  Some  dim 
survival  in  a  mysterious  underworld  was  the  ancestral 
belief  of  the  race.  Virgil  had  indeed  deepened  and 
illumined  the  picture  drawn  by  Homer  with  gleams 
of  a  purer  radiance  and  shadows  of  more  sombre  signi- 
ficance, but  had  left  it  still  a  mere  epilogue  to  the  life 
of  this  world.  We  see  in  this  longing  mention  of  the 
Druidic  belief  how  the  world  was  beginning  to  thirst 
for  something  beyond  this,  how  men  were  yearning 
for  a  future  that  should  not  merely  reflect  in  pallid 
memories  the  life  of  earth,  but  should  carry  on  all 
that  had  begun  here  into  new  development,  and  fill  out 
t^e  hopes  and  aspirations  of  earth  with  achievement. 
That  burst  of  enthusiasm  with  which  Lucan  records  this 
possible  vista  into  the  life  beyond  the  grave,  measures 
for  us  the  longings  shadowed  forth  indeed  in  the  ^Eneid, 
but  brought  into  distinctness,  it  seems,  only  by  contact 
with  the  race  whose  whole  life  lay  in  the  future.      "Happy 

J  Several  times  in  the  most  frivolous  writer,  I  should  think,  who  ever  used 
the  Latin  tongue.  Sec  Martial,  Ep.  v.  34,  a  pretty  little  poem  on  the  death 
of  a  child,  and  ix.  21  ;  x.  loi.  I  do  not  mc:in  that  wc  see  here  more  tlian  the 
d.iwn  of  a  conventional  Heaven,  but  it  is  not  less. 

2  Lucan,  Pharsalia,  i.  442,  sey. 


2o8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

are  they  in  their  delusion,"  sighs  Lucan ;  and  it  is  a 
characteristic  expression  ;  he  could  not  conceive  of  their 
belief  as  truth,  yet  yearned  to  share  it  as  a  mere  dream. 
To  nobler  spirits  it  seemed  more  than  a  dream.  Shut 
out  from  the  life  of  the  State,  to  which  there  was  no 
definite  term,  men  were  awakening  to  the  discovery 
that  the  individual  life  contained  some  principle  of 
growth  for  which  the  State  provided  no  scope,  that 
within  the  heart  of  man  lay  emotions  and  desires  which 
were  an  enormous  over-provision  for  any  call  that  this 
world  was  to  make  on  them,  and  that  if  man's  existence 
were  an  intelligible  whole,  it  could  not  end  with  the 
threescore  years  and  ten  of  his  sojourn  here.  We  mis- 
understand the  hope  of  immortality  when  we  look  upon 
it  as  a  mere  anticipation.  It  is  rather  an  actual  dis- 
cernment of  some  principle  of  growth  disproportionate 
to  its  environment,  and  suggesting  a  different  scheme 
of  existence  from  the  outward  one.  The  prospect  of 
Immortality  was,  in  the  ages  of  classical  antiquity,  a 
dim  and  not  specially  attractive  anticipation,  detached 
from  all  experience  interesting  to  the  hearts  of  men. 
It  became,  in  the  age  of  which  we  speak,  a  belief 
necessary  to  render  life  in  this  world  harmonious  and 
explicable,  an  indispensable  refuge  for  the  need  of  per- 
manence formerly  satisfied  by  the  life  of  the  Common- 
wealth, an  answer  to  the  craving  now  first  made  con- 
scious of  its  own  infinite  scope,  and  satisfied  only  b}' 
Eternity. 

The  thinker  in  whom  these  new  ideas  find  their  most 
characteristic  expression  is  the  Stoic  Emperor,  Marcus 
Aurelius  Antoninus.  His  ^^ Journal  intime^^  is,  in  some 
ways,  a  deeper  revelation  of  an  individual  soul  than 
almost  any  other  book  that  ever  was  written.  We 
have  here  the  outpourings  of  one  whom  we  might  almost 
call  the  first  hermit.      He  was  not  a  hermit ;  he  lived  a 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  209 

family  life  as  well  as  that  of  a  soldier  and  monarch — 
his  was  a  career  of  varied  activity  and  constant  com- 
panionship— but  nothing  of  this  reaches  the  reader ;  we 
never  breathe  the  atmosphere  of  the  camp  or  the  court ; 
we  find  ourselves  overhearing,  for  the  first  time,  the 
communings  of  a  human  spirit  with  itself.  It  is  this 
which  M.  Renan  must  mean  when  he  says  of  the  book, 
"  C'est  le  livre  le  plus  purement  humain  qu'il  y  ait." 
Those  who  take  it  up  with  that  introduction  will  be  apt 
to  lay  it  down  with  disappointment.  It  is  not  human 
in  the  sense  that  it  makes  any  approach  towards  the 
various,  many-sided  utterance  which  belongs  to  any 
complete  human  character  ;  it  contains  no  trace  of  subtle 
observation  ;  we  are  never  reminded  of  the  writers  to 
whom  we  turn  for  mottoes ;  we  never  come  to  a  thought 
that  makes  us  stop  to  say,  "  There  is  the  man  who 
knew  mankind."  Except  so  far  as  we  are  now  and  then 
reminded  that  a  court  must  have  the  same  dangers  in 
all  ages,  we  find  nothing  in  it  that  bears  on  the  concrete 
difficulties  and  temptations  of  particular  bodies  of  men 
or  of  individuals.  But  it  is  human  in  this  sense,  that 
it  opens  to  us  those  depths  in  a  human  soul  which 
belong  to  humanity  as  such  ;  not  to  the  second  century 
or  to  the  nineteenth  century,  not  to  the  Italian  or  English 
race,  not  to  the  king  or  the  slave,  but  to  a  human  soul 
at  all  times  and  in  all  places,  wherever  it  is  made 
conscious  of  its  own  personalit}',  wherever  it  is  led  to 
retire  into  its  own  depths,  and  realize  that  which  remains 
to  a  man  apart  from  all  circumstance.  This  spiritual 
attitude  is  not  characteristic  of  the  most  important  periods 
of  history ;  a  great  man's  own  personality  is  not  there 
an  object  of  supreme  interest  to  himself.  It  is  charac- 
teristic of  an  Age  of  Death,  and  is  most  completely  ex- 
hibited in  one,  who  even  in  that  age  of  disintegration 
must  have  been  the  loneliest  of  men. 

o 


2IO  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

All  monarchs  must  be  solitary  in  some  sense,  but  a 
monarch  in  modern  Europe  is  a  member  of  a  select 
society  ;  he  is  one  of  a  band  of  equals.  The  Emperor  of 
Rome  was  alone  in  the  world.  We  see  in  a  Caligula 
or  a  Tiberius  the  moral  insanity  which  results  from 
such  unnatural  isolation ;  in  Marcus  Aurelius  that  in- 
fluence is  traceable  in  a  freezing  loneliness,  a  sense  of 
almost  despair,  softened  into  resignation.  He  was  as 
lonely  in  literary  communion  as  in  the  intercourse  of 
society  and  the  commerce  of  daily  life ;  he  did  not 
know  the  Psalms,  and  there  was  then  nothing  else  at 
all  like  his  Meditations.  In  some  ways  he  is  curiously 
modern,  and  to  the  modern  reader  this  tells  as  a 
disadvantage.  He  was  the  first  to  come  in  sight 
of  certain  ideas  that  the  modern  world  has  dwelt..on 
and  returned  upon  until  they  have  become  common- 
place, and  we  turn  from  many  of  his  most  original 
reflections  as  tedious,  because  they  spring  from  a  seed 
that  has  been  eminently  fertile.  The  writer  whom  he 
oftenest  recalls  is  Pascal.  A  deep  mournfulness,  a 
sense  of  transitoriness  and  futilit}^  in  all  things  earthly, 
an  utter  detachment  from  all  interest  in  the  fleeting 
pageant,  seems  set  to  exactly  the  sanie  key  in  the 
thoughts  of  the  Frenchman  and  the  Roman  ;  we  should 
hardly  discover  the  difference  if,  as  we  turned  the  leaf, 
the  one  book  were  exchanged  for  the  other.  "  Comme 
tout  disparait  en  un  instant !  dans  le  monde  les  personnes, 
ct  dans  la  duree  les  souvenirs !  comment  des  objets  si 
frivoles,  si  decousus  pourraient  ils  occuper  notre  intelli- 
gence et  notre  raison."  That  is  not  Pascal,  but  Marcus 
Aurelius  speaking  through  a  French  translation ;  and  he 
returns  to  the  thought  again  and  again  with  a  persist- 
ence which  reminds  us  that  it  was  an  original  one  to 
him.  "  Serait-ce  la  vaine  opinion  des  hommes  qui 
t'agite  ?   alors  regarde  I'oubli  rapide  de  toutes  les  choses. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  211 

I'abime  du  temps  pris  dans  les  deux  sens "  (i.e.,  the 
boundless  past  and  the  boundless  future),  "  et  I'exiguite 
du  lieu  oil  la  renommee  se  renferme."  It  is  exactl}'  the 
feeling  of  Pascal,  but  it  has  a  typical  impressiveness 
which  Pascal  lacks.  There  speaks  the  man  who  has 
touched  the  limits  of  all  earthly  desire.  Is  there  any 
one,  since  the  line  of  his  successors  came  to  an  end,  of 
whom  we  may  sa}',  as  we  can  of  him,  that  it  was  impos- 
sible for  him  to  frame  a  wish  for  any  earthly  gain  ? 
Kings  in  the  modern  world  have  not  been  shut  out  from 
ambition ;  they  have  seen  a  height  above  them.  But 
the  master  of  the  Roman  world  had  touched  the  summit 
of  earth,  and  if  he  found  it  jo3^1ess,  there  was  no  refuge 
but  in  the  world  within. 

What  Marcus  Aurelius  felt  was  the  unique  and  pro- 
found disappointment  of  the  Philosopher  on  a  throne. 
Plato  at  S3'racuse  may,  perhaps,  have  known  something 
of  the  feeling ;  he  must  have  discovered  how  little  the 
approach  there  made  towards  his  own  ideal — that  kings 
should  become  philosophers,  or  philosophers  kings — 
had  done  for  the  happiness  of  mankind.  But  with 
the  Emperor  that  dream  was  realized  more  fully  than  it 
had  been  realized  under  the  influence  of  the  greatest  of 
Philosophers  on  one  of  the  most  virtuous  of  Statesmen. 
Plato  might  discover  some  shadow  of  an  explanation  of 
Dion's  grievous  failure  in  the  baleful  inheritance  of 
despotic  rule ;  but  for  an  Antonine  there  was  no  such 
refuge  from  the  oppressive  discovery  that  the  Philo- 
sopher on  a  throne  could  do  but  little  to  make  his  sub- 
jects wise  and  good,  or  even  happy.^  To  him  the  whole 
of  life  must  have  been  coloured   and   shaped   by  disap- 

'  Sfc  Wordsworth's  poem  on  Dion  : — 

"  And  what  pure  homage  //icn  did  wait 
On  Dion's  virtues,  while  tlic  kinar  beam 
Of  Plato's  genius,  from  its  lofty  sphere, 
I-'cll  round  him  in  the  grove  of  .Academe, 


213  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

pointment,  and  his  sense  of  its  transitoriness  is  even  a 
deeper  feeling  than  that  of  its  futihty.  "  Reflect  often 
on  thy  last  hour,"  is  the  burden  of  the  Meditations. 
Life  is  a  vapour,  a  smoke,  a  winter  torrent ;  the  interval 
between  the  shortest  and  the  longest  life  is  comparable  to 
that  between  the  disappearance  of  two  grains  of  incense 
flung  into  the  altar-fire.^  Life  hurries  to  its  close;  its 
futilities  are  soon  to  be  hushed  in  the  silence  of  the 
tomb  :  why  make  ado  about  anything  so  ephemeral  ? 
Is  there  no  Life  that  more  truly  deserves  the  name  ? 

This  question  is  not  answered  by  Marcus  Aurelius, 
otherwise  than  with  dim  yearnings,  repressed  by  pious 
resignation.  "  How  is  it,"  he  writes  at  a  time  apparently 
not  long  before  his  death,  "  that  the  Gods,  who  have 
arranged  all  things  well,  and  lovingly  for  mortals,  have 
in  this  one  respect  overlooked  their  interest,  that  men, 
even  excellent  men,  who  have  entered  into  frequent 
communion  with  them,  through  devout  ministrations — 
when  once  they  have  died  quit  existence  altogether,  and 
are  utterly  extinguished  ?  If,  indeed,  this  is  so,  be 
assured  that  the  Gods  would  have  arranged  it  otherwise, 
if  that  had  been  right.  For  it  would  have  been  possible 
if  it  had  been  right."  ^  It  is  instructive  in  this  respect  to 
compare  him  with  a  shallower  and  more  cheerful  writer, 

Softening  their  inbred  dignity  austere. 

****** 
Mourn  hills  and  groves  of  Attica  !  and  mourn 
Ilissus,  bending  o'er  thy  classic  urn  ! 
Mourn,  and  lament  for  him  whose  spirit  dreads 
Your  once  sweet  memory,  studious  walks  and  shades  !" 

No  history  is  more  tragic  than  that  commemorated  in  these  noble  lines. 
Dion  was  surely  the  noblest  pupil  of  Plato,  and  the  attempt  to  establish  a 
righteous  government  at  Syracuse,  in  which  he  incurred  the  hatred  of  those 
whose  welfare  was  his  supreme  aim,  and  fell  a  victim  to  their  wrath,  must  have 
seemed  to  his  master  almost  like  a  great  experiment  exhibiting  the  futility  of  his 
loftiest  hopes. 

1  M.  Antoninus,  x.  31  ;  iv.  15  ;  v.  23. 

2  M.  Antoninus,  xii.  5  : — Et  -yap  oUaLov  ^v^  rjv  &v  Koi  Zvva76v. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  213 

who  belongs  to  the  past  as  he  does  to  the  future.  To 
Plutarch  the  fact  that  it  was  right  became  a  witness  that 
it  was  possible.  The  mere  spectacle  of  Life  shut  oft' 
from  a  hereafter  was  self-refuting ;  so  deep  down  in  his 
heart  was  the  conception  of  Divine  purpose,  that  the  con- 
templation of  high  aims,  far-reaching  hopes,  became  to 
him  the  pledge  of  a  future  large  enough  to  contain  them  ; 
and  the  narrow  limits  of  this  life  shrivelled  away  under 
the  mere  view  of  all  that  this  life  held  of  capacity  and 
aspiration.  "  If  God,"  he  says,  "  make  so  much  of  crea- 
tures in  whom  there  is  nothing  permanent.  He  is  like 
women  who  sow  the  seeds  of  plants  within  the  soil 
enclosed  in  an  oyster-shell."  ^  In  that  quaint  metaphor 
is  conve3^ed  perhaps  almost  all  that  the  intellect  can 
decipher  of  the  heart's  confidence  in  a  larger  future 
for  the  aspirations  of  instincts  cramped  in  this  earthly 
life,  and  seeking  a  deeper  soil.  It  seems  strange  that 
Plutarch  should  have  felt  these  hopes — Plutarch,  the 
reviewer  of  the  past — and  that  Marcus,  whose  heart 
throbbed  with  the  life  of  the  future,  should  be  without 
them.  But  perhaps,  as  Plutarch  studied  the  lives  of 
the  great  men  of  the  past  and  vividly  realized  their 
influence,  he  felt  that  they  had  not  quitted  existence 
altogether,  that  God  was  not  the  God  of  the  dead,  but 
of  the  living."^  Surely  there  is  nothing  more  pathetic  in 
literature  than  the  words  in  which  the  Emperor  silences 
his  yearning  for  the  faith  of  the  Historian,  and  feeling 
all  the  emptiness  and  poverty  of  life  far  more  keenly, 
yet  teaches  himself  to  acquiesce  in  its  narrow  limits, 
since  they  were  imposed  by  God. 

Two    ideas    upheld    him    in    this    dreary    and   jo3'less 

1  Plutarch,  "  Dehis  qui  scro  a  Niimine  puniantur,"  c.  17. 

-  It  is  interesting  to  n.'niember  tliat  one  of  those  to  whom  Marcus  records 
his  obligations  was  the  grandson  of  Plutarch — Sextus  of  Cliosronea.  See  the 
pleasing  character  of  him,  M.  Antoninus,  i.  9. 


214  ^^^^  MORAL  IDEAL. 

resignation — the  sense  of  an  Order  of  Nature,  and  the 
sense  of  a  constant  invisible  companionship.  The 
second  was  the  nearest  his  heart,  but  both  were  near. 
It  is  a  deeply  rooted  thought  in  him  that  all  sin  is 
schism,  that  we  are  called  upon  to  be  one  with  the  order 
in  which  we  live,  and  one  in  an  organic  sense,  "a  member, 
not  merely  a  portion  ;  "  ^  and  the  idea  of  an  organic  whole,''^ 
a  unity  of  Law,  in  which  the  human  member  may  co- 
operate, and  in  which  we  may  learn  to  regard  disastrous 
events  as  parts  of  an  orderly  system,  no  less  than  the 
rose  in  summer  and  the  harvest  in  autumn,^  is  latent  in 
all  his  thought.  He  paints  with  all  the  associations  of 
horror  familiar  to  a  soldier  the  wretched  condition  of 
the  severed  limb,'*  and  reminds  himself  of  the  possibility 
that  each  one  of  us  may  enter  on  this  condition  at  any 
moment — that  we  may  choose,  each  one  for  himself,  that 
separateness  which  is  death  for  every  being  that  is  made 
to  be  part  of  a  larger  whole.  In  the  constant  disappoint- 
ment provided  for  regal  beneficence  by  the  neighbour- 
hood of  ingratitude,  stupidity,  and  treachery,^  the  thought 
of  the  vast  order  in  which  an  inhabitant  of  the  Roman 
world  could,  for  the  first  time,  recognize  himself  as  a 
fellow-citizen  of  all  men,  seems  to  have  been  a  perpetual 
source  of  religious  thankfulness  to  him  ;  he  returns 
again  and  again  to  the  thought  of  this  great  Order  in 
which  he  finds  a  place,*^  and  seems,  from  the  mere 
spectacle  of  its  vastness  and  its  unity,  to  derive  some 
tranquilizing  power,  which  we  should  imagine  the  ex- 
clusive result  of    being    consciously  in    subjection  to  a 

1  M.  Antoninus,  vii.  13.  ^  ii,id_^  jii.  n  ;  iv.  29  ;  v.  8. 

3  Ibid.,  iv.  44.  *  Ibid.,  viii.  34. 

^  eK  TOLOVTov  piov  aTripxopi-ai,  iv  i5  avTol  ol  kolpj^voI,  vTrkp  &v  ra  Tocravra 
riyuvKTafXTji',  rjv^dfxi]!',  e<pp6vTi<xa,  avTol  CKeivoi  ideXovji  f.'.e  vTriytiv  (x.  36). 
Perhaps  he  was  thinking  of  his  son. 

®  e.g.,  iii.  11: — Tov  avdpuiTo-,  ttoA/tt;.''  cVra  wiXcus  rvjs  d:wrc£r7;s  ^s  ai 
Xociral  TToXeis  dairtp  oiKiai.  elff.v. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  215 

loving  Will.  Of  that  belief  we  can  scarcely  say  that  we 
find  a  trace  in  him ;  he  seems  to  know  neither  a  Father 
in  heaven  nor  a  brother  on  earth  ;  but  the  Order  of 
Nature,  in  its  new  and  unexplored  impressiveness, 
filled  all  that  vacuum,  and  almost  satisfied  him  with 
its  realm  of  majestic  Law. 

It  is  not  inconsistent  to  speak  of  its  new  impressive- 
ness, although  when  Antoninus  lived  this  idea  was  set 
forth  in  a  poem  rather  older  for  him  than  "Paradise 
Lost "  is  for  us.'^  It  was  new  if  we  measure  it  by  the  life 
of  an  idea,  and  remember  that  we  are  speaking  of  ideas 
as  they  are  felt  apart  from  genius.  We  have  seen,  in 
Lucretius,  the  rise  of  a  reverence  for  Nature  that  may 
be  called  modern,  the  sense  of  a  calm  permanent  swa}^, 
contrasted  with  that  "fitful  fever"  of  personal  dominion 
which  raged  so  furiously  in  the  lifetime  of  the  poet ; 
contrasted,  too,  when  a  high  enough  standpoint  was 
taken,  and  the  course  of  the  ages  was  unrolled  before 
the  eye  of  the  observer,  with  the  steady  but  temporary 
rule  of  the  cities  of  the  past.  We  have  seen  in  Virgil 
how  the  rise  of  the  Empire  harmonized  this  idea  with 
that  of  political  dominion,  which  originally  seemed  its 
ineffaceable  contrast.  The  progress  of  national  life,  it 
seemed,  was  towards  a  unity  that  almost  lost  itself  in  the 
Unity  of  Nature ;  the  Laws  of  Imperial  Rome,  so  far  as 
they  approached  their  ideal,  were  the  laws  of  Nature. 
If  we  consider  the  majestic  system  of  Roman  Law,  and 
trace  its  connection  with  all  the  thought  and  life  of 
Europe,  we  shall  see  nothing  surprising  in  the  approxi- 
mation. All  the  philosophy  of  Rome,  such  as  it  was, 
was  poured  into  its  law.  Perhaps  without  Roman  Law 
we  might  never  have  known  the  expression,  "a  law  of 
nature."      Whether   we   should    be    any   poorer    for    the 

1  The  poem  of  Lucretius  was  published  about  57  B.C.      Marcus  Aurelius 
died  180  A.ij. 


2i6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

loss  is  another  question  ;  some  may  think  that  the 
meaning  of  Law  would  be  clearer  if  the  same  word  were 
not  used  to  express  orders  of  sequence  which  impose 
themselves  and  cannot  be  broken,  and  claims  which 
may,  but  ought  not  to  be,  rejected.  All  positive  law  is 
indeed  in  some  sense  a  protest  against  the  belief  that 
the  whole  moral  world  is  included  within  the  realm  of 
Nature,  inasmuch  as  it  is  of  its  very  essence  to  assume 
that  man  can  know  the  right  and  do  the  wrong.  Never- 
theless when  for  the  first  time  a  single  law  regulated  the 
known  world,  the  two  conceptions  of  Law  and  Nature 
almost  coalesced  in  their  close  approach.  The  subordi- 
nation of  the  whole  known  world  to  a  single  ruler  and 
a  single  law  gave  a  certain  religious  significance  to  the 
idea  of  Nature  ;  the  outward  world  seemed  to  combine  in 
a  single  majestic  order,  a  fit  object  for  the  reverence  and 
the  submission  of  the  most  religious  of  mankind.  "  The 
world  is  a  polity,  for  men  have  the  same  law,"  ^  is  one 
of  the  many  sentences  which  remind  us  of  the  expansion 
now  taken  by  the  very  word  law,  at  the  same  time  that 
the  words  are  true  in  their  narrowest  sense.  Under  the 
Antonines  there  was  only  one  law  in  the  world.  The 
Roman  Law,  with  its  long  vista  into  the  past,  with  its 
magnificent  embrace  for  all  the  nationalities  of  the 
known  world,  seemed  to  the  men  of  the  new  age  a 
stately  bridge  between  the  realm  of  Morals  and  of  Nature, 
a  bridge  which  the  pilgrim  might  cross  in  either  direc- 
tion, finding  himself  on  both  sides  within  the  same  realm 
of  order,  and  among  inhabitants  who,  if  they  occasionally 
used  a  diff'erent  dialect,  sought  to  express  by  it  the  same 
desires,  the  same  fears,  and  the  same  convictions. 

But  this  religion  of  Nature  was  not  the  deepest  feeling 
in  this  Pascal  of  the  second  century  ;  his  spirit  finds  the 
deepest  satisfaction  in  a  belief  not  entirely  in  harmony 

^  M.  Antoninus,  iv.  4. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.        .  217 

with  it,  though  both  were  real  to  him.  We  have  seen 
that  his  yearnings  after  an  Eternal  hfe  were  unable  to 
transform  themselves  into  hopes,  but  they  found  another 
refuge  in  the  conviction  of  a  permanent  relation  to  an 
Eternal  Being — a  truth,  indeed,  which,  when  it  is  fully 
apprehended,  is  seen  to  be  inseparable  from  the  hope  he 
could  not  attain.  Men  approach  a  great  truth  by  diffe- 
rent paths,  and  fail  to  discern  the  common  goal  towards 
which  they  are  led.  Marcus  Aurelius  saw  something 
in  man  which  virtually  implies  his  immortality,  though 
he  could  not  follow  out  its  teaching.  He  seems  to  have 
been  much  impressed  by  the  belief  of  the  wisest  man  of 
antiquity  in  special  supernatural  guardianship ;  and  in 
his  own  age  all  privilege  naturally  melted  into  universal 
endowment.  It  had  seemed  natural  that  to  Socrates  a 
special  guide  should  be  appointed,  but  now  men  were 
ready  to  acknowledge  that  the  best  gifts  of  Heaven  were 
least  special ;  the  "  divine  sign  "  ^  with  which  Socrates 
was  familiar  was  recognized  as  the  voice  of  an  indwelling 
spirit  given  as  a  comrade  and  guide  to  every  son  of  man. 
The  change  from  the  Daemon  of  Socrates  to  the  Daemon 
of  Marcus  Aurelius  gathers  up  the  whole  moral  evolution 
of  the  ages ;  we  interpret  best  the  meaning  of  the  earlier 
and  the  later  epoch  when  we  remember  that  in  the  first 
it  was  the  wisest  of  men  who  believed  that  a  peculiar 
guidance  was  vouchsafed  him  by  God ;  and  in  the 
second  this  guidance  was  felt  as  no  special  endowment 
of  wisdom  or  virtue,  but  an  inheritance  of  commonplace 
humanity. 

P^or,  indeed,  it  was  the  great  distinctive  characteristic 
of  this  time  that  the  exceptional  became  the  universal. 
This  was  the  very  meaning  of  the  new  sense  of  Iluma- 

^  It  is  rather  misleading  to  speak  of  the  daimon  of  Socrates,  as  lie  always 
alludes  to  it  in  this  impersonal  form.  The  daemon  of  Marcus  is  always 
personal,  e.g.,  viii.  13  ;  iii.  5,  &c. 


I 


2i8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

nity  that  was  come  into  the  world.  The  spirit  of  anti- 
quity is  one  of  the  narrowest  aristocracy.  There  was 
no  more  of  a  hberal  spirit  in  great  men  than  in  the 
insignificant  vulgar  ;  the  association  of  all  excellence  with 
I  what  is  exceptional  was  just  as  strong  in  the  noblest  as 
in  the  basest  of  the  sons  of  Greece  and  Rome.  The 
citizen  who  was  to-day  a  man,  to-morrow  a  chattel,  kept 
before  the  mind  of  every  human  being  the  standard  of 
privilege.  No  one  could  ask  why  this  man  should  have 
some  good  thing  lacked  by  his  neighbour  without  ques- 
tioning the  foundation  and  structure  of  society  ;  for  what 
good  could  be  greater  or  more  absolutely  limited  than 
Freedom  ?  That  recognition  of  a  Divine  voice,  therefore, 
which  seems  to  have  had  much  influence  in  the  condem- 
nation of  Socrates,  as  the  introducer  of  new  gods,^  was 
not  in  him  or  his  contemporaries  an  expansive  influence. 
There  was  nothing  strange,  to  Socrates,  in  believing 
that  a  Divine  influence  should  be  real  and  exceptional. 
But  the  lapse  of  six  hundred  years  brought  men  to  a 
different  view  of  the  Divine  education  of  humanity ; 
the  insignificant  nature  of  that  which  does  not  belong 
to  all  was  the  characteristic  moral  discovery  (so  we 
may  call  it)  of  the  day ;  it  was  held  with  the  passionate 
fervour  and  the  inevitable  exaggeration  that  belongs  to 
new  truth.  And  none  could  feel  this  truth  with  more 
depth  and  fervour  of  conviction  than  the  lonely  Emperor, 
he  who  found  in  the  exceptional  position  he  occupied 
no  satisfaction,  no  immunity  from  sorrow  and  care — 
only  added  causes  of  both,  added  difficulties,  added 
vexations.  "  Even  in  a  palace  life  may  be  lived  well ! " 
The  man  who  wrote  those  words  on  a  page  intended 
for  no  eye  but  his  own-  was  one  to  feel  vividly,  that  if 
God  gave  guidance  to  any  one,  then  it  must  be  the 
inheritance  of  every  son  of  man. 

1  Plato,  Apol.  of  Socrates,  24.     Cf.  Xenophon,  Memorabilia,  i.  i. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  219 

We  are  accustomed  to  speak  of  the  so-called  Athana- 
sian  creed  as  a  mass  of  absurd  contradictions.  The 
assertion  that  there  are  three  persons  in  one  God,  it  is 
supposed,  is  one  that  can  convey  no  meaning  to  any 
mind  anxious  to  find  appropriate  meaning  in  all  words. 
And  yet  it  must  be  felt  by  all  who  have  been  accustomed 
to  look  within,  who  have  in  any  form  accepted  the  idea 
of  an  unseen  world,  that  something  very  like  this  in- 
credible description  of  God  is  true  of  man.  No  one  can 
feel  that  anything  within  himself  is  sacred  if  he  believe 
only  in  himself,  and  probably  there  are  moments  in  the 
life  of  almost  all  v.'hen  it  has  been  felt  that  each  one,  if 
he  stand  alone,  is  incomplete ;  that  what  we  need  to 
give  us  fulness  of  personality  is  union  with  another. 
We  know  the  meaning  of  Self  for  the  first  time  when 
we  know  the  meaning  of  another  than  Self;  each  is  a 
fragment  till  he  cease  to  be  a  mere  unit.  And  this  is 
felt  here  and  there  by  many  an  ordinary  man  with  regard 
to  a  companionship  which  is  not  human.  In  entire 
solitude  he  becomes  sensible  of  the  presence  of  that 
which  may  be  best  described  as  an  ideal  Self;  some  close 
neighbourhood  makes  itself  discernible  through  remon- 
strance for  what  he  is,  or  seems  to  hover  above  his  will 
with  some  pattern  of  that  which  he  feels  himself  called 
upon  to  become.  The  sense  of  Tightness  is  something 
deeper,  more  authoritative,  than  anything  can  be  that  is 
wholly  contained  within  his  own  personality.  Conscience, 
that  "  knowledge  with  another,"  which  awakes  at  the 
approach  of  evil,  is  but  one  aspect  of  this  unseen  com- 
panionship ;  it  is  felt  in  regions  where  the  dividing-line 
of  right  and  wrong  is  hardly  discernible.  It  is  to  those, 
who  have  ever  known  it,  the  central  reality  of  the  moral 
life ;  nevertheless  it  is  easily  ignored,  and  there  is  much 
experience  besides  that  of  wrongdoing  in  which  it  is 
hidden.      The  whole   life  of  the  outward   conceals   this 


220  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

unseen  companionship,  and  most  of  all  that  satisfying 
life  of  the  outward,  in  which  a  man  enters  into  relation 
with  the  State.  It  is  most  known  probably  to  the  lonely  ; 
to  the  loneliest  of  men  it  took  the  aspect  of  an  influence 
so  subtle,  so  penetrating,  that  it  was  impossible  to  describe 
without  falling  into  contradiction.-^  Sometimes  on  his  page 
it  appears  as  the  protector,  sometimes  as  the  protected  ;  it 
is  a  being  that  at  once  commands  and  obeys,  both  guards 
man  and  is  guarded  by  him.  It  is  nearer  to  him  than 
any  other  human  being  is,  but  it  is  distinct  from  himself, 
and  may  be  an  object  of  reverence  to  a  man  who  feels 
himself  utterly  poor  and  feeble.  It  belongs  to  such  an 
order  as  is  commemorated  in  the  Mysteries — something 
intimate,  mysterious,  and  separate  from  the  rest  of 
nature,  to  the  whole  of  which  it  is  infinitely  to  be 
preferred.  It  is  strange,  when  we  read  the  passages 
in  which  Marcus  Aurelius  speaks  of  it,  to  think  of  him 
as  a  persecutor  of  the  Christians,  for  the  thought  of  a 
mediator  between  God  and  man  comes  out  as  distinctly 
in  his  Meditations  as  in  any  Christian  writings.  He  is 
a  preacher  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Ghost. ^ 

This  newly  discerned  sacredness  in  individual  life  was 
no  privilege  of  the  good  and  the  pure-minded  ;  it  could 
not  be  forfeited  by  the  worst  of  criminals.  The  doom 
which  the  State  inflicted  on  its  enemy  was  no  longer  to 
be  regarded  as  the  mere  rejection  of  something  vile,  but 
as  a  concession  to  the  necessities  of  the  criminal  himself. 
The  State  could  not  take  the  life  of  the  worst  of  her 
sons,  even  for  the  good  of  all  the  rest,  if  it  were  not 
also  good  for  him.  "  Thy  soul  " — Seneca  addresses  an 
imaginary  criminal — "  is  incurable  ;  it  has  woven  itself  a 
warp  and  woof  of  crime.     Sin  has  become  its  own  motive. 

1  Compare,  for  instance,  ii.  17  : —  .  .  .  TTjpelv  rbv  evoov  dalfiova  av^^piffTOv, 
KoL  affiVTJ,  with  such  passages  as  iii.  5  ;  v.  27. 

2  See  also  Epictetus,  Diss,  ab  Arr.,  i.  14,  and  elsewhere. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  221 

All  we  can  do  for  thee  is  to  give  thee  that  which  for 
thee  is  the  sole  good — death."  ^  It  is  the  claim  of  the 
individual  which  is  considered  here,  even  when  the 
individual  is  a  public  enemy.  How  completely  is  the 
ideal  of  antiquity  left  behind  !  The  city  could  not  have 
allowed  that  anything  was  sacred  in  an  individual  life 
when  it  was  a  question  of  asserting  her  majesty  against 
a  traitor.  The  criminal  was  a  mere  invader  ;  his  welfare 
was  no  more  to  be  considered  than  that  of  a  wolf  in  the 
fold  ;  all  that  was  sacred  lay  in  that  which  he  was  doing 
his  best  to  destroy.  But  as  we  read  these  words  of 
Seneca  we  feel  that  a  change  has  in  this  respect  come 
over  the  world.  The  State  exists  in  order  to  guard 
something  which  may  conceivably  survive  it.  The  in- 
tegral unity  of  moral  thought  was  new.  The  city  had 
demanded  lo3^alty  in  word  and  deed,  but  men  now 
became  conscious  of  belonging  to  one  whose  demand 
included  the  hidden  things  of  the  heart.  "  God  enters 
into  our  inmost  thoughts  ;  nay,  he  never  departs  from 
them."  ^  No  individual  endowment  was  needed  to 
confer  a  priceless  value  on  every  human  soul ;  each  was 
the  work  of  one  whose  care  for  his  workmanship  was 
but  faintly  typified  by  the  affectionate  brooding  of  the 
artist  over  his  work  ;  ^  every  man  was  sacred,  for  every 
man  was  the  work  of  God. 

Men's  aspirations  contain  an  inverted  history  of  their 
lives ;  whatever  has  been  missed  from  earth  is  pro- 
jected on  to  the  Heavens.  The  age  of  slavery  was  the 
age  when  all  that  men  desire  and  hope  was  gathered  up 
in  the  one  word  Freedom.  It  was  a  word  which  had 
always  expressed  "  our  being's  end  and  aim  "  more  fully 
and  definitely  than  that  aim  has  ever  been  expressed  by 

1  Seneca,  De  Iril.,  i.  16,  3.  2  Seneca,  Epist.,  83. 

»  This  idea  of  the  Ariist  as  the  type  of  God  is  found  more  than  once  in  the 
dissertations  of  lOpictetus  ;  e.^.,  Diss,  ab  Arr.,  i.  6. 


2  22  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  word  Happiness.  Even  now  it  is  not  possible  to 
differ  so  much  about  what  constitutes  Freedom  as  about 
what  constitutes  Happiness,  though  when  every  one  is 
more  or  less  free  the  idea  of  Freedom  is  always  vague. 
But  to  the  Greek  and  Roman  the  meaning  of  Freedom 
was  kept  definite  by  the  neighbourhood  of  its  opposite ; 
with  us  the  criminal  does  not  so  clearly  exhibit  its 
absence  as  with  them  the  slave.  There  is  no  distinction 
in  the  modern  world  so  definite  and  so  universal  as  the 
distinction  between  liberty  and  bondage  in  antiquity. 
Freedom  occupied  the  desires  of  mankind,  through  the 
ages  of  the  classical  world,  as  no  equally  definite  object 
has  ever  occupied  them  since  then,  and  when  the 
classical  world  came  to  an  end  its  ideal  was  only  in- 
tensified in  being  spiritualized.  When  the  Cit}'  perished, 
the  deep  and  vivid  yearnings  it  had  nourished  could  not 
develop  into  that  desire  for  constitutional  government 
and  uncorrupt  representation,  which  the  men  of  that  day 
would  have  needed  the  spirit  of  prophecy  even  to  con- 
ceive, and  which  would  have  seemed  to  them  a  very 
poor  thing  if  they  could  have  conceived  it.  It  took 
a  richer  field — it  turned  from  the  world  without,  where 
all  was  wintry  and  full  of  decay,  to  that  inner  life 
which  men  had  for  the  first  time  leisure  to  observe,  and 
vv'hich  in  comparison  seemed  to  burgeon  with  the  promise 
of  spring. 

An  age  which  exhibited  on  a  gigantic  scale  the  vices 
of  slavery  in  men  just  delivered  from  slavery  was  one 
fitted  to  bring  out  by  contrast,  as  never  before  or  since, 
the  meaning  of  inward  liberty.  When  the  Stoic  poet  de- 
clares, "Our  one  need  is  Freedom,  but  not  such  freedom 
as  belongs  to  any  enfranchised  slave  whom  the  ceremony 
of  manumission  has  elevated  to  the  rank  of  a  Roman 
citizen,"  ^  he  is  alluding  to  an  event  of  daily  occurrence. 
1  Persius,  Sat.,  v.  73-80  (paraphrased). 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  223 

When  he  adds,  "  No  mere  ceremony  can  change  a  menial 
to  a  true  Freeman  ;  there  are  other  masters  than  those 
from  whom  the  praetor's  rod  sets  free,"^  he  was  preaching 
a  truth  that  none  of  his  readers  could  ignore.  One  who 
desires  to  realize  what  that  slavery  was  from  w'hich  the 
praetor's  rod  did  set  free  should  turn  to  the  records  of 
a  Roman  trial,  and  read  of  men  and  women  given  up 
to  tortures  which  seem  to  have  roused  much  less  remon- 
strance from  the  best  of  men  than  do  the  pangs  of  ani- 
mals in  our  day ;  and  remember  that  this  was  not  as  a 
penalty  for  an^^thing  they  had  done  (their  innocence  was 
admitted  by  all),  but  as  a  supposed  security  for  the 
truth  of  the  evidence  thus  wrung  from  them.  But  from 
such  records,  also,  we  may  learn  what  the  true  Freedom 
was,  which  man  can  neither  give  nor  take  away  ;  the 
martyrs  of  loyalty,  we  have  seen,  teach  that  lesson  no 
less  than  the  martyrs  of  faith.  By  their  endurance  and 
their  virtue  men  must  have  been  reminded  that  the  free- 
dom which  was  the  object  of  such  passionate  and  reason- 
able desire,  was  not  the  only  freedom.  To  those  who 
for  the  first  time  confronted  the  other  it  seemed  not  to 
be  the  true  Freedom.  The  great  chasm  which  separated 
the  human  world  into  persons  and  things  shrank  to 
nothing  when  compared  with  that  abyss  which  separated 
those  who  realized  the  freedom  of  the  spirit,  and  those 
in  bondage  to  low  desires.  The  bondage  of  the  freedman 
taught  the  lesson  no  less  decidedly,  and,  of  course,  far 
more  frequently,  than  the  spiritual  emancipation  of  the 
slave.  The  crowds  pressing  across  the  boundar}^  that 
separated  bond  and  free  exhibited  in  every  variety  of 
distinctness  the  temper  of  bondage ;  the  demeanour  of 
the  frccdmen  taught  the  spectator  that  "Avarice  and 
Luxury  enforce  a  harder  toil  than  the  most  severe  master, 

1  I'crsius,  Sat.,  v.  qo,  130.      "An   doniimini  i{;norris,  nisi   quem  vindicta 
relaxal,"  seems  Ihe  central  idea,  often  obscured  by  his  oddity. 


224  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  add  to  it  the  distraction  of  their  own  discord.  The 
load  imposed  by  Ambition,  the  continual  restraints  and 
fears  which  belong  to  the  dominion  of  Superstition,  alike 
declare  to  us  that  the  true  enfranchisement  we  need  is 
within."  ^  But  it  was  by  an  enfranchised  slave  that  the 
lesson  was  formulated  for  all  time.  Here  and  there,  at 
many  a  Roman  trial,  some  spectator  must  have  felt  that 
such  a  thing  might  be  ;  but  when  Stoicism  gained  a  voice 
in  a  Phrygian  bondsman,  the  message  took  a  resonance 
that  preserved  it  for  the  ears  of  posterity. 

There  is  something  very  impressive  in  the  fact  that 
the  best  representative  of  this  new  morality  was  an 
Emperor,  and  the  next  best  was  a  slave.  It  tells  forcibly 
for  the  wide-reaching  influence  of  the  new  spirit  of  per- 
sonality which  was  coming  upon  the  world,  that  we 
should  find  it  hard  to  decide  which  of  two  men  occupying 
the  extremes  of  society  was  its  typical  exponent.  On 
the  whole,  that  position  must  be  assigned  to  Marcus 
Aurelius.  But  the  most  t3'pical  is  not  necessarily  the 
most  original  expression ;  we  may  find  all  the  ideas  of 
the  Emperor  on  the  page  of  his  predecessor,"  from  whom, 
indeed,  he  sometimes  cites  them.  His  Meditations  are 
far  more  coloured  by  the  feelings,  desires,  and  aspirations 
of  an  individual  mind  than  the  record  of  the  teaching 
of  Epictetus ;  but  the  presentment  of  a  religion  (so  we 
must  regard  their  common  belief)  which  has  lifted  the 
speaker  himself  above  the  degradation  and  sufferings  of 
bondage  must  in  some  respects  stand  alone. 

In  turning  from  the  writings  of  the  Emperor  to  those 
of  the  slave,  it  is  striking  to  find  that  profound  sad- 
ness has  given  way  to  a  bright  and  steadfast  cheerful- 
ness. Partly  we  have  to  remember  that  Marcus  Aurelius 
wrote  for  himself,  and  Epictetus  addressed  disciples  ;  but 

1  Persius,  Sat.,  v.  131-157,  180-188  (paraphrased). 

2  By  about  a  century. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  225 

the  difference  is  no  mere  accident  of  method.  The  sense 
of  pettiness,  of  worthlessness  in  life,  which  oppressed  the 
ruler  of  the  Roman  world  had  no  place  in  the  thoughts 
of  the  slave.  He  too  felt  life  a  sojourn  in  a  strange 
land,^  but  the  sense  of  exile  was  lost  in  the  sense  of 
freedom.  This  was  the  keynote  of  all  his  thought ;  to 
this  he  returns  with  a  somewhat  monotonous  recurrence  ; 
but  the  reader  can  never  forget  that  what  he  preached 
with  his  lips  he  taught  by  his  life.  Freedom,  in  the 
outward  world  the  associate  of  the  spirit  that  refuses  to 
submit,  he  recognized  in  the  world  within  as  inseparable 
from  the  spirit  that  refuses  to  rebel.-  It  is  not  more 
separate  from  Law  in  one  region  than  in  the  other;  the 
citizen  had  accepted  Law  as  the  basis  of  Liberty ;  the 
philosopher  could  do  no  more.^  But  in  the  inward 
realm  in  which  he  learned  to  find  a  home,  the  law  which 
gives  perfect  freedom  is  that  of  renunciation  ;  the  great 
achievement  is  to  withdraw  all  energy  from  that  spirit 
of  preference  which  would  impress  the  idiosyncrasies  of 
the  Self  on  the  world  of  Nature ;  to  bestow  this  energy 
rather  on  a  recognition  of  Law  producing  that  receptive 
attitude  by  which  character  receives  its  stamp.*  His  own 
life  was  a  demonstration  of  such  possibility.  His  emanci- 
pation could  have  been  no  crisis  in  his  spiritual  career ;  ^ 
he  was  as  free  when  a  master  could  kill  or  torture  his 
body  as  when  he  knew  no  master,  for  the  emancipation 
from  the  tyrants  of  the  soul  was  in  him  complete.  The 
saying  of  Socrates,  "  Anytus  and  Meletus  can  kill  me, 
but   cannot  hurt  mc,"^  is  the  constant  text  of  his  dis- 

1  Life,  he  says  (Enchiridion,  5),  should  be  like  the  saunter  near  port  of  a 
passenger  who  has  landed  for  an  hour  or  two. 

2  Ep.,  Diss,  ab  Arr.,  ii.  .].  3  /^/^.,  ij.  n.  4  /^/^/.^  ,.  12. 

5  /itd.,  ii.  23,  24,  where  he  almost  repeats  the  passapjc  in  Pcrsius  quoted 
above,  and  shows  how  much  more  impressive  the  thought  is  when  expressed 
more  simply. 

«  /iid.,  ii.  2,  5. 

P 


226  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

course ;  in  those  words  Socrates  had  proclaimed  the 
freedom  of  the  slave.  "  Let  us  be  imitators  of  Socrates, 
who  sang  paeans  in  his  dungeon,"  ^  was  in  him  no  mere 
sermonizing;  it  was  the  exhortation  of  one  who  knew  that 
what  he  exhorted  was  possible.  He  had  taken  his  start 
from  that  complete  surrender  which  he  was  urging  on 
his  disciples  ;  he  had  been  detached  by  the  decree  of 
Fate  from  all  those  possessions  from  which  the  soul 
should  always  be  detached  by  a  sense  of  their  insig- 
nificance ;  he  had  been  shut  off  from  the  realm  of  the 
indifferent  by  circumstance,  and  had  thus  no  choice  but 
to  find  his  good  elsewhere,  if  he  were  to  find  any  good 
at  all. 

Epictetus  was  thus  set  apart  by  the  discipline  of  life 
to  proclaim  what  we  may  call  the  inverted  Freedom  of 
the  invisible.  His  experience  of  bondage  exhibited  to 
him  the  true  character  of  bondage — he  saw  its  limitations, 
he  saw  that  within  the  man  which  it  could  not  touch. 
Or,  rather,  he  enormously  exaggerated  that  within  the  man 
which  it  could  not  touch."'  He  and  his  spiritual  brethren 
represent  a  phase,  in  regard  to  the  Will,  very  similar 
to  that  which  we  find  in  Plato  with  regard  to  the  in- 
tellect. They  saw  the  faculty  on  which  they  bent  their 
attentive  gaze  enlarged  through  the  mists  of  dawning 
thought.  Epictetus  believed  in  the  omnipotence  of  Will, 
as  Plato  in  the  omnipotence  of  Knowledge ;  perhaps  it 
was  the  only  way  in  which  the  scope  of  either  faculty 
could  be  adequately  discerned  by  him  whose  mission  it 
was  to  impress  its  meaning  upon  the  world.  We  see 
that  Moral  Freedom  is,  as  it  has  been  called,^  the  freedom 

1  Ep. ,  Diss,  ab  Arr.,  ii.  6. 

2  See  especially  ii.  23,  where  he  seems  to  take  the  power  to  dose  the  eyes  as 
a  typical  specimen  of  the  relation  of  Will  over  Sense.  We  may,  he  seems  to 
think,  in  like  manner  shut  off  all  impression  from  without,  if  we  will  but  make 
the  resolve  to  do  so. 

3  By  Professor  Clerk  Maxwell. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  227 

of  a  bird  in  its  cage ;  that  what  a  man  can  be  depends, 
to  a  certain  extent,  on  what  he  can  do.  We  cannot  but 
allow  that  some  part  of  Character  is  the  inevitable  result 
of  Circumstance.  And  yet,  as  we  listen  to  the  teaching 
of  Epictetus,  we  may  feel  his  truth  the  deeper  one  ;  we 
may  recognize  its  limitations  as  belonging  to  a  tempo- 
rary^ order  of  things  in  comparison  with  that  to  which 
he  leads  us.  We  may  believe  that  what  strikes  us  as 
exaggeration  after  seventeen  hundred  years  of  an  in- 
dividual morality  was,  in  the  first  freshness  of  that  new 
life,  a  literal  possibility — a  moral  miracle,  worked  by  the 
preacher  of  a  new  Faith. 

The  contrast  between  persons  and  things  forms  the 
whole  subject-matter  of  the  philosophy  of  Epictetus. 
There  is  in  it  no  wealth  of  thought,  no  varied  paths  of 
wide-reaching  investigation,  only  a  single  idea  repeated 
again  and  again.  Good  and  evil,  he  says,  are  both  to 
be  sought  in  the  realm  of  choice  ;  the  involuntary  and 
the  indifferent  begin  together.^  The  clue  to  a  true  order 
in  our  moral  being,  he  felt,  is  a  right  understanding  of 
the  contrasted  worlds  of  the  necessary  and  the  voluntary. 
The  necessary  world  is  the  outward  world ;  the  world 
where  accident  reigns,  where  many  are  stronger  than 
one,  and  this  world,  properly  understood,  must  be  re- 
garded as  the  realm  of  indifference.^  External  events 
are  important  only  so  far  as  they  afford  the  material  for 
disciplining  the  will,  and  bringing  out  the  distinctness 
of  that  personal  element  which  can  recognize  itself  only 
in  this  struggle.  In  this  region  there  is  no  true  good 
or  evil.  Here,  according  to  the  point  of  view,  we  may 
say  that  everything  is  good,   or  that  nothing   is   good. 

'  Mod  t6  iya06i> ;  'F,i>  irpoaipicrei.  llov  t6  kukuv  ;  'Ei/  npoaipiaei.  IToO 
rb  ovS^Tepov  ;  'Ev  roti  dTrpoaipirois  (Epicteti,  Diss,  ab  Arr.,  ii.  16).  This  is 
the  kernel  of  almost  all  he  has  to  say. 

2  ICxternal  things  should  be  to  us  no  more  than  tessera  with  which  we  play 
at  dice  (Diss.  Arr.,  ii.  5). 


228  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

In  the  realm  of  the  Vokmtary,  on  the  other  hand,  every 
step  we  take  is  towards  good  or  evil.  Not  what  hap- 
pens to  a  man,  but  what  he  chooses,  is  the  proper  object 
of  desire  or  of  fear.  If  his  will  has  no  part  in  any 
event,  that  event  is  a  pure  object  of  indifference. 

The  work  of  Philosophy,  therefore,  is  to  effect  a 
complete  inversion  of  the  ordinary  view  of  these  two 
regions.  We  are  like  stags,^  terrified  by  feathers  and 
driven  into  snares.  We  seek  to  escape  fancied  evil  in 
the  realm  of  Necessity,  and  fly  into  real  evil  in  the 
realm  of  the  Voluntary.  We  choose  crime  to  escape 
exile  or  death,  though  in  exile  or  death  there  is  nothing 
evil,  and  crime  is  the  greatest  of  evils.  We  mistake 
the  material  of  Virtue  for  the  source  of  Vice.  We  turn 
away  blindly  from  the  very  threshold  of  Liberty.  What 
is  Liberty  ?  Life  in  accordance  with  desire.  Men 
strive  to  gain  this  universal  object  by  bending  things  to 
their  wishes,  and  they  strive  in  vain.  The  world  is  so 
made  that  it  cannot  be  remoulded  upon  the  tastes  and 
fancies  of  men  ;  as  long  as  men  persist  in  this  effort 
they  are  in  bondage,  they  are  subjected  to  the  rule  of 
hard  masters,  forcing  them  to  actions  in  which  their 
will  has  no  part.  From  the  fear  of  death,  or  from  the 
desire  of  luxury,  they  are  subjected  to  a  necessity  which 
constrains  the  Will,  that  one  rightful  ruler,  that  sole 
legitimate  cause.  If  they  would  remould  desire  to  fit 
the  world  they  would  find  themselves  secure  upon  the 
territory  of  Freedom.  The  will  is  not  the  lord  of  the 
outer  world.  When  exerted  here,  it  constantly  finds 
itself  a  slave,  and  not  a  ruler.  But  let  it  turn  to  its  own 
domain  and  it  finds  itself  at  once  supreme.  Though  it 
is  not  possible  to  bring  facts  into  accordance  with  indi- 
vidual desire,  it  is  possible  so  to  remould  desire  that  it 
shall   never  conflict   with   fact.      He  who  has  learnt   to 

1  Diss.  Arr. ,  ii.  ch.  i,  8. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  229 

desire  nothing  that  he  may  not  choose  has  entered  into 
the  region  of  perfect  Freedom. 

At  the  root  of  this  idea  of  the  contrasted  worlds  of 
servitude  and  of  freedom  lies  a  deep  religious  reverence 
for  the  Order  of  Nature,  such  as  we  have  seen,  on  its 
intellectual  side,  in  the  poem  of  Lucretius.'^  The  outer 
world  is  the  world  of  necessity  ;  it  is  the  unchangeable 
world.  But  also  it  is  the  world  which,  if  we  rightly 
understand  it,  we  shall  not  wish  to  change.^  No  expo- 
nent of  modern  Science  confronts  the  world  of  existing 
reality  with  a  more  absolute  conviction  that  in  a  know- 
ledge of  its  laws  lies  a  sure  deliverance  from  all  the  ills 
of  life.  Epictetus  knew  nothing  of  the  powers  with 
which  modern  Science  has  equipped  the  will  of  man  in 
its  dealings  with  the  external  world ;  but  his  confidence 
in  the  power  of  Truth  to  bring  the  mind  to  a  condition 
in  which  any  modification  of  outward  things  should  ap- 
pear a  matter  of  absolute  indifference,  gave  it  quite  as 
high  a  place  as  the  modern  view — perhaps  higher.  The 
powers  of  Science,  as  revealed  to  our  time,  have  done 
almost  all  that  magic  had  ever  promised  ;  before  its  influ- 
ence even  the  limitations  of  time  and  space  seem  to  dis- 
appear. But  the  weak  and  helpless  creature,  as  Epictetus 
imagined  him,  in  face  of  the  unchangeable,  was  more 
invincible  among  the  terrors  of  the  outward  world  than 
the  inhabitant  of  a  world  renovated  by  Science,  himself 
undisciplined  by  Truth.  The  ideal  Stoic  could  not  trans- 
form those  dangers  ;  but  none  can  transform  them  all, 
and  he  did  not  need  to  transform  any.  To  Epictetus  all 
the  dangers  and  necessities  of  the  material  universe  were 
but   as  the  discomforts  of   the   palestra,'^  leading  up  to 

1  It  is  interesting  to  remark  that  in  the  marginal  annotations  with  which 
P.entley  has  enriched  a  copy^of  Epictetus  now  in  the  I^ritish  Museum,  the  only 
comparison  is  with  Lucretius. 

'  Diss,  ah  Arr. ,  ii.  ch.  2.  '  /iiJ.,  i.  ch.  24. 


230  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  disciplined  strength  which  was  to  equip  the  victor 
for  the  contest  of  a  nobler  Olympia.  He  loves  to  sur- 
round the  trials  and  struggles  of  life  with  associations 
of  dignity  and  charm  borrowed  from  the  Greek  games — 
associations  very  difficult  for  a  modern  reader  to  appre- 
ciate, even  with  all  the  aid  afforded  by  St.  Paul.  These 
majestic  and  venerable  institutions,  the  concentrated 
reminiscence  and  type  of  the  dignity,  the  beauty,  the 
grandeur,  dear  to  the  pride  of  Greece,  appeared  to 
the  Phrygian  slave  but  as  a  parable  symbolizing  that 
which  God  had  intended  the  whole  outward  world  to 
be  to  man,  and  the  actions  of  other  men  to  be  to  each 
individual.  To  the  meanest  slave  the  circumstances  amid 
which  he  was  placed  were  an  Olympia,  where  Divine 
spectators  looked  on  at  the  struggle,  and  applauded  the 
conquest  which  nothing  could  prevent  but  the  choice 
of  the  combatant.  He  had  but  to  wi7l  in  order  to  quit 
that  short  contest  a  triumphant  conqueror.  No  outward 
impediment  could  affect  the  result,  for  the  victory  lay 
within  a  region  to  which  outward  influences  could  not 
penetrate.  They  brought  the  mere  apparatus  for  pre- 
paring him  for  the  contest ;  for  that  contest  itself  nothing 
was  necessary  but  his  choice. 

But  the  choice  itself  was  one  needing  that  discipline 
which  comes  from  the  knowledge  of  Law.  To  Epictetus 
the  fact  that  man's  will  should  be  a  disorderly,  unscien- 
tific influence  seem.ed  a  part  of  that  strange  dislocation 
which  it  is  the  business  of  Philosophy  to  set  right. 
While  the  outward  world  is  under  the  influence  of  some 
fixed  law,  so  that  we  know,  for  instance,  the  weight  of 
anything,  not  by  holding  it  in  our  hands  and  consulting 
our  sensations,  but  by  weighing  it  in  scales,  how  is  it, 
he  asks,  that  in  the  most  important  matter  of  all,  the 
preferences  and  desires  of  men,  we  can  form  no  judg- 
ment, but  can   only  watch   in  each   individual  case   the 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  231 

varying,  accidental  response  of  chance  preference,  as  if 
in  every  case  of  contested  weight  we  could  only  ask  the 
opinion  of  a  bystander  whether  a  particular  object  were 
light  or  heavy  ?  Perhaps  we  might  gather  up  all  of 
value  that  Epictetus  has  to  teach  when  we  say  that  he 
regarded  it  as  the  business  of  Philosophy  to  set  up  a 
standard  of  weight  for  the  moral  world. ^  The  moral 
world  is  no  more  subject  to  chance  than  the  material 
world ;  indeed,  in  the  view  of  Epictetus,  for  whom 
chance  had  a  real  meaning,  it  was  far  less  so.  A  pound 
weight  is  a  pound  weight  in  the  hand  of  a  child  or  a 
man,  however  different  the  sensations  caused  by  it.  So 
in  this  Stoic  philosophy  motives  have  their  absolute 
value,  whether  they  appeal  to  the  mind  of  a  Socrates  or 
of  some  base  courtier  of  Nero.  Socrates  knows  that  it 
is  better  to  die  than  to  be  false  to  the  highest  that  is 
discerned  as  truth  ;  the  cowardly  sycophant  thinks  that 
death  is  worse  ;  but  the  intrinsic  merit  of  the  alterna- 
tives remains  the  same  in  either  case.  The  scale  is  not 
altered  when  it  is  overlooked.  The  Order  of  Nature  is 
beyond  the  reach  of  our  choice  ;  we  have  only  to  con- 
form ourselves  to  it,  or  to  suffer  the  consequences. 

We  may  say,  in  an  important  sense,  that  Epictetus 
was  the  first  to  preach  this  truth.  Of  course,  no  one 
can  have  ever  taught  his  fellows  anything  of  real  moral 
value  without  assuming  it ;  but  it  is  not  so  impressive 
anywhere  else  as  in  the  teaching  of  the  enfranchised 
slave.  Epictetus  had  known  all  that  men  dread — blows, 
ill-usage,  tyranny,  hard  labour,  need — and  he  proclaimed 
that  these  were  not  evils.  Who  else  had  such  a  plat- 
form for  making  that  declaration  ?  Who  else  had,  as 
he  expresses   it   forcibly,   so  entirely   turned   round    the 

1  Here  again  be  closely  approaches  Persius,  who  uses  even  this  very  com- 
parison of  moral  and  physical  weight  (v.  100),  and  sets  off,  by  his  far-fetched 
quaintness,  the  homeliness  and  simplicity  of  his  successor. 


232  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

masks  by  which  mankind  are  terrified,  and  seen  whether 
there  was  anything  really  terrible  behind  them  ?  Of 
the  words  of  such  as  him  we  may  say,  indeed,  as  one 
Italian  poet  ^  said  of  another,  *'  Egli  dice  cose,  e  voi 
parole."  He  showed  forth  the  perfect  freedom  that  is 
bound  up  with  the  ideal  of  perfect  resignation  as  it  can 
only  be  truly  shown  forth  in  the  achievement  of  a  life 
and  character. 

Marcus  Aurelius  and  Epictetus  exhibit  the  strength 
of  this  new  morality.  The  Emperor,  in  a  journal  meant 
for  his  own  eye  alone,  shows  the  meaning  of  the  new 
doctrine  of  Personality — the  sudden  energy  set  free  for 
introspection,  the  sacredness  transferred  from  national 
to  individual  life.  The  slave,  in  his  didactic  utterances, 
presents  rather  that  aspect  in  which  the  new  ideal 
joins  the  old.  He  speaks  as  the  heir  of  an  inheritance 
hitherto  inadequately  though  deeply  prized,  of  an  estate 
rich  in  unsuspected  mineral  wealth,  a  possession  coveted 
by  all,  in  ignorance  of  its  actual  advantages.  Freedom 
had  been  the  3'earning  of  all  hearts,  and  although  none 
had  known  the  true  Freedom  to  be  that  of  the  inward 
life,  yet  the  aspiration  after  the  outer  Freedom  had  kept 
alive  the  inner.  This,  which  from  his  platform  of  servi- 
tude he  proclaimed  to  be  the  only  true  Freedom,  he  also 
declared  to  be  the  right  of  all.  Heroic  Greece  and 
triumphant  Rome  had  looked  on  Freedom  as  the  privilege 
of  the  few ;  by  the  Phrygian  slave  it  was  preached  as 
the  inalienable  inheritance  of  every  son  of  man. 

When  w^e  ponder  the  difference  between  the  new  and 
old  meaning  of  Freedom,  we  may  be  tempted  to  consider 
it  a  mere  accident  that  the  name  is  the  same.  But  we 
blind  ourselves  to  the  meaning  of  History  if  we  yield  to 
this  temptation.  Inheritance,  in  the  world  of  the  In- 
visible,  is   secure ;   no   man   can   acquire   that  which   he 

1  Berni,  of  Michael  Angelo. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  233 

does  not  in  some  form  bequeath.  The  thoughts  of  one 
generation,  it  has  been  well  said,-^  form  the  feelings  of 
its  successor.  The  fathers  would  not  always  recognize 
their  legacy  in  the  wealth  of  the  sons.  The  heroes 
of  the  past  might  have  disclaimed  all  parentage  in 
the  conception  of  Freedom  that  glowed  in  the  heart 
of  Epictetus ;  but  they  would  have  erred ;  he  gave 
their  aspirations  the  only  form  possible  to  them  in  that 
bereavement  of  civil  life  which  they  could  not  have  con- 
ceived possible.  His  ideal  was  the  fruit  of  a  different 
soil  and  a  different  atmosphere  from  theirs,  but  it  sprang 
from  the  seed  they  had  sown. 

How,  then,  it  may  be  asked,  can  we  speak  of  this  as 
an  age  of  general  servility  ?  What  more  can  protect  an 
age  from  servility  than  that  the  idea  of  Freedom  should 
enter  the  realm  of  the  Invisible,  that  man  should  learn 
to  recognize  his  true  Freedom  ?  If  this  was  the  com- 
monplace of  the  age — if  we  find  it  on  the  page  of 
rhetoricians  no  less  than  on  that  of  men  who  set  it  forth 
in  their  lives — how  could  it  be  that  the  moral  life  of 
man,  as  far  as  it  is  associated  with  manly  aim,  seems 
then  to  have  touched  its  nadir  ?  We  have  given  the 
answer  to  this  question,  but  we  must  often  repeat  it. 
J.Icn  in  this  age  were  mere  units.  They  awoke  to  per- 
ceive two  great  ideas — the  sacredness  of  Personality,  and 
the  oneness  of  the  race.  But  between  these  two  ideas 
there  was  no  combining  clement.  The  sense  of  human 
Ijrotherhood  knew  no  concentration  ;  nowhere  through- 
out the  world  of  human  relation  could  it  find  a  focus. 
And  our  moral  life  depends  on  gradation  ;  what  we  owe 
equally  to  all  mankind  we  shall  be  slow  to  recognize  as 
tlie  claim  of  any  one  to  whom  we  do  not  give  it  gladly. 
A    Marcus  Aurclius    or   an   Epictetus  will    no   doubt   be 

'  By  Mr.  Joseph  Jacobs,  in  an  article  on  "  The  God  of  Israel,"  in  the  Nine- 
teenth Century  for  September  1878. 


234  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

ready  to  give  every  human  being  the  rights  of  a  brother ; 
the  average  man  will  rather  let  the  rights  of  a  brother 
sink  to  the  admitted  claims  of  every  human  being,  and 
act  only  from  selfishness  or  preference. 

The  expansion  of  the  City  to  include  the  race  was 
to  the  men  of  that  time  a  great  idea.  Earnest  thinkers 
were  never  tired  of  speaking  of  man  as  a  part  of  the 
universe ;  it  was  one  of  their  stock  themes,  that  as  in 
the  great  ages  of  antiquity  each  one  had  felt  himself  the 
member  of  a  State,  so  now  he  was  to  feel  himself  a  part 
of  that  great  whole,  in  which  was  included  not  only  all 
human  society,  but  all  the  system  of  things  which  we 
know  by  the  name  of  Nature.  He  was  to  transfer  his 
loyalty  from  Athens  or  Rome  to  the  Order  of  Nature, 
and  to  find  exercise  for  all  the  sentiments  which  had 
formerly  been  known  as  patriotism,  in  the  fact  of  mem- 
bership in  a  great  system  of  law  which  included  the 
human  world  and  the  world  which  was  not  human. 
They  were  even  fond  of  illustrating  this  idea  by  the  com- 
parison with  a  living  organism  which  St.  Paul  has  made 
so  familiar  to  Christendom  ;  the  criminal,  they  felt,  was 
the  schismatic ;  his  condition  comparable  to  that  of  the 
hand  or  foot  which  said  to  the  rest  of  the  body,  "  I  have 
no  need  of  thee."  Nevertheless  it  is  true  that  they 
were  the  strongest  opponents  of  this  idea,  so  far  as  it  is 
a  vital,  practical  reality.  They  spoke  much  of  man's 
relation  to  the  universe,  they  returned  again  and  again 
to  his  position  of  membership  in  a  society  of  Gods  and 
men,^  but  they  made  this  a  mere  phrase,  because  they 
recognized  no  other  membership  but  this. 

If  a  man's  relationship  to  Humanity  be  his  only 
membership,  it  is  a  mere  name.      A  human  brotherhood, 

^  The  seeker  after  righteousness  is  to  be  constantly  reminding  himself, 
5ti  ywAos  eifxl  rod  e/c  tGiv  XoyiKQv  <rvaTr]/j.aTOs.  If  he  change  /x^Xos  to  fJ-^pos, 
he  "  does  not  love  men  from  his  heart"  (M.  Antoninus,  vii.  13). 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH.  235 

made  up  of  mere  individuals,  is  a  rope  of  sand.  When 
a  man  has  been  moulded  under  the  idea  of  an  organic 
corporate  life,  gradually  developing  from  the  duties  of  a 
son  to  the  responsibilities  of  a  citizen,  he  is  ready  to 
carry  on  the  sense  of  kindred  to  a  wider  whole.  When 
this  preliminary  training  is  wanting,  the  unity  of  the 
human  race  becomes  a  mere  name,  except  so  far  as  pre- 
eminent goodness  overleaps  the  mighty  chasm  between 
the  large  thing  and  the  small. 

It  is  a  hard  thing  to  love  the  neighbour  as  the  self, 
but  it  is  not  impossible  to  make  life  a  continual  approach 
towards  this  ideal.  We  have  only  to  accept  the  teaching 
of  circumstance — to  sec  no  pain  we  do  not  strive  to 
mitigate — and  we  are  set  on  a  path  that  leads  us  hourly 
nearer  to  our  goal ;  we  shall  never  pass  by  on  the  other 
side  when  need  makes  its  appeal,  and  thus  the  foreigner 
will  become  the  neighbour,  and  we  shall  pass  the  limit 
in  the  very  attempt  to  reach  it.  Or,  rather,  we  shall 
discern  that  the  limit  belongs  only  to  the  outward,  and 
that,  in  truth,  the  love  of  the  neighbour  is  the  love  of 
the  needy.  But  the  injunction  to  act  as  a  member  of 
humanity  supplies  no  beginning.  Its  effect,  rather,  is 
negative.  I  am  a  member  of  humanity  :  why,  then,  should 
my  neighbour  make  any  special  claim  upon  me  ?  My 
kinship  is  with  the  human  race  :  why  should  my  family 
be  specially  dear?  If  we  begin  our  moral  progress 
with  a  recognition  of  the  bonds  which  unite  us  with 
all  men,  we  annihilate  those  which  unite  us  with  any. 
Moral  theory,  on  this  basis,  has  no  relation  to  life ;  the 
world  of  thought  becomes  its  proper  sphere ;  the  world 
of  action  is  a  mere  realm  of  indifference,  a  region  given 
up  to  disaster,  a  piece  of  waste  ground,  where  chance 
may  take  its  course,  and  which  we  must  make  different 
throughout,  before  any  truly  moral  action  is  possible. 

This  combination  of  lofty  theory  and   ignoble  life  is 


236  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

shown  most  distinctly  in  the  philosopher  Seneca.  It 
would  be  very  easy  to  read  from  the  pulpit,  as  a  sermon, 
a  collection  of  extracts  from  his  writings,  and  it  might 
be  made  a  sermon  deeply  moving  to  the  most  earnest 
Christian  congregation.  Perhaps  we  could  not  succeed  in 
this  attempt  with  any  other  writer  who  either  never  heard, 
or  never  cared  to  hear,  the  name  of  Christ.'^  No  bio- 
graphy more  earnestly  preaches  the  lesson  of  that  little 
understood  warning — "  If  3^e  know  these  things,  happy 
are  ye  if  ye  do  them."  That  knowledge  may  be  actually 
a  barrier  to  action,  and  words  no  less  earnest  than  noble 
prove  a  screen  for  ignoble  deeds,  is  a  lesson  taught  by 
many  a  preacher,  but  by  none  so  forcibly  as  by  one  who 
flattered  the  living  and  libelled  the  dead  Claudius,  and 
apologized  for  the  matricide  of  Nero.  Still,  the  know- 
ledge that  words  like  his  were  sterile  for  all  action  should 
never  lead  us  to  charge  them  with  hypocrisy ;  when 
Seneca  spoke  of  the  God  in  every  man,  of  the  peace 
which  fortune  neither  gives  nor  takes  away,  he  was 
doubtless  using  expressions  that  corresponded  to  his 
true  feeling,  for  the  moment.  He  mistook  a  kind  of 
moral  taste  which  has,  in  fact,  little  more  than  an 
aesthetic  value,  for  that  dynamic  impulse  which  tells  on 
action.  Or  at  least  he  only  recognized  the  difference 
by  fleeting  glimpses  which  never  stirred  his  heart  with 
remorse  or  shame,  as  they  would  have  done  had  he 
ever  compared  the  standard  enforced  by  his  preaching 
and  that  suggested  by  his  life. 

But  we  do  not  need  the  spectacle  of  a  moral  teacher  I 

apologizing  for  hideous   crime  in   order  to  teach  us  the  t 

weakness  of  a  merely  individual  morality.  We  see  that 
weakness  in  the  noblest   specimens   of  Stoicism.     "  We 

^  A  series  of  letters,  purporting  to  be  addressed  by  Seneca  to  St.   Paul,  is  i 

still  extant,  and  though  plainly  a  mere  fiction,  is  not  without  interest  as  indi-  ' 

eating  the  associations  naturally  suggested  by  his  teaching. 


THE  AGE  OF  DEATH. 


^37 


must  leave  the  sins  of  other  people  alone,"  says  Marcus 
Aurelius.  The  ruler  who  accepted  that  axiom  was  in 
some  respects  a  worse  Emperor  than  Nero.  What  an 
illustration  of  its  influence  is  afforded  by  the  fact  that 
he  was  the  father  of  Commodus  !  ^  It  was  not  for  want 
of  the  very  noblest  ideal  of  an  individual  morality  ever 
held  by  man  that  the  Stoic  Emperor  left  his  throne  to 
a  monster.  And  this  ideal  was  the  concentration,  in  a 
beautiful  soul,  of  aims  that  were  characteristic  of  an  age. 
None  more  than  the  men  of  that  time  have  said  fine  and 
true  things  of  the  organic  connection  of  man  with  man  ; 
they  were  fond  of  speaking  of  individuals  as  leaves  of 
a  plant  sharing  a  common  life.  But  the  actual  tendency 
of  their  teaching  was  rather  to  reduce  men  to  the  mere 
contiguity  of  pebbles  on  the  sea-shore.  The  hand  or 
foot  need  not,  in  the  Stoic  view,  participate  in  the  disease 
of  the  bod3^  It  need  only  feel  its  own  ills.  On  its  best 
side  we  see  this  belief  as  a  disintegrating,  pulverizing 
influence — an  influence  that  could  be  accepted  by  the 
best  men  only  at  a  period  of  the  world's  history  in 
which  the  universal  need  and  tendency  was  towards 
a  deep  and  long  repose. 

When  the  union  with  Humanity  is  the  only  union, 
corporate  responsibility  is  lost.  The  idea  of  Duty  be- 
comes narrowly  individual ;  there  is  no  standard  which 
forms  a  moral  union  for  the  group.  Men  can  never  say, 
"  We  ought."  There  is  no  place  for  indignation  in  the 
world.  When  we  see  how  often  indignation  is  futile, 
when  we  realize  the  narrow  limits  within  which  man  can 
judge  his  fellow,  we  are  often  tempted  to  believe  that 
Duty  should  never  be   recognized  except   in  the  sphere 

1  Epictetus  has  some  even  more  offensive  assertions  of  a  similar  character, 
e.g.,  i.  18  : — IJ.7)  Oav/xaii'e  rb  kuWos  t^j  yvvaiKbs,  Kal  ry  fJ^oix<?  ov  xoXeiraive/y, 
a  sentence  whicli  it  is  painfully  interesting  to  compare  witli  tlic  toleration  of 
Marcus  for  the  vices  of  Faustina.  But  Epictetus  was  not  sinning  against  his 
special  vocation  as  a  ruler. 


238  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

which  each  man  encloses  when  he  says  "  I."      The  Age 
of  Death  is  a  forcible  refutation   of  that  belief.      If  any- 
one think  that  it  is  enough  for  each  individual  himself 
to  refrain  from  wrong  actions,  himself  to  press  forward 
to  every  noble  aim,  rigidly  excluding  from  his  endeavours 
any  judgment  of  others,  no  period  of  history  could   be 
presented  to  him  more  full  of  instruction   than  the  first 
few  centuries   of  our  era.      He  will  see  in  the  teaching 
of   Marcus   Aurelius   and    Epictetus,    and   even   in   some 
parts  of  Seneca,  a  standard  of  goodness   that  was  not 
surpassed  in  some  directions  by  any  moral  teaching,  and 
that  was  at  the  same  time  perfectly  sterile  for  an}'  result 
of  which  History  can  take  account.     The  philosophers  of 
this  age  taught  and   sincerely  believed  a  large  part  of 
all  that  the  teaching  of  Christ  sets  before  man,  a  much 
larger  part  than  can   be  claimed  as   the  practical  exhibi- 
tion of  Christianity  at  any  stage  of  its  development ;   and 
the   result   of   their    teaching   was   to    make   sycophants 
and   cowards.      Theirs    was   a  mutilated   ideal  ;  not   in- 
complete only  in  the  sense  that  an  ideal  is  the  product 
of  fallible  human  aspirations  and  on  every  side  capable  of 
expansion,  but  in  the  sense  that   on  one  side  it  has  cut 
itself  off  from  expansion.      It  was  not  growth  arrested 
at    an    immature    stage,    but     an     organism    that    had 
deprived    itself    of    the     means     of    growth.       It    con- 
sidered   man    out   of  his   natural   condition,   man   as  he 
is  cut  off  from   the   bonds  of  human   societ}^,   detached 
from  all  ties  of  family  and  country,  isolated  as  in  some 
spiritual  Juan  Fernandez.     It  regarded  as  a  whole  that 
being  of  which  it  is  one  of  the  most  important  facts  to 
remember  that  he  is  part  of  a  larger  whole ;   and  thus 
omitted   from  its   content  his   most  important  relations, 
and  the  most  organic  necessities  of  his  being. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA. 

That  age  which  closes  the  history  of  the  old  world  we 
have  called  the  Age  of  Death  ;  the  title  seems  justified  by 
the  exhibition  of  its  strongest  interests  and  its  habitual 
tendencies.  But  the  death  of  one  phase  of  life  was  the 
birth  of  another.  The  Roman  Empire,  in  truth,  might 
in  some  sense  be  called  rather  the  beginning  of  modern 
than  the  end  of  ancient  history.  From  some  points  of 
view,  we  may  regard  it  as  a  presentation  of  that  ideal 
Unity  to  which  the  civilization  of  the  modern  world  seems 
continually  to  aspire ;  it  shows  us  the  nations  of  Europe 
bound  in  a  corporate  union  which  they  have  never  actu- 
ally possessed,  but  towards  which  their  whole  history 
seems  an  indistinct  and  baffled  progress.  We  under- 
stand the  Middle  Ages  best,  when  we  keep  as  a  clue  to 
their  history  the  yearning  in  the  great  mind  which  may 
be  taken  as  the  representative  of  mediaeval  Faith  after  a 
corporate  union  of  which  the  Pope  should  be  the  heart, 
and  the  Emperor  the  head.  Dante  feels  the  "  Holy 
Roman  Empire "  ^  a  sacred  ideal.  He,  the  truest  son 
of  Italy,  wrote  his  treatise  on  Monarchy  to  celebrate 
the  arrival  of  a  German  Emperor  in  Italy.  That  the 
book  is  "  an  epitaph  instead  of  a  prophecy "  detracts 
nothing  from  its  significance.  It  is  an  epitaph  which 
implies  a  legacy ;  the  aspirations  which  it  embodies  pre- 
figure a  large  part  of  the   struggles  of  modern  Europe, 

1  See  the  valuable  and  interesting  work  with  this  title  by  Mr.  Bryce,  a  little 
volume  which  seems  to  me  to  contain  the  kernel  of  mcdiajval  history. 


240  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

perhaps  even  of  the  struggles  of  the  future.  The 
organization  after  which  Dante  yearned  gave  Europe  a 
certain  imperfect  but  actual  Unity  until  a  new  dividing- 
line  separated  Protestant  from  Catholic ;  it  even  lingered 
on  as  an  empty  shade  up  to  the  cockcrow  of  the  Revolu- 
tion. That  Holy  Roman  Empire,  which  was  neither 
Holy,  nor  Roman,  nor  an  Empire,  and  yet  perished  only 
yesterday,  was  the  representative  of  a  great  idea;  we 
may  say  of  it,  as  Cicero  of  Cato  :  "  The  influence  of  the 
dead  was  undying."  ^  Its  influence  is  traceable  in  the 
work  of  a  thinker  whom  his  followers  regard  as  the 
typical  representative  of  modern  thought.  Comte,  too, 
dreams  of  a  Holy  Empire,  and  sees  in  the  future  some 
kind  of  reflex  of  that  national  union  of  which  Roman 
law  was  the  bond  and  expression.  The  Frenchman  and 
the  Italian,  wide  as  the  poles  asunder,  agree  in  a  belief 
that  a  common  civilization  imphes  a  common  faith,  that 
Europe  shall  at  last  find  its  soul. 

The  aspiration  of  Dante  and  of  Comte  was  in  some 
sense  the  possession  of  those  whose  moral  life  we  have 
been  endeavouring  to  follow.  The  Roman  Stoics  and 
their  contemporaries  inhabited  a  united  Europe,  they 
lived  under  a  single  law  (perhaps  the  wisest  the  world 
has  ever  known),  and  in  its  new  expansion,  including  all 
that  they  meant  by  the  world,  they  felt  a  new  meaning 
given  to  law,  a  new  faith  to  the  heart  of  man.  The 
world  without  always  gives,  in  some  sense,  a  model  to 
the  world  within,  and  the  world  had  never  before  been 
a  Unity ;  nor,  indeed,  has  it  ever  since  been  a  Unity  in 
the  same  sense.  The  struggles  of  cities  fill  the  record 
of  the  ancient  world  ;  the  struggles  of  nations  fill  the 
record  of  the  modern  ;  between  them  intervenes  a  time  in 
which  the  scene  of  all  previous  and  subsequent  conflicts 
was  filled  by  one  vast  political  organism,  confronting  all 

1  "  Etiam  mortui  valuit  auctoritas." 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  241 

opposition  as  mere  revolt.  Hence  all  endeavour  in  the 
realm  of  thought  took  this  ideal  of  Unit}^  as  its  goal. 
As  one  dominion  bound  all  the  various  races  of  the 
known  world  into  a  single  kingdom,  acknowledging  a 
single  head,  so  one  aim  was  predominant  in  speculation  ; 
intellectual  effort  was  bent  to  harmonize  all  existent 
varieties  of  thought,  to  find  in  all  something  to  assent 
to,  something  to  accept.  As  Greece,  Africa,  the  East, 
had  each  become  a  province  of  the  Roman  Empire,  so 
Hellenic,  Alexandrian,  Oriental  speculation  must  all 
become  a  part  of  the  true  faith.  Everything  that  had 
ever  been  declared  with  earnestness  must  in  some  sense 
be  true. 

This  new  sense  of  the  oneness  of  truth  beneath  the 
variety  of  opinions  must  have  been  wonderfully  quickened 
by  the  mere  fact  that  cultivation  came,  at  the  time  of 
which  we  speak,  to  include  a  knowledge  of  more 
languages  than  one.  When  we  compare  any  modern 
thinker  with  Plato,  we  perceive  that  the  most  profound 
philosopher  of  antiquity,  or  rather  of  any  time,  is  in 
some  respects  at  a  disadvantage  in  comparison  with  an 
ordinary  person  who  knows  that  his  own  language  is 
but  one  of  many  actual  forms  of  speech.  Plato  could 
not  shake  off  the  belief  that  to  understand  a  word  is  to 
discover  the  nature  of  a  thing  ;  the  mistake  is  impossible 
for  any  modern.  It  was  hardly  possible  for  a  subject 
of  the  Roman  Empire ;  acquaintance  with  even  two  lan- 
guages sufficiently  confutes  the  error  that  language  is  a 
photograph  of  existence.  The  Roman  could  not  but  know 
that  Latin  was  language  in  just  the  same  sense  that  Greek 
was.  He  must  sometimes  have  suspected  (as  Plato  never 
did)  that  language  is  an  imperfect  vehicle  of  thought,  and 
that  incomplete  or  even  misleading  expression  need  not  be 
erroneous  statement.^     As  we  study  the  faded  metaphor, 

1  For  instance,  when  Anthony  wrote  of  ^rfKorvirla  to  Cicero  (see  the  letter 

Q 


242  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  illogical  associations,  the  misleading  suggestions,  em- 
bodied in  the  history  of  words,  we  feel  that  a  portion 
of  the  search  for  truth  consists  in  disentangling  what  a 
writer  means  from  what  he  is  obliged  to  say.  When 
once  men  were  taught  this  lesson  of  language,  a  new 
light  fell  on  religion.  Mythology  was  assimilated  to 
this  linguistic  variety.  While  there  was  one  language 
and  many  barbaric  dialects,  men  never  realized  that  truth 
might  be  subject  to  variety  of  expression,  or  conversely, 
that  varied  expression  might  point  to  a  single  truth.  Of 
course,  the  Greek  had  always  known  that  barbarians 
could  make  themselves  mutually  intelligible ;  but  it  was 
impossible  for  him  ever  really  to  believe  that  any  other 
language  stood  in  the  same  relation  to  thought  as  his  own 
did.  When  once  a  barbaric  language  enshrined  the  law 
by  which  the  world  was  governed,  the  exclusive  race  was 
forced  to  recognize  that  it  was  a  fragment  of  the  human 
race.  We  might  almost  say,  that  all  which  divided  man 
from  man  became  transparent  to  that  underlying  reality 
in  which  man  was  bound  to  man,  when  once  it  was  dis- 
cerned that  beneath  the  variety  of  languages  lay  hid  the 
Unity  of  Thought. 

The  exponent  of  this  new  feeling  of  Catholic  sympathy 
with  all  human  imagination  and  thought  was  also  the 
enthusiastic  student  of  the  heroic  past.  The  new  aim 
of  discovering  unity  beneath  divergence  occupies  a  pro- 
portion of  Plutarch's  space  quite  equal  to  that  study  of 
the  great  figures  of  the  antique  world  to  which  he  owes 
his  fame.  He  saw  beneath  the  antagonistic  aspect  of 
various  creeds  a  single  aspiration  after  the  Divine,  the 
one  ray  of  Divine  light  tinged  by  the  varied  colouring 

enclosed  to  Atticus  in  Epist.  ad  Att.,  x.  8),  each  must  have  felt  that  there  was 
a  feeling — jealousy — for  which  the  Latin  language  provided  no  name,  and  for 
which  one  was  needed.  Cicero's  frequent  recourse  to  scraps  of  Greek  must 
have  been  a  continual  reminder  of  this  new  idea  to  himself  and  his  corre- 
spondents. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  243 

of  human  imagination  ;  ^  and  the  refracted  rays,  he  felt, 
might  be  recombined  ;  the  many  was  but  a  transparent 
disguise  for  the  one.  The  Gods,  he  urges,  are  not  diffe- 
rent in  different  places,  they  differ  only  as  the  names 
for  the  sun  in  different  languages.  The  races  which 
could  not  understand  each  other's  names  for  the  sun  all 
see  the  same  sun.  Osiris  and  Bacchus  are  not  different 
beings  any  more  than  the  sun  which  shines  in  Egypt  is 
different  from  the  sun  which  shines  in  Greece.^  And 
then,  further,  Bacchus,  Osiris,  and  all  their  kindred  are 
but  var3ang  aspects  of  the  one  Invisible  God,  who  shall 
become  the  Guide  and  King  of  men  when  they  are  deli- 
vered from  the  prison  of  the  body  and  migrate  into  the 
distant  land  where  He  reigns  alone.^  While  men  are 
yet  bound  in  the  chains  of  material  surroundings  (he 
felt)  they  can  discern  Him  only  under  these  various 
aspects ;  they  must  express  the  great  truths  which  they 
dimly  perceive  as  to  His  nature  under  the  guise  of 
fragmentary  metaphor,  which  becomes  mythology.  Those 
who  take  Bacchus  for  wine  and  Vulcan  for  flame,  he 
says,  make  the  same  mistake  as  those  who  confuse  the 
oar  with  the  pilot,  or  the  loom  with  the  weaver ;  and 
those  err  also  who  see  in  nature  so  many  separate  agencies, 
and  do  not  discern  that  all  are  at  bottom  but  various 
aspects  of  one  great  primal  unity.*  The  various  allegories 
by  which  men  have  accounted  for  the  fictitious  histories 
that  have  sprung  up  concerning  these  separate  beings  arc 
singly  erroneous,  but  in  their  totality  they  are  true.  The 
fragment  is  a  fiction,  the  totality  is  a  truth.  Typho  is  not 
the  principle  of  darkness,  of  dryness,  or  of  barrenness  ;  he 
is  generally  the  hurtful  principle  in  Nature  ;  every  specia- 
lization of  this  truth  is  good  as  its  illustration,  and  be- 
comes false  only  when  it  is  taken  as  complete  in  itself. 

^  See  Plutarch,  De  Isidc  cl  Osiridc,  c.  20. 
^  Ibid.,  c.  67.  i  Ibid.,Q.7Z.  -i/iuL.c.Gs. 


244  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  discernment  that  all  the  diversities  which  sepa- 
rate human  beings,  are  less  important  than  that  under- 
lying unity  which  forms  their  bond,  came  home  to  the 
men  of  that  time  as  a  religious  truth.  Mahomet  did 
not  believe  more  emphatically  that  God  was  one  than 
did  the  thinkers  of  the  first  two  centuries  of  our  era 
that  Man  was  one.  It  was  recognized  that  what  was 
common  to  the  slave  and  the  emperor  was  more  im- 
portant than  what  was  special  for  each,  and  it  is  hardly 
possible  for  us  who  see  this  as  a  truism  to  realize  what 
it  was  to  those  who  hailed  it  as  a  great  moral  discovery. 
The  preciousness  of  man  as  man  was  felt  more  strongly 
in  this  earliest  age  of  the  modern  world  than  it  was  felt 
again  before  the  eighteenth  century.  It  was  opposed 
by  the  spirit  of  chivalry,  by  mediaeval  religion,  and  then 
again  by  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance ;  each  of  these 
laid  stress  on  something  exceptional ;  that  recognition  of 
the  common  as  the  uniting  element  was  a  prophecy  of 
all  that  is  most  advanced  in  modern  democracy.  Under 
this  new  light  the  lesson  of  the  Greek  took  a  new  mean- 
ing. He  had  shown  forth  the  exceptional  elements  of 
human  life — its  beauty,  its  genius,  its  loftiest  virtue ; 
his  language  enshrined  all  that  was  most  precious  in 
merely  human  thought ;  his  hands  had  fashioned  all 
that  was  most  ideal  in  the  representation  of  human 
beauty.  But  under  the  new  view  of  human  oneness 
all  this  became  a  "  promise  and  potenc3'' "  of  human  life 
itself.  The  work  of  Phidias,  of  Homer,  of  Sophocles, 
became  a  tribute  to  the  dignity  of  Man.  All  that  was 
conspicuous  in  the  man  of  exceptional  gifts  became  a 
measure  of  the  value  of  that  common  humanity  which 
dwarfed  its  eminence.  Thus  the  Greek  sense  of  humanity 
took  a  new  meaning.  It  gained,  as  the  fragmentary  ex- 
pression of  a  truth  it  had  imperfectly  contained,  a  depth 
and  pregnancy  that  it  had  lacked   as  a  whole  in  itself 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  245 

As  the  name  of  man  became  more  precious  than  the 
name  of  Greek,  so  even  beyond  that  broad  humanity 
was  discerned  a  deeper  unity,  and  Humanity  was  seen 
to  contain  a  seed  of  something  greater  than  itself.  As 
the  human  element  had  lain  hidden  within  the  Greek 
element,  so  the  Divine  element  had  lain  hidden  within 
the  human  element.  The  oneness  latent  beneath  the 
divergence  of  Greek  and  Barbarian  was  seen  as  a  guide 
to  a  deeper  oneness  ;  the  larger  whole,  which  had  re- 
placed the  smaller  whole,  became  in  its  turn  a  fragment, 
and  craved  its  completion.  This  is  the  rhythm  of  all 
thought.  The  one — the  many — and  then  again  the 
one,  deeper  and  wider  than  before,  till  we  reach  that 
Unity  which  is  the  foundation  of  all  others.  God  and 
Man  were  seen  to  be  one  in  a  new  sense ;  it  was  felt 
vaguely  that  all  which  was  most  precious  in  human 
relation  was  a  clue  to  and  symbol  of  the  relation  by 
which  Man  was  bound  to  God.  It  was  confusedly  dis- 
cerned that  we  must  ascend  to  a  level  higher  than 
humanity  before  we  can  understand  the  laws  of  human 
relation  ;  that  the  idea  of  Man  in  relation  to  something 
beyond  himself  gains  a  luminous  intelligibility  for  ever 
absent  from  those  speculations  as  to  his  nature  and 
development  in  which  he  is  treated  as  a  whole.  It  had 
been  the  truth  of  the  ancient  world  that  he  was  a  frag- 
ment of  the  State,  and  as  the  states  of  the  ancient  world 
perished  individuality  took  a  new  meaning.  But  by  the 
same  movement  of  thought,  a  new  relation  came  in  to 
replace  the  old  ;  the  Eternal  succeeded  the  perennial ; 
Man  ceased  to  think  of  himself  as  a  member  of  the  State, 
and  discerned  his  position  as  a  son  of  God. 

This  was  felt  vaguely  by  all  who  entered  into  the 
deeper  currents  of  thought.  But  the  Jew  had  known 
this  always,  so  far  as  he  was  true  to  his  own  special 
message;   and  in  this  age   he  was  taught  to  recognize  it 


246  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

afx^esh  by  discovering  its  harmony  with  all  that  had 
appeared  its  most  striking  opposite.  The  great  Anti- 
thesis of  all  human  thought  is  that  of  Judaism  and 
Hellenism.  It  is  hardly  possible  for  us  to  conceive 
of  another  moral  and  intellectual  contrast  so  striking, 
so  complete,  so  exhaustive  of  all  the  tendencies  that 
belong  to  human  endeavour  and  interest.  When  we 
have  entered  into  the  depth  of  Hebrew  thought,  have 
felt  its  thrill  of  awe  at  the  ineffable  Name  suggested 
by  all  creation,  and  least  inadequately  associated  with 
that  declaration  "  I  am  ;  " — and  then,  returning  from 
that  plunge  into  an  abyss,  have  soared  to  a  height  from 
which  we  may  overlook  the  wide,  varied,  contrast-full 
extent  of  Hellenic  life  and  thought,  we  seem  to  have 
left  no  region  of  human  interest  unvisited.  Fresh  from 
Hebrew  awe  of  God,  and  Hellenic  interest  in  Man — 
from  the  Hebrew  sense  of  Righteousness  and  Iniquity 
— the  Hellenic  sympathy  with  varied  impulse  and 
elasticity  of  moral  view — we  have  touched  the  extremes 
of  all  moral  life,  and  seem  to  have  confronted  the 
blankest  contradiction  which  can  set  human  thoughts  on 
paths  of  hopeless  divergence. 

The  Greek,  with  his  harmony  of  opposites,  his  swift 
inversion  of  sympathy,  his  delight  in  varied  thought,  his 
elastic  expansiveness  of  comprehension,  had  declared  in 
brilliant  and  enduring  poetry  and  art  that  man  is  various  ; 
he  saw  everywhere  the  human  even  when  he  sought 
the  Divine.  He  enthroned  Humanity  in  Heaven,  and 
saw  there,  not  the  pure  white  ray,  but  the  rainbow  into 
which  that  ray  was  refracted  by  his  prismatic  genius. 
The  very  opposite  of  all  this  describes  the  faith  of  the 
Jew.  In  his  abhorrence  of  all  worship  of  the  Visible, 
his  profound  loyalty  to  the  Unseen,  he  never  ceased  to 
uphold  his  conviction  that  God  is  one,  and  more  and 
more  came  to  feel  that  the  true  Man  was  the  son  of  God. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  247 

The  antagonism  of  the  two  races  was  unabated.  Per- 
haps it  was  increased.  Their  mutual  opportunities  of 
intercourse  revealed  to  each  the  depths  of  their  diver- 
gence. The  worship  of  the  Formless,  the  Unseen,  pre- 
sented itself  to  the  classic  mind  as  mere  Pantheism,  or 
degrading  superstition.  The  worshipper  of  the  out- 
ward Unity  recoiled  from  the  worshipper  of  the  inward 
as  from  a  mere  opponent  to  the  Gods.  Almost  all 
references  to  the  Jews  in  Greek  or  Latin  seem  to  ignore 
their  faith.  The  Jews,^  says  a  Greek  historian,  had 
been  taught  that  God  was  merely  "  what  we  call  Heaven 
and  the  universe  and  the  nature  of  things."  The  Roman 
satirist  declares  that  they  "  pray  to  the  clouds  and  the 
power  of  Heaven."^  The  Roman  historian  describes 
them  as  "  given  over  to  superstition,  but  disinclined  to 
religion.""  They,  who  saw  God  everywhere,  seemed  to 
see  Him  nowhere.  They  did  see  Him  nowhere  in  the 
sense  that  he  was  there  and  not  here.  The  Roman 
General  in  the  sacred  shrine,  where  he  found  no  image, 
and  where  he  must  have  deemed  himself  confronted  with 
a  vacuum  as  much  of  faith  as  of  imagination,^  is  a  type 
of  the  mind  formed  on  Greek  culture,  in  presence  of 
a  profound  faith  rooted  in  a  depth  to  which  he  could 
not  penetrate ;  as,  in  like  manner,  the  Jewish  Apostle,  at 
the  centre  of  Greek  art,  indignant  at  the  shapes  of  beauty 
on  every  side,  which  he  deemed  objects  of  idolatry,  is  a 

'  Strabo,  xvi.  2. 

2  "  Nil  praeter  nubes,  et  coeli  numen  adorant"  (Juvenal,  xiv.  95). 

'  "  Gens  superstitioni  obnoxia,  religionibus  adversa"  (Tacitus,  Hist.,  v.  13). 

*  Pompey  did  in  fact  order  the  sanctuary  to  be  purified  and  the  sacrifices 
continued,  but  respect  for  the  religion  of  the  conquered  was  a  part  of  Roman 
policy,  and  we  may  take  the  impression  given  in  these  citations  as  includin.:^ 
that  which  he  was  the  means  of  bringing  to  Rome.  For  the  contempt  and 
hatred  with  which  the  Jews  were  regarded  by  the  Romans  see  Cic.  Pro  Flacco, 
28,  and  'I'ac.  Hist.  v.  4,  Frofana  illic  omnia  qua;  apud  nos  sacra  :  rursuni 
conccssa  apud  illis  quce  nobis  .incesta  ;  a  mere  calumny,  vividly  expressing 
the  detestation  which  gave  it  birth. 


248  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

type  of  the  mind  formed  by  Hebrew  faith  in  presence  of 
that  Greek  worship  of  the  beautiful  which  he  could  not 
comprehend.  We  should  think  of  Paul  at  Athens,  side 
by  side  with  Pompey  in  the  Holy  of  Holies,  as  showing 
forth  respectively  the  illusions  which  beset  the  wor- 
shipper of  the  Unseen  and  the  lover  of  the  Beautiful 
when  they  attempt  to  judge  each  other.  Paul  thought 
that  the  citizens  of  Athens  were  superstitious — they  who 
probably  had  the  least  superstition  of  any  men  then  on  the 
face  of  the  earth.  Pompe}'',  or  at  all  events  those  who 
took  their  impressions  through  the  medium  of  his  con- 
quest, thought  that  nation  to  be  irreligious  whose  very 
existence  was  grounded  on  an  acknowledgment  of  the 
One  Invisible  ground  of  Heaven  and  Earth,  and  all  that 
in  them  is.  Athens  superstitious  and  Jerusalem  irre- 
ligious !  The  fact  that  such  things  were  said  is  a  warn- 
ing for  the  critics  of  all  time. 

But  the  time  w^as  come  when  the  thinker  of  each  race 
was  to  learn  that  the  lesson  of  his  own  nation  was  in- 
complete when  standing  alone.  The  testimony  of  Israel 
to  the  Divine  Unity  mirrored  itself  in  that  humanity 
which  his  Scriptures  declared  to  be  moulded  in  the  image 
of  God,  and  which  the  spirit  of  the  age  discovered  to 
lie  at  the  root  of  all  divergences  of  national  character. 
And  in  the  same  way,  though  not  by  any  means  to  the 
same  degree,  the  lesson  of  the  Greek  was  mirrored  back 
on  the  lore  of  the  Jew.  He  was  beginning  to  read, 
even  into  his  Scriptures,  the  belief  that  the  Divine  nature 
enfolds  in  its  own  oneness  the  variety  of  Man.-"^  He  saw 
that  Unity  was  not  uniformity,  that  God  reveals  Himself 
in  many  ways  to  His  creatures,  that  all  the  wealth  of  con- 
trast discernible  in  His  work  must  be  first  within  His  own 
nature ;   he  felt  dimly  that  there  might  be  many  persons 

1  In  the  Septuagint  version  of  the  Old  Testament,  the  Theophanies  reveal 
not  the  Supreme  Himself,  but  some  inferior  manifestation  of  His  will. 


ii 


THE  JE  W  AT  A  LEX  A  NDRIA .  249 

in  one  God.  But  his  sense  of  tiie  Divine  oneness  was 
not  lost  in  this  sense  of  the  Divine  multiformity ;  rather 
it  was  intensified.  Man  was  at  once  Many  and  One,  and 
God  must  be  more  full  of  contrast  and  more  entirely  One 
than  His  creature  was.  It  is  no  fanciful  view  of  the 
varied  and  seething  thought  of  this  age  to  say  that  in 
its  combination  of  many  elements  in  a  single  civilization 
was  prepared  and  prefigured  the  belief  in  the  Trinity. 
I\Ien  saw  that  that  was  true  of  human  nature  which,  in 
the  view  of  Man's  relation  to  God  then  dawning  upon 
the  world,  they  were  to  express  in  dogmas  concerning 
the  Divine.  At  that  point  in  the  world's  history,  it  was 
felt,  as  never  before,  that  the  human  race  was  at  once 
man}^  and  one.  Before  that  time  there  had  been  a  cer- 
tain ideal  unity,  typified  on  one  side  by  the  Greek,  on 
the  other  by  the  Jew,  towards  which  all  that  called  itself 
Man  was  supposed  to  be  in  some  sense  aspiring  ;  but  the 
Barbarian  was  not  really  one  with  the  Greek,  nor  the 
Gentile  with  the  Jew.  Between  each  race  and  the  outer 
world  there  was  a  vast  chasm  which  no  aspirations  could 
bridge.  Plato  felt  the  imperfect  logical  character  of  the 
division  of  Greeks  and  barbarians  ;  it  was,  he  said,  as  if 
cranes  should  divide  the  whole  animal  world  into  cranes 
and  not-cranes ;  ■^  but  morally  he  felt  its  influence,  and 
his  countrymen  probably  never  saw  any  flaw  in  it  at 
all.  To  the  Jew  at  Alexandria  both  Greek  exclusiveness 
and  Jewish  exclusiveness  were  revealed  to  some  extent 
in  their  true  character.  He  was  forced  to  see  that  the 
specially  Jewish  lesson  entirely,  and  the  special  Greek 
lesson  to  a  great  extent,  was  lost  when  the  Greek  or 
the  Jew  refused  to  be  a  member  of  Humanity.  They 
had  each,  in  their  difTercnt  languages,  borne  witness  to 
the  oneness  of  humanity,  and  when  the  whole  outward 
structure  of  society  proclaimed  that  humanity  was  one,  a 

1  Plato,  Politicus,  263. 


250  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

new  meaning  was  reflected  back  on  their  own  teaching, 
a  new  force  was  given  to  their  own  words. 

To  those  who  look  back  on  this  phase  in  the  evolution 
of  moral  life  from  a  stage  of  much  fuller  development,  it 
may  appear  that  this  trinity  of  earth,  soon  to  be  mirrored 
in  the  Trinity  of  Heaven,  was  a  mere  accident.  It  can- 
not be  said  that  the  stream  of  Christian  thought  is  com- 
plete when  it  is  enriched  by  the  tributaries  of  Greece, 
of  Judaea,  and  of  Rome ;  it  has  yet  to  accept  the  deep 
waters  of  Teutonic  influence,  the  element  on  which  the 
very  life  of  modern  Europe  depends.  But,  in  truth,  this 
human  trinity  is  independent  of  a  particular  historic 
phase  ;  it  is  an  expression  of  a  law  of  thought  repeated 
again  and  again  in  the  most  various  quarters.  It  has 
never  again  been  expressed  with  the  same  colossal  im- 
pressiveness  and  deep  pregnant  force  of  expansion  which 
it  found,  when  the  nation  which  declared  the  Divine 
Unity  stood  face  to  face  with  the  nation  which  illustrated 
and  enfolded  the  human  variety,  under  the  harsh  dominion 
and  the  wise  law  of  that  nation  whose  call  was  to  the 
Mediatorship  of  all  nations.  But  it  is  more  or  less 
expressed  in  the  history  of  all  thought  so  far  as  any 
moral  evolution  can  be  discerned  there.  The  collision 
of  opposites — the  presence  of  a  Mediator — this  is  the 
universal  rhythm  of  human  development.  And  that 
theological  dogma  which  finds  the  Divine  Father,  the 
Eternal  Son,  and  the  Holy  Spirit  to  constitute  "  not 
three  Gods,  but  One  God,"  does  but  translate  this 
rhythmic  human  law  into  that  Divine  expression  which 
every  moral  law  requires  if  it  is  to  be  felt  an  enduring 
reality.  The  trinity  of  the  Athanasian  Creed  is  the 
expression  of  human  development,  as  it  was  exhibited 
to  the  eyes  of  the  world,  when  the  two  races  who'\ 
severally  have  done  most  for  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  i 
development  of  mankind,  met  under  the  rule  of  that  race 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  251 

who  has  done  most  for  its  government.  It  would  pro- 
bably not  be  possible  at  any  other  crisis  of  history  to 
point  out  three  nations  thus  related  to  each  other ;  but 
their  relation  expresses  the  law  of  history ;  it  has  been 
felt  again  and  again  in  individual  development  and  recog- 
nized in  philosophy,  and  the  age  in  which  it  was  seen,  as 
it  were,  in  its  naked  simplicit}^,  will  always  be  felt  in 
some  sense  the  key  to  the  history  of  the  human  race. 

The  t3^pical  representative  of  this  new  sense  of  a 
Unity  underlying  all  difference  is  Philo,  the  Alexandrian 
Jew.^  On  the  soil  of  Alexandria  it  had  become  impos- 
sible for  the  son  of  Israel  to  perpetuate  the  exclusive- 
ness  either  of  his  own  race  or  of  the  race  by  whose 
culture  his  mind  had  been  formed.  Escaping  from  the 
narrow  horizon  of  both,  he  saw  their  several  histories  as 
each  a  chapter  in  the  history  of  humanity,  but  in  one 
the  typical  chapter — the  clue  to  all  the  volume.  He  felt, 
as  only  the  select  few  of  his  countr3'men  had  ever  felt 
before,  that  the  message  of  his  nation  was  a  message  to 
the  human  race.  "  In  thy  seed  shall  all  the  families  of 
the  earth  be  blessed,"  was  a  promise  that  came  home  to 
him  with  new  meaning ;  he  saw  all  that  had  separated 
his  countrymen  from  the  Gentiles  as  a  promise  of  their 
beneficent  union  with  the  Gentiles.  An  intimate  know- 
ledge of  all  that  is  most  precious  in  Gentile  lore  prepared 
him  to  discover  its  readiness  to  enrich  and  to  be  enriched 
by  a  yet  higher  lore  ;  to  feel  that  its  most  characteristic 
lessons  were  incomplete  until  they  were  combined  with 
the  doctrine  of  which  they  might  on  a  narrow  view 
appear  almost  the  denial,  and  that  they  first  found  their 
deepest  meaning  when  they  met  their  antithetic  belief. 
He  shows  us  how  close   may  be  the  relation  of  convic- 

1  Philo  takes  the  same  place  with  regard  to  Judaism  that  Plutarch  docs  with 
regard  to  Hellenism,  They  each  represent  the  spirit  that  prizes  the  traditions 
of  a  race,  and  awakens  to  a  unity  in  which  it  is  a  mere  fragment. 


253  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tions  separated  by  the  fiercest  intellectual  opposition,  and 
how  men,  who  seem  to  meet  in  blank  antagonism,  may 
but  illustrate,  complete,  and  expand  each  other's  thought. 

It  was  not  by  any  endowment  of  exceptional  genius 
that  a  Jew,  steeped  in  the  religious  conviction  of  his 
race,  welcomed  and  assimilated  the  convictions  diametri- 
cally opposed  to  it,  discerned  the  nearness  of  the  most 
fundamental  opposites,  and  blended  the  lesson  of  those 
who  would  have  had  nothing  for  each  other  but  indiffer- 
ence or  denunciation.  His  was  no  soaring  spirit,  ready 
to  spring  to  heights  from  which  the  great  outlines  of 
the  moral  world  take  a  new  aspect  ;  he  was  but  an 
attentive  traveller  along  its  highway,  studious  of  all 
that  was  revealed  to  the  eye  of  average  power.  What 
he  saw,  all  could  see  who  would  look  around  with 
any  earnest  care ;  the  lesson  he  taught  was  one  that 
all  could  learn.  If  he,  first  of  those  whose  recorded 
thought  has  reached  the  modern  world,  saw  that  the 
Greek  and  the  Hebrew  corresponded  each  to  each, 
as  the  human  corresponded  to  the  Divine,  it  must  have 
been  because  the  time  was  come  for  all  to  see  this. 
The  Hebrew  Scriptures  revealed  the  only  true  Being, 
the  Invisible  One,  lying  beyond  and  behind  all  pheno- 
mena. Greek  literature  revealed  Man,  the  various,  the 
diverse,  the  divergent,  the  being  who  found  his  very 
meaning  in  conflict.  When  Philo  lived,  these  two  re- 
velations converged ;  it  needed  no  penetrating  gaze  to 
pursue  their  paths  to  a  common  goal,  only  a  patient 
attention  to  the  external  circumstances  of  the  world. 
Greece  and  Judaea  bowed  beneath  a  single  law.  The 
teacher  of  Righteousness,  the  lover  of  Beauty,  were 
taught  their  oneness  in  their  common  relation  to  a 
government  which  brought  both  into  a  single  framework, 
and  forced  them  to  feel  some  kind  of  mutual  relation. 

Philo   brought   to   this  great  truth,   not   the  distinct- 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  253 

ness  of  genius,  but  the  confusion  of  ordinary  prejudice  ; 
on  his  page  we  find  prefigured  the  theological  confusion 
which  has  always  obscured  the  meaning  of  inspiration 
to  the  eyes  of  mankind.  He  saw  that  Greek  and 
Hebrew  wisdom  were  ready  to  unite ;  but  he  blurred 
that  truth  by  mistaking  antithesis  for  resemblance,  and 
insisting  that  a  harmony  was  a  unison.^  He  turned 
the  convergence  into  a  union  in  which  the  distinctness 
was  lost  in  one  sense,  and  yet  in  another  exaggerated. 
The  Old  Testament,  he  urges  continually,  does  not 
mean  what  it  says  ;  its  actual  meaning  is  a  kernel 
within  a  husk,  which  many  have  taken  for  the  fruit, 
and  either  thus  fed  on  the  husks,  or  else  trampled  under 
foot  the  precious  grain.  At  Alexandria  probably  he 
knew  most  of  the  last,  and  is  always  trying  to  prepare 
his  readers  to  bear  Greek  raillery.  It  is  very  easy, 
he  tells  those  Greeks  who  must  have  sharpened  their 
wits  on  the  Septuagint,^  to  make  merry  with  the  sacred 
writings,  if  we  regard  them  as  a  narrative  of  events. 
But  the  wise  man  does  not  regard  Hebrew  history  as 
a  record  of  event.  The  history,  which  merely  informs 
a  careless  reader  that  the  serpent  tempted  Eve,  and 
that  she  tempted  Adam,  teaches  the  seeker  after  truth  \ 
that  Pleasure,  the  tempter,  appeals  first  to  sense,  and 
sense    to   mind.'      In    narrating   the    destruction   of  the 

1  See,  e.g.,  Quis  Rerum  Divinarum  Hasres,  Mangey,  vol.  iv.  92-94,  where  he 
seems  to  suppose  that  the  harmony  of  opposites  taught  by  Ileracleitus  was 
plagiarized  from  the  Pentateuch,  being  suggested  apparently  by  so  simple  a 
passage  as  Genesis  xv.  10  :— "EXXt?^^?  rbv  ni-^av  Kal  aoldifiov  irap  avroh 
Hp&icKiiTov,  Ke^d\aiou  rrj^  avroO  irpodTT^aafievov  (pi\oao(f)ias,  avxeif  w  i(p' 
evp^jfi  Kaivij ;  iroKaibv  yap  (Dpepia  Mwa^us  icrl.  This  citation,  and  most 
of  those  which  follow,  are  from  the  Erlangen  edition  of  iVIangey's  Philo,  in 
four  vols.,  1785-92. 

-  u)  KarayiXaaToi  Kal  \iai>  ii'xfpeh,  he  answers  an  imaginary  objection,  /li/i/., 
p.  36,  He  seems  to  have  been  irritated  by  very  minute  and  pedantic  criticism, 
if  that  to  which  he  here  replies  be  a  fair  specimen. 

3  De  Mundi  Opificio,  Mangey,  i.  112-114.  Q^-  Leg.  AUegor. ,  [[.,  puisim, 
same  vol. 


254  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

old  world  b}'  a  flood,  it  really  sets  forth  the  awful  cala- 
mity of  permission  to  sin,  of  that  oneness  of  impulse 
from  which  the  distraction  of  wrong  is  removed,^  and  the 
whole  nature  is  turned  to  evil,  when  the  moral  order  is, 
as  it  were,  submerged  beneath  instincts  from  which  God 
has  withdrawn  His  protest ;  and  even  from  the  Heavens 
above  the  destroying  influence  pours  down  to  meet  the 
rising  tide  below.  Nor  is  it  only  in  the  vast  events  of 
History  that  this  mystic  wisdom  is  discernible ;  we  can 
learn  from  the  minutest  details,  as  from  the  grandest  out- 
lines of  the  sacred  record,  some  principle  of  the  divine 
teaching  of  humanity.  When  we  read  in  the  account 
of  the  mysterious  sacrifice  of  Abraham,  "  The  birds  he 
did  not  divide," "  we  may  learn,  if  we  truly  receive  what 
is  there  conveyed  to  us,  the  great  lesson  of  unity  of 
mind,  the  bird  being  an  emblem  of  that  spiritual  prin- 
ciple in  every  man  which  makes  him  one.  The  Hebrew 
writings  take  the  form  of  narrative,  because  that  is  the 
only  form  in  which  the  deepest  truths  can  be  presented ' 
to  man;  but  those  truths  are  not  to  be  conceived  of/ 
under  the  time-relations  of  history  ;  they  are  the  express 
sions,  necessarily  imperfect,  and  to  the  superficial  reader 
misleading,  of  that  which  is  eternal.  It  is  not  that  these 
things  might  not  have  happened — Philo  takes  so  very 
little  interest  in  that  question  that  it  is  not  always  easy  to 
say  which  way  he  answered  it — but  that  wJiich  happened 
is  not  their  meaning  for  iis?  We  have  to  seek  out  that 
meaning  as  ore  in   a  mine,  not  take   it   ready  made  as 

1  Ue  Confessione  Linguarum,  Mangey,  iii.  327: — Tou  ira^T^/iaros  rovio  [i.e., 
permission  to  sin)  6  fxkyas  dpaypacpets  wapa  ti^  vcfiod^rrj  Ka.TaKXvc/j.os  eari. 

2  Quis  Rerum,  &c.,  Mangey,  iv.  100,  102. 

3  Sometimes  he  must  have  regarded  the  narrative  as  literally  false  ;  he  says 
this  definitely  of  the  sacrifice  of  Isaac.  Tdre  yap  Kai  tov  ayairj^Tov  xilbv 
Upiovpyj]ff€i,  ovxj.  dvOpwirov.  ov  yap  TeKvSKrovos  6  co(pbs  (De  Migratione 
Abrahami,  Mangey,  iii.  474).  But  he  says  elsewhere  things  quite  incon- 
sistent with  this,  and  I  suppose  he  never  really  made  up  his  own  mind  on 
the  point. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  255 

coins  from  the  Mint.  We  have,  in  a  certain  sense,  to 
be  fellow-workers  with  the  writer ;  we  hardly  need  less 
mental  activity  to  decipher  than  he  to  compose  his  nar- 
rative. It  is  true  only  to  those  who  can  thus  decipher  it. 
Philo  is  here  the  ancestor  of  an  important  section  of 
the  Church,  lasting  from  its  first  existence  to  our  own 
da3^  Perhaps  none  is  more  fundamentally  hostile  to  the 
spirit  of  Science.  When  the  seeker  after  Truth,  asking, 
"  What  happened  at  a  particular  time  ?  "  or  "  What  was 
meant  by  a  particular  writer  ?  "  is  answered,  "  This  and 
this  is  the  lesson  we  are  meant  to  learn  from  the  words 
you  are  striving  to  interpret,"  he  feels  that  a  serious 
investigation  is  transformed  into  a  game  of  cross-ques- 
tions. Nothing  can  be  more  unsatisfactory,  from  the 
scientific  point  of  view,  than  a  mode  of  exegesis  which 
insists  that  a  seeming  narrative  is  an  actual  sermon  ; 
which  forbids  us  to  compare  dates,  when  the  histor}^  is 
elaborately  chronological ;  which  treats  as  impiety  the 
analysis  of  numbers,  when  our  text  is  full  of  statistics ; 
which  ignores  a  historic  aim  elaborately  insisted  on, 
and  thrusts  in  a  homiletic  aim  nowhere  hinted  at. 
This  view  of  Inspiration  puts  a  moral  premium  on  an 
intellectual  attitude  in  which  the  ignorance  of  fact  is 
deliberately  cultivated.  It  represents,  therefore,  all  that 
the  scientific  mind  abhors.  Nevertheless,  we  shall  not 
understand  history  unless  we  are  prepared  to  make 
a  certain  place  in  our  intellectual  sympathy  for  those 
who  have  cherished  it  in  the  past.  God  speaks 
through  the  deeds  of  men  no  less  than  through  their 
words;  history  is  the  Divine  language.  It  is  indeed 
a  language  hard  to  understand,  easy  to  misinterpret ; 
we  shall  never  discover  in  its  sentences  that  exact  and 
accurate  justice  after  which  human  law  is  continually 
but  vainly  aspiring  ;  we  shall  sometimes  be  forced  to  read 
there  verdicts  which  seem   to  outrage   the  very  concep- 


256  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tion  of  Divine  law.  Yet  still  we  must  recognize  that 
the  purpose  of  Heaven  lies  hid  in  the  events  of  the 
past,  we  may,  here  and  there,  be  enabled  to  discover 
that  purpose.  Perhaps  the  superstitious  reverence  for 
the  letter  of  Scripture  which  we  are  fast  outgrowing 
was  the  withering  husk  to  a  seed  of  truth — the  belief 
that  principles  applicable  to  all  history  are  applicable  to 
one  history  in  a  special  sense.^  As  the  seventh  day 
was  hallowed  to  the  Lord  in  order  that  all  days  might 
be  recognized  as  holy,  so  the  elect  race  was  set  apart 
as  the  ideal  Son  of  God,  in  order  that  all  races  might 
be  recognized  as  actual  sons  of  God.  The  inner  mean- 
ing of  the  Jewish  history  once  deciphered,  a  "  Rosetta 
stone "  was  set  up  for  all  the  hieroglyphics  of  human 
history,  however  remote  from  that  of  Israel.  In  carrying 
out  this  principle,  in  seeking  for  the  symbolism  of  fact, 
Philo  betrays  a  more  than  ordinary  lack  of  the  historic 
sense  ;  it  is  the  characteristic  error  of  the  theologian 
that  he  hurries  on  to  the  principle,  before  making  sure 
of  the  event,  and  blames  carefulness  concerning  accuracy 
of  fact  as  indifference  to  the  principle  which  facts  involve. 
But  this  is  an  error  of  very  different  importance  at  dif- 
ferent periods  in  the  development  of  thought.  In  hurry- 
ing on  to  the  symbolic  meaning  of  a  story  before  deciding 
whether  it  was  true  or  false,  Philo  was  not  opposing  any 
obvious  principle,  as  he  would  have  been  in  a  generation 
familiarized  with  a  long  course  of  historical  investigation 
and  with  the  accuracy  that  is  bred  of  physical  science. 
He  may,  indeed,  have  read  one  or  two  histories  whose 
authors  sought  for  accuracy  as  much  as  do  the  great 
historians  of  our  own  day,  but  that  aim  was  wholly  alien 

1  "  The  history  of  Israel,"  it  was  once  said  to  me,  in  answer  to  a  question 
regarding  the  Divine  mission  of  the  Jewish  race,  "is  the  type  of  an  individual 
history  in  a  sense  that  no  other  history  is.''  I  have  never  known  any  one  who 
more  prized  that  history  than  the  speaker — Thomas  Erskine  of  Linlathen. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  257 

to  the  spirit  of  his  time  on  the  whole.  He  was  not  defy- 
ing, as  his  theological  successors  have  defied,  the  univer- 
sally accepted  tests  of  his  intellectual  world.  In  another 
respect  also  he  may  be  favourably  compared  with  them 
— he  never  set  up  a  date,  or  a  geographical  boundary,  at 
which  inspiration  ceased ;  it  was  the  condition  of  all  direct 
influence  from  God  to  man,  at  all  times.  He  speaks  of 
it  quite  simply  from  his  own  experience.^  Man  under 
this  influence  hears  a  voice  which  is  not  his  own,  and 
feels  that  his  personality  becomes  in  a  special  sense 
what  the  very  word  person  would  seem  to  witness  that  it 
is  always  in  some  sense,  a  channel  through  which  comes 
an  utterance  he  accepts,  but  does  not  originate.  The 
subjective  element  of  inspiration  was  in  his  view  common 
to  humanity.  As  history  was  the  language  of  God,  so 
the  ear  to  hear  it  might  be  opened  in  every  son  of  man. 
The  lesson  appointed  for  that  multitude  of  races 
brought  into  unity  as  subjects  of  the  Roman  Empire 
may  be  described,  on  one  side,  as  the  transformation 
of  the  part  into  the  whole.  Man  as  an  individual  had 
been  a  fragment,  and  was,  in  the  age  we  have  reached, 
discovered  to  be  a  Unity.  But  the  lesson  is  quite  as 
true  in  an  inverted  form  ;  what  the  Jew  at  Alexandria 
had  to  learn  was,  that  human  history  became  intelligible 
when  the  former  Unity  was  treated  as  a  fragment ;  that, 
for  Jew  and  Greek  alike,  love  for  the  nation  led  to  the 
discernment  that  the  nation  was  a  mere  fragment  of 
humanity.  The  antithesis  of  Hellenic  and  Hebrew 
thought  was  felt  as  a  convergence  pointing  to  a  funda- 
mental unity.  From  Judaea  came  that  vision  of  the  Divine 
in  which  the  Human  was  on  one  side  transfigured  with 
its  glory ;  on  the  other,  seen  in  black  shadow  against 
that  daz/Jing  radiance.  On  that  ground  was  no  other 
interest  in  the  history  of  Man  but  his  relation  to  God  ; 
the  creature  and  Creator  stood  face  to  face  ;  this  one  anti- 

1  Dc  Migralione  Abrahanii,  c.  7. 

R 


258  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

thesis  filled  the  world  of  thought.  What  could  be  more 
unlike  Greek  love  of  variety,  Greek  feeling  of  dramatic 
sympathy  with  all  impulse,  and  the  bright,  fearless  irre- 
verence which  marked  the  Greek  attitude  towards  the 
supernatural?  But  an  impartial  inexorable  dominion  over 
each  brought  them  into  relation  with  each  other.  The 
monotonous  receptivity  of  Rome,  attentive,  unsympa- 
thizing,  yet  in  a  certain  sense  respectful,  full  of  recog- 
nition for  all  that  could  make  out  for  itself  the  claim 
of  tradition,  ready  to  give  space  and  legitimacy  to 
everything  that  would  own  Roman  authority  in  the 
political  sphere,  supplied  all  opposites  with  a  plan  of 
mediation.  That  impartial  wide-reaching  Law  came  in 
as  the  harmonizing  element,  beneficent  to  all,  recog- 
nized as  the  power  "  through  whom  we  enjoy  very 
great  quietness,"  ^  felt  as  a  refuge  even  from  the  tyranny 
of  those  who  administered  it,  and  a  protector  even  from 
the  enormities  that  were  perpetrated  in  its  name. 

The  place  of  Rome,  at  that  stage  of  the  world,  would 
be  more  intelligible  to  modern  Christendom  if  it  were 
less  familiar.  Who  could  peruse,  for  the  first  time, 
those  four  accounts  of  the  great  tragedy  of  the  world's 
history  which  we  know  too  well  as  a  narrative  to  un- 
derstand as  a  fact,  without  seeing  that  the  victory  of 
fanaticism  was  the  defeat  of  Rome  ?  "  He  that  delivered 
me  unto  thee  hath  the  greater  sin."  How  expressive  of 
the  influence  of  Roman  law  is  it  that  from  the  moment 
of  hearing  those  words  Pilate  sought  to  release  his 
captive !  He  recognized  his  vocation  at  that  strange 
excuse  for  his  failure  in  fulfilling  it ;  he  felt  that  the 
Roman  governor  was  called  on  to  teach  the  peoples 
committed  to  his  charge  the  common  element  of  Law. 
"  We  have  a  law,  and  by  this  law  he  ought  to  die ; "  he 
was  not  to  ignore  this  Jewish  law,  if  this  particular  Jew 

1  Acts  xxiv.  2.     The  address  is  to  an  individual  Governor,  but  might  have 
been  made  general. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  259 

was  liable  to  its  infliction.  It  was  no  part  of  his  com- 
mission to  revise  the  law  of  the  Jew,  but  where  appeal 
was  made  to  the  law  of  the  Roman,  there  he  was  called 
on  to  give  that  judgment  which  was  applicable  to 
humanity.  He  was  to  take  cognizance  of  all  that  was 
peculiar  in  Law,  but  he  was  never  to  leave  hold  of  what 
was  universal.  When  the  cry  of  the  rabble,  "  If  thou 
let  this  man  go  thou  art  not  Caesar's  friend,"  overcame 
the  loyalty  of  the  Judge,  an  example  was  set  up  for  all 
time  of  that  obliteration  of  the  justice  of  Rome  by  the 
weakness  or  vice  of  Romans,  which  doubtless  was  the 
most  familiar  aspect  of  its  legal  system  to  its  subjects ; 
but  in  that  concession  the  Roman  law  had  no  part  ;  it 
was  defied,  not  distorted.  And  we  see,  in  the  specu- 
lations of  Philo's  contemporary,  Paul,  how  deep  into  the 
heart  of  the  sons  of  Israel  sank  that  new  conception  of 
Law  as  something  universal,  which  it  was  the  mission  of 
Roman  law  to  bring  home  to  the  heart  of  the  nations. 
*'  The  law  was  our  pedagogue  to  bring  us  to  Christ,"  is  no 
more  than  a  statement  of  a  single  aspect  of  that  character 
in  Law  which  Roman  law  most  perfectly  realized  and 
embodied.  It  was  the  Mediator  of  the  Nations ;  and 
whether  or  not  Philo  was  consciously  remembering  it 
when  he  wrote  of  the  Logos,  certainly  it  was  an  actual 
influence  on  his  thoughts. 

None  could  be  better  prepared  for  a  true  apprehension 
of  the  meaning  of  law  than  a  son  of  Israel.  The  deep 
and  passionate  devotion  of  Jews  to  the  oppressive  system 
of  precepts  which  they  had  inherited  from  the  past  per- 
plexed even  the  Romans.  A  people  who  allowed  their 
enem}'  to  prepare  on  the  Sabbath  the  ruin  of  their  city 
unhindered  by  them,  rather  than  violate  the  command 
which  only  on  the  narrowest  literalism  could  seem  to 
prohibit  their  defence  of  their  native  land,^  had  learned 

^  It  is  said  that  the  Jews  allowed  their  city  to  be  taken  by  the  General  of 


26o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

at  least  what  it  was  to  escape  from  the  "  unchartered 
freedom  "  of  individual  desire  into  the  repose  of  obed- 
ience, had  come  to  feel  this  obedience  the  very  object 
of  life.  In  this  strange  fanaticism  for  a  code  to  which 
most  would  think  it  much  to  yield  a  reluctant  obedience, 
they  learned  the  stability,  the  strength,  the  oneness  that 
is  given  a  people  who  keep  a  law — almost  any  law. 
Even  if  it  be  unreasonable  and  fantastic,  it  still  impresses 
on  the  Many  the  unity  of  a  single  ideal ;  and  the  Jew  in 
face  of  the  Roman — suffering  any  torture  rather  than 
violate  the  Mosaic  commands,^  watching  in  passivity  the 
approaches  of  the  hated  invader,  rather  than  clutch  on 
the  Sabbath  the  sword  after  which  his  hands  must 
have  always  yearned — formed  a  magnificent  tribute  to 
the  irresistible  attraction  of  that  which  was  but  the 
casket  and  framework  of  Duty.  As  far  as  we  know, 
this  fanaticism  impressed  the  Roman  with  mere  con- 
tempt ;  and  the  feeling  was  mutual,  except  so  far  as  on 
the  other  side  it  was  diluted  with  fear.  Nevertheless 
the  fanaticism  of  the  Jew  was  a  preparation  for  that 
citizenship  of  Rome  against  which  it  was  also,  in  its 
external  aspect,  the  strongest  barrier.  The  law  was  his 
pedagogue  to  bring  him,  not  only  to  Christ,  but  to  Rome. 

Ptolemy  Soter,  320  B.C.,  rather  than  pollute  its  sanctity  by  any  attempt  at 
self-defence  ;  and  Josepluis  cites  the  reproach  of  a  historian  (hardly  known 
elsewhere),  that  "  they  submitted  to  be  under  a  hard  master  by  reason  of 
their  unseasonable  superstition."  There  is  some  doubt  whether  they  would 
have  resisted  in  any  case,  and  Josephus  is  anxious  to  defend  them  from  the 
imputation  (as  he  seems  to  consider  it)  of  this  rigorous  adherence  to  the  letter 
of  the  law  (see  "Antiquities  of  the  Jews,"  xii.  i.  i).  There  is  no  doubt  as 
to  their  abstinence',  from  action  during  the  siege  under  Pompey,  when  they 
allowed  the  Roman  engineers  to  carry  on  their  siege- works  unmolested  on 
the  Sabbath  [Ibid.,  xiv.  4,  2,  3);  and  Dio  Cassius  (xxxvii.  16)  says  that 
without  this  abstinence  the  Temple  would  never  have  been  taken.  A  century 
earlier,  at  the  outbreak  of  the  Maccabean  revolt,  they  let  themselves  be 
slaughtered  like  sheep  rather  than  draw  the  sword  on  the  sacred  day.  We 
see  from  the  allusions  in  Juvenal  and  Horace  how  much  impression  their 
observance  of  the  day  made  on  the  Romans. 

1  See  Josephus  contra  Apion,  ii.  33.     The  whole  book  is  an  important  testi- 
mony to  the  influence  of  the  Mosaic  legislation. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  261 

Hence  it  was  that  at  this  time  the  sense  of  a  Mediator 
filled  the  world  of  thought.  Philo  finds  in  the  history  of 
Israel  a  continual  type  of  a  Divine  Being,  intermediate 
between  God  and  man,  an  ambassador  to  man  from  God, 
a  suppliant  to  God  from  man,-^  partaking  in  the  character 
of  both,  and  thus  a  bond  between  the  two  extremes  of 
Being.  The  ideal  Israel,  the  ideal  Man,  is  in  truth  such 
a  mediator ;  he  is "  indeed  an  embodiment  and  incarna- 
tion of  Divine  Law.  "  God  our  Saviour  extends  His 
all-healing  medicine  to  His  suppliants  through  the  just 
man."  ^  Man  thus  rises,  by  a  perfect  harmony  with  God's 
will,  into  a  position  above  humanity.  The  just  man  is 
the  ideal  Law.  We  see  here  the  side  on  which  Philo 
approaches  Rome.  "  Abraham  went  as  the  Lord  com- 
manded him,"  he  says,  "  means  the  same  thing  as  when 
it  is  said  by  Philosophers  '  to  follow  Nature.'  .  .  .  The 
words  of  God  are  the  actions  of  the  wise  man,"  and  the 
IVord  of  God  is  the  Law  of  Nature.*  Abraham  was  the 
ideal  Stoic.  The  Jewish  sense  of  a  Mediator  melts  into 
the  Roman  sense  of  Law.  It  is  a  personal  conception 
on  this  side  of  the  barrier,  on  that  an  impersonal ;  but 
essentially  the  two  conceptions  are  one. 

The  significance  of  this  single  Roman  creation  was 
brought  out  by  the  very  barrenness  and  poverty  of 
the  Roman  character.  It  had  no  other  qualifications 
for  its  task  than  legal  impartialit3^  Of  itself  Roman 
feeling''   merely   echoed   and   emphasized   with   its   own 

'  e.g.,  Quis  Rerum  Divinarum  H.Teres,  Mangcy,  iv.  90. 
'  pdfios  aiirbs  Civ,  Kal  d^crfioi  iiypacpos  (De  Abrah.,  last  sentence). 
s  Hid. ,  22.     The  wise  take  God  for  their  teacher  ;  the  less  perfect  take  the 
•wise  man  (Quis  Rerum  Divinarum  H?eres,  5). 
*  De  Mig.  Ab.,  c.  23. 
5  Lucan  (I'harsalia,  i.  52,  3)  seems  to  me  wxll  to  bring  out  true   Roman 

feeling : — 

"Omnibus  hostes 
Reddite  nos  populis,  civile  avertilc  bellum  " — 

"  Make  us  the  foes  of  all,  so  wc  be  one." 


262  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

hardness  the  exclusiveness  of  Greece.  It  was  avowedly 
second  hand  ;  it  judged  everything  by  a  Greek  standard  ; 
it  met  the  deep  spiritual  intuition  of  the  Jew  with  the 
protest  of  Greek  ideahsm,  intensified  by  its  own  super- 
stition, and  narrowed  by  its  own  hardness.  There  was 
no  touch  of  original  genius  in  the  Roman  ;  his  work  was 
to  organize,  to  arrange,  to  combine — never  to  create. 
The  Roman  poet  sings  no  heroic  deeds,  warms  into  life 
no  dim  legend,  creates  no  character,  bids  no  memory 
glow  with  the  brilliancy  of  dramatic  power.  His  theme 
is  the  Nature  of  Things  ;  his  genius  is  devoted  to  the 
subject  least  stimulating  to  genius  of  any  that  has  ever 
been  set  to  the  music  of  noble  verse.  Yet  the  result 
is  imperishable,  because  here  the  positive  genius  of 
Rome  finds  its  true  work,  the  lawgiver  of  the  nations 
interprets  the  law  of  the  universe.  No  matter  that  its 
interpretation  is  childish  if  we  look  at  it  in  the  light 
of  full  scientific  development ;  its  errors  are  only  in  detail, 
the  spirit  of  law  is  there. 

The  spirit  of  reverence  for  things  that  are  was  deeper 
than  the  deadly  hatred  that  separated  Rome  and  Judaea. 
That  spirit  was,  in  truth,  akin  to  the  deep  religious 
genius  which  those  who  felt  it  could  not  comprehend. 
It  prepared  the  way  for  a  reverence  of  the  Divine  Law- 
giver, and  for  all  the  moral  influence  which  invaded  the 
world  with  the  Jewish  belief  in  a  Divine  Law.  But  the 
whole  tendency  of  the  classic  world  was  towards  the 
impersonal  character  of  Law.  Although  the  lawgiver 
formed  an  imposing  figure  in  the  legendary  history  both 
of  Greece  and  Rome,  the  deeper  feeling  of  the  ancient 
world  towards  Law  outside  of  Palestine  is  expressed  in 
the  line  of  Sophocles — • 

"  None  knoweth  the  "fountain  of  Eternal  Law." 
"Within  the  Hebrew  horizon  this  was  exactly  the  know- 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  263 

ledge  which  belonged  of  right  to  every  true  Son  of  Man. 
It  is  the  change  from  the  idea  of  Law  to  that  of  a 
Lawgiver  which  constitutes  the  transition  from  Rome 
to  Judaea.  All  Law  was  for  the  Jew  the  Will  of  a  Holy 
God ;  and  the  Holy  Man  was  this  Law  set  forth  in 
action  and  endurance.  For  Divine  Will  lay  at  the  root 
of  all  being ;  it  was  a  Divine  command  which  had  called 
into  existence  all  that  meets  eye  and  ear  and  touch,  and 
by  a  Divine  decision,  therefore,  every  change  in  their 
order  must  be  regulated.  The  object  of  worship  to 
the  Jew  was  not  a  Zeus,  son  of  Time,  not  a  vague 
principle  of  oneness  to  which  the  word  He  should 
be  inapplicable,  but  the  Maker  of  Heaven  and  Earth, 
and  all  that  in  them  is.  God  was  the  Creator.  He 
who  made  Man,  and  made  all  that  surrounds  him,  was 
able  to  enter  into  relations  with  the  being  that  His 
hands  had  fashioned ;  He  who  had  created  could  also 
guide  and  judge. 

Deeply  penetrating,  widely  reaching,  was  the  influence 
that  poured  upon  the  world  through  this  Hebrew  belief 
in  Creation.  We  may  to  some  extent  measure  the 
positive  effect  of  this  belief  by  the  extent  of  change  in 
the  moral  aspect  of  the  world  taking  place  at  its  eclipse. 
We  see  before  our  eyes.  In  our  own  day,  the  converse 
of  that  great  moral  revolution  which  came  upon  the 
world  when  the  Greek  learned  from  the  Jew  to  believe 
in  a  Creator.  Centuries  must  pass  before  the  inherited 
influence  of  that  belief  can  wear  out  in  the  hearts  of  men  ; 
but  already  we  may  discern  that  the  intellectual  abandon- 
ment of  a  conviction  rooted  in  the  moral  structure  of  our 
race,  tells  to  some  extent  on  all  debatable  moral  ground. 
But  modern  Europe  has  been  moulded  by  a  long  inheri- 
tance of  belief  in  Divine  Will  :  it  cannot,  when  it  throws 
off  that  belief,  return  to  the  position  of  those  to  whom  the 
conception  of  a  personal  Creator  was  unknown.     The  Will 


264  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  God — familiar  as  the  words  are  to  us — is  a  concep- 
tion wholly  wanting  to  classic  antiquity.  There  was  will 
enough  in  the  superhuman  beings  who  hovered  above 
the  world  of  mortal  effort  with  benign  or  hostile  influence, 
but  it  was  not  the  source  of  Destiny,  only  an  eddy  on  its 
stream ;  it  brought  the  mind  into  no  contact  with  Origin, 
Human  Will  takes  a  new  meaning  when  men  believe  in 
Divine  Will ;  when  it  is  recognized  that  all  that  we  see 
and  touch  takes  its  source  in  the  decision  of  a  Divine 
Mind,  it  loses  much  of  that  meaning  with  the  belief.  Man 
is  for  ever  being  made  in  the  image  of  God,  and  the 
generation  which  regards  the  Divine  Being  rather  as  a 
spectator  or  a  product  than  as  author  and  director  of 
the  development  of  the  Universe,  cannot  regard  it  as 
the  business  of  Man  to  control  and  shape  the  world  of 
humanity ;  a  strong  impulse  becomes  a  command  Man 
dare  not  disobey ;  an  indication  of  general  tendency 
claims  all  the  loyalty,  all  the  resignation,  that  was  for- 
merl}^  given  to  an  expression  of  Divine  purpose.  The 
fatalism  which  has  in  our  time  invaded  the  world  of 
politics  in  a  conspicuous  form  is  latent  everywhere, 
and  forces  on  the  attention  of  all  who  look  below  the 
surface  of  life  the  lesson  that  all  Man's  endeavours  are 
affected  by  his  belief  or  disbelief  of  the  world  in  which 
he  finds  himself  being  the  work  of  God. 

When  the  Jew  first  taught  the  world  this  belief,  its 
influence  was  seen  more  clearly  than  it  ever  could  be 
seen  again.  However  certain  it  may  appear  to  the 
logical  intellect  that  that  w^hich  is  meant  by  virtue  can 
have  no  place  in  the  Divine  nature,  some  instinct  deeper 
than  logic  craves  and  discovers  a  Divine  t3'pe  of  all 
human  excellence ;  and  all  that  Man  seeks  to  be,  he 
must  see  in  God,  as  long  as  he  sees  God  at  all. 

We  may  say,  with  not  more  exaggeration  than  on 
such  a  subject  we  need  for  distinctness,  that  human  will 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  265 

•was  first  conceived  of  with  fulness  of  meaning  when 
Divine  will  first  shone  upon  the  world  in  that  belief. 
The  conception  of  a  Divine  Creator  gave  the  active 
powers  of  humanity  a  new  glory,  and  also  a  new  respon- 
sibility. The  shadow  of  scorn  passed  from  industry  ;  the 
toil  of  the  slave  gained  a  Divine  type.  This  shadow  had 
never  reached  the  soil  of  Judaea.  "  My  Father  worketh 
hitherto,  and  I  work,"  said  a  Jew  contemporary  with 
Philo,  and  the  words  gather  up  the  life  of  Israel. 
Labour,  Philo  tells  us  more  than  once,  is  the  root  of 
every  other  excellence.^  That  scorn  for  toil  which  is 
bred  of  slaverj'-  never  could  utterly  pervert  a  son  of 
Israel.  The  corrupt  Roman  might  scoff"  at  his  reverence 
for  the  Sabbath  as  a  varnish  of  superstition  over  sloth," 
but  the  truth  was,  that  to  revere  the  Sabbath  was  to 
revere  labour.  No  one  can  find  rest  who  avoids  toil. 
"  Six  days  shalt  thou  labour,  and  do  all  that  thou  hast 
to  do,"  is  a  part  of  the  command  that  bade  the  Jew  do 
no  manner  of  work  on  the  seventh  day.  If  observance 
of  that  law  was  exaggerated  into  superstition  when  the 
Jew  watched,  in  his  Sabbatic  repose,  the  advance  of  the 
Roman  siege-works  rather  than  draw  his  sword  on  the 
day  of  rest,  what  stored-up  force  of  patience  and  will  is 
not  expressed  in  that  act  of  obedience  !  And  who  can 
doubt  that  the  energy  for  toil  as  much  as  for  combat  was 
reinforced  by  that  rhythmic  abstinence  ?  Philo  only 
translated  the  law  of  the  Sabbath  into  the  language 
of  ethics  when  he  declared  that  "  labour  was  the  root 
of  every  other  excellence."  He  brought  the  wisdom  of 
the  Jew  into  a  form  in  which  it  could  be  intelligible  to 
the  Greek.      It  never  would  be  acceptable  to  the  Greek. 

'  nrd-vra  oCv  op^i  to.  dyaOa  ^k  irbvov  KaOdirtp  iK  /itS?  ^ffijx  (KTre(pvKbTa. 
Dc  Sac.  Ahelis  et  Caini,  see  also  De  I'osterilatc  Caini,  46.  I'hilo's  feeling  for 
the  Sabbath  is  vividly  expressed  in  the  treatise  "  Dc  Mundi  Opificis." 

-  Juvenal,  Sat.,  xiv.  105. 


266  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  city  life,  so  dear  to  his  heart,  was  inextricably 
entangled  with  slavery,  and  slavery  out  of  Judaea  made 
the  command,  "  Six  days  shalt  thou  labour,"  unnecessary 
and  hateful.  But  a  race  which  looked  around  on  the 
earth  and  sky,  and  felt  at  every  throb  of  joyous  life 
that  God  was  the  maker  of  man,  could  never  put  hand 
to  the  plough  or  spade  without  some  dim  sense  of 
partnership  in  the  Divine  work.  Labour  was  Divine, 
and  therefore  it  was  in  the  deepest  sense  of  the  word 
truly  human. 

Then,  too,  on  the  other  side,  this  importance  given 
to  the  conception  of  Human  Will  came  in  to  solve  the 
very  problem  which  the  conception  of  Divine  Will  had 
evolved.  If  God  made  the  world,  why  is  it  full  of  evil  ? 
It  can  be  only  because  Man  has  re-made  it.  God  saw 
it,  and  it  was  very  good.  Man  must  have  refused  the 
position  of  a  creature  and  chosen  to  be  an  independent 
Creator.  This  is  not  so  much  the  doctrine  of  the  Jew 
as  that  which  the  Gentile  learnt  from  the  fusion  of  their 
several  creeds.  We  indeed  find  it  in  our  Bible,  but  we 
might  take  it  away  and  leave  no  hiatus  ;  in  many  re- 
spects the  Book  of  Genesis  would  be  more  coherent  if  we 
could  withdraw  from  it  that  account  "  of  Man's  first  dis- 
obedience," which  we  too  much  remember  in  its  extended 
form  on  the  page  of  Milton  when  we  read  it  on  that 
which  has  been  attributed  to  Moses.  To  the  question, 
as  it  presents  itself  to  a  logical  mind — "  Being  the  work 
of  God,  why  is  man  no  better  that  he  is  ?  "  the  Hebrew 
has  no  answer.  He  does  not  really  attempt  to  answer 
it.  He  finds  that  the  consciousness  of  this  relation  of 
Creature  and  Creator  sets  right  all  the  difficulty  he 
needs  to  have  solved ;  that  so  far  as  Man  remembers 
himself  to  be  the  work  of  God,  so  far  as  he  refrains 
from  seeking  to  make  a  God  which  shall  be  his  work, 
these  difficulties  vanish  away,  and  that  is  enough  for  him. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  267 

To  the  Jewish  mind  the  only  evil  was  Sin.  And  Sin 
is  schism — the  cutting  off  the  member  from  the  organism, 
the  substitution  of  the  Many  for  the  One.  So  far  all  are 
agreed  who  believe  in  anything  that  may  be  called  sin  ; 
the  only  difference  is  as  to  that  Oneness  which  claims 
man's  loyalty.  Is  it  the  nation,  the  family,  the  caste,  or 
is  it  a  still  deeper  Unity,  which  includes  all  other,  and 
which  man  knows  as  God  ?  Between  this  Unity  and 
that  which  each  man  means  when  he  says  I,  there  is  a 
profound  and  hidden  connection.  The  Indian  creed,  we 
have  seen,  confused  the  two  ;  the  division  line  between 
the  human  and  the  Divine  was  indistinct.  The  Indian 
name  of  the  Divine  is  the  Self  It  is  a  wonderful  illus- 
tration of  the  nearness  of  opposites  that  in  Hebrew 
thought  the  name  for  that  which  hides  the  Divine  is 
the  Self^  That  which  to  the  Indian  reveals  God 
conceals  Him  from  the  Jew  ;  the  telescope  hinders 
vision  when  it  is  not  needed.  God  was  so  close  to 
the  human  soul  that  the  Self  was  a  veil  between  it 
and  Him.  "  If  any  yearning  come  upon  thee,  O  soul, 
to  inherit  the  Divine  possessions,  quit  not  only  thy 
country — that  is,  the  body — thy  kindred — that  is,  sense 
— and  thy  father's  house — that  is,  speech  "  (all  of  which 
are  symbolized  in  the  migration  of  Abraham),  "  but  put 
off  thyself,  and  depart  out  of  thyself" ""'  It  is  the  Indian 
feeling,  renewed  and  revivified  by  a  sense  of  that  dis- 
tinctness of  God  and  Man,  which  comes  with  the  develop- 
ment of  the  life  of  the   Conscience   and   the  belief  in 

1  Philo  says  that  it  is  only  in  remembering  the  nothingness  of  self  that  we 
can  remember  the  greatness  of  God.  It  seems  to  me  that  he  would  have  ex- 
pressed his  meaning  better  if  he  had  said  it  is  only  m  forgetting,  &c.  Surely 
to  remember  the  nothingness  of  anything  is  to  forget  it.  De  Sac.  Ab.  et  Caini, 
Mangey,  ii.  96-98. 

2  Quis  Rcrum  Divinarum  I  Lxres,  Mangey's  Philo,  iv.  32  : — ffeavrriv  airLopaOi, 
KoX  ^KffTrjOi  aeavTTJs  KaOdirep  oi  KopyfiavTiQiirres,  &c.  Perhaps  in  these  words 
I'hilo  was  remembering  the  last  words  of  Socrates  in  the  "  Crito,"  quoted 
above,  p.  196. 


268  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

creation.  God  is  the  only  true  Being ;  the  Creature  is 
for  ever  distinguished  from  the  Creator,  the  Being  whose 
centre  hes  within  from  the  Being  whose  centre  lies 
without.  Self  for  the  Jew  was  that  independent  claim, 
that  rejection  of  the  attitude  of  a  creature,  in  which 
the  Creator  becomes  invisible.  The  lesson  of  the  Jew 
is  blurred  for  Christian  ears  by  extreme  familiarity,  and 
perhaps  it  may  come  home  to  us  more  forcibly  from 
Alexandria  than  from  Jerusalem.  We  have  become 
accustomed  to  the  ideal  of  Self-denial  in  the  withered 
form  which  any  ideal  must  take  that  is  adopted  con- 
ventionally as  part  of  a  creed ;  we  have  lost  the  full 
import  of  those  words,  "  If  any  man  will  come  after 
me,  let  him  deny  himself"  It  is  not,  "  This  and  that 
pleasant  thing  must  be  put  away  ;  "  it  is,  "  The  self- 
assertion  of  the  Creature  is  the  denial  of  the  Creator." 
Man  is  the  work  of  God  ;  his  whole  vocation  lies  in  the 
understanding  of  this  relation  to  his  Creator ;  he  stands 
face  to  face  with  a  great  Unity,  before  which  no  pro- 
portionate recognition  of  the  Self  is  possible  ;  its  impe- 
rious claim  must  be  met  by  a  denial  before  it  can  enter 
into  that  which  is  its  true  and  abiding  life.  Here  is 
the  eternal  paradox,  insoluble  to  logic,  incontrovertible 
to  every  soul  that  has  felt  its  import.  Man  cannot 
discern  God  till  he  has  denied  Self;  but  it  will  be 
found,  also,  in  the  deepest  sense,  that  he  cannot  discern 
Self  till  he  has  acknowledged  God.  For  none  can  know 
an3'thing  till  he  knows  something  else ;  and  we  first 
know  the  Self  when  we  know  that  which  is  to  every 
man  the  eternal  Other  of  the  human  soul. 

It  is  just  because  Man  and  God,  in  the  Jewish  con- 
ception, stand  opposite  to  each  other  as  Creature  and 
Creator  (instead  of  both  being  equally  creatures  in  one 
sense,  and  both  equally  creators  in  another),  that  the 
Jew  felt  himself  near  God   in  a  sense  the  Greek  never 


I 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  269 

could  share.  "  Thou  wilt  have  a  desire  io  the  work  of 
thine  own  hands"  That  confidence  breathes  through 
every  line  of  the  Jewish  Scriptures,  and  its  reflection  on 
the  page  of  Philo  is  much  stronger  than  any  ray  from 
Greek  wisdom  which  reaches  his  broad  mirror.  ''We 
have  the  uncreated,  the  eternal  Father,  who  hears  the 
silent  and  sees  the  hidden"  he  makes  Joseph  say  to 
his  brethren  when  reassuring  them  after  their  father's 
death  ;  and  this  sense  of  tJie  Father  can  never,  to  the 
Jewish  mind,  be  swallowed  up  in  the  idea  of  the  King. 
God  is  more  awful  than  the  most  awful  earthly  monarch, 
but  no  earthly  monarch  would  permit  that  boldness  of 
remonstrance  which  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  give  as  the 
utterance  of  His  trusted  servant.  No  parts  of  the  Old 
Testament  seem  to  have  laid  more  hold  on  Philo's 
imagination  than  those  which  record  the  appeals  of 
Abraham  and  of  Moses  to  a  Divine  Righteousness 
with  which  Divine  appointment  appeared  inconsistent. 
"  Shall  not  the  judge  of  all  the  earth  do  right  ?  "  seems 
to  gather  up  for  him  the  fearless  confidence  which 
mingled  with  boundless  awe  of  the  Creator.-^  Philo,  the 
ambassador  to  Caligula,  vividly  realized  the  contrast 
between  that  bond  which  united  the  Jew  to  his  unseen 
Lord  and  that  which  kept  a  nation  of  slaves  trembling 
at  the  foot  of  their  tyrant.  The  son  of  Israel  was  more 
akin  to  the  unseen  Unity,  could  use  a  greater  freedom 
in  that  intercourse,  than  the  Roman  with  the  Emperor  of 
Rome.  Philo  seems  to  return  to  this  sense  of  confidence 
and  boldness  with  a  sort  of  relief,  feeling  vividly  that 
the  earthly  Lord  was  not  in  any  sense  the  image  of 
the  heavenly  Lord  ;  that  the  least  inadequate  type  of 
His   absolute  dominion  was   the   Fatherly  dominion,   in 

^  ravra  yap  {i.e.,  the  complaints  of  Moses,  as  Numb.  xi.  ir,  Exod.  v.  22, 
&c. )  .  .  .  Idcicref  hv  Tis  Kal  wpbs  iva  tCjv  iv  iiipn  ^acnXtuf  uirdy  (Quis 
Rerum  Divinarum  Hatres,  Mangcy's  I'liilo,  iv.  11). 


270  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

which,   at  its   best,   dominion  was   less    prominent   than 
love. 

All  such  types  were  inadequate ;  the  relation  between 
Creator  and  Creature  was  one  too  deep,  too  intimate,  to 
be  fully  expressed  even  by  this  close  bond ;  all  that  was 
most  organic  in  human  relation  was  but  its  shadow. 
The  well-known  words  of  Andromache  to  Hector  seem 
to  haunt  him  as  its  least  inadequate  expression.  The 
wise  man  finds  this  world  an  exile,  but  he  may  say, 
"  Lord,  Thou  art  to  me  fatherland,  kindred,  and  paternal 
hearth."  ^  And,  indeed,  the  relation  of  sex  lies  very 
near  all  his  views  of  the  relation  of  God  and  man. 
The  distinction  of  the  passive  and  the  active,  suggested 
by  the  two  halves  of  humanity,  is  ideally  complete  in  the 
relation  of  humanity  to  That  which  lies  above  it.  Israel 
was  the  spouse  of  the  Lord  ;  the  ideal  Humanity  needed 
the  Divine  for  its  counterpart,  as  a  bride  her  bridegroom. 
And  thus  the  religion  of  the  Jew  held  in  germ  all  that 
elevation  of  woman  which  is  most  characteristic  of  modern, 
and  most  unlike  classic  thought.  The  race  which 
realized  the  true  oneness  between  God  and  man,  realized 
for  the  first  time  the  true  oneness  between  man  and 
woman.  Modern  scholarship  indeed  looks  with  scorn 
on  the  view  which  sees  a  hidden  allegory  in  the  little 
love-poem  included  in  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  ;  but  this 
mystic  interpretation  is  no  more  than  a  refraction, 
through  the  mists  of  an  exclusive  worship,  of  that  deep 
sense  of  the  infinite  in  human  passion,  which,  though 
it  be  constantly  the  rival  of  all  sense  of  the  Divine,  is 
yet  intimately  akin  to  a  sense  of  the  antithesis  of  the 
Divine  and  human.  The  Song  of  Solomon  may  bear 
witness  to  its  intelligent  readers  far  more  distinctly 
than  to  those  who  put  an  unreal  meaning  into  every 

^  Quis  Reram  Divinarum  Hseres,    Man  gey 's   Philo,   iv.    p.    14  : — av  not, 
SiairoTa,  i)  Trarpls,  &c. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  271 

word,  that  the  feeling  which  prostrates  man  before  God 
has  a  deep  and  hidden  connection  with  that  in  which 
man  and  woman  find,  each  in  each,  the  completion  and 
explanation  of  their  being.  The  tenderest  love  known 
to  human  beings  takes  a  fresh  dimension  when  it  is 
felt  as  an  illustration  and  type  of  the  Faith  in  that 
which  engulfs  and  overshadows  them — beyond,  beneath, 
above,  in  every  way  transcending  human  vision  and 
explaining  it. 

Humanity  becomes  a  different  thing  when  it  is  thus 
regarded  as  the  spouse  of  the  Divine.  The  fierce 
Hebrew  was  the  first  to  recognize  Humility  as  the 
characteristic  human  attitude ;  it  was  impossible  for  him 
ever  to  forget  that  Presence  in  face  of  which  no  other 
attitude  seemed  tolerable  to  him.  "  The  meek  shall  in- 
herit the  earth  "  is  (we  often  forget)  a  quotation  from  a 
psalm.  If  Greek  dread  of  arrogance,  Greek  reverence 
for  proportion,  has  left  us  many  expressions  outwardly 
resembling  that  text,  the  resemblance  is  merely  outward. 
The  envy  of  the  Gods  is  widely  remote  from  that  Divine 
jealousy  which  guards  the  command,  "  Thou  shalt  not 
make  to  thyself  any  graven  image ; "  they  have  almost 
nothing  in  common.  Greek  religion  grew  out  of  the 
self-assertion  of  Man ;  it  knew  nothing  of  the  antithesis 
of  Creator  and  Creature.  God  and  Man  to  the  Greek 
were  not  even  contrasted  as  the  perfect  and  imperfect,  for 
Olympus  repeats  and  exaggerates  all  the  sins  of  earth. 
A  God  was  merely  an  intensified,  not  a  purified  Man. 
This,  at  least,  was  true  of  the  characteristically  Greek 
element  in  Greek  religion  ;  and  if  by  its  side  was  what 
we  may,  in  contrast  with  it,  call  a  Jewish  element — if  the 
religion  of  the  Mysteries  ^  held  the  seed  of  a  conception 

J  See,  for  this  affinity  to  tlic  Mysteries,  De  Gi^'antibus,  12.  Mwucr^s  .  .  . 
(h  rbv  yu6<pov,  tov  auor)  x^pov  da^Xduv,  ,  .  .  ylvcrai  ov  fJL6vov  /iuoTTjj  dXXa 
Kal  Upo(f)6.VTi\%  dpylwv. 


272  THE  MORAL  IDEAL, 

of  the  Divine  less  remote  from   Hebrew  awe — yet  still, 
on  the  whole,  the  Hebrew  ideal  was  altogether  opposite 
to  one  which   in  all  its  most  vivid   manifestations  was 
a  glorification  of  humanity — humanity  with  all  its  con- 
trasts, all  its  diversities,  all  its  sins.      "  The  nothingness 
of  the   Creature "  is  an  idea  inconceivable  to  a  Greek. 
Man  was  himself  a  Creator.      All   that  most  interested 
the  Greek  mind  was  created   by  man.      The  very  name 
oi  poet,  signifying  creator,  has  passed  into  our  language, 
indicating    that   which    we    feel    the    immortal    work    of 
the  most  exalted   human  intellect ;   and  while  attention 
is  concentrated  on  the  poet  and  the  artist,  the  contrast 
of  Creator  and  Creature  grows  dim.      And  then,  too — 
for  the  Greek  God  was   in   some  sense  a  creature — the 
Divine  beings  had  their  genealogy,  their  parentage  ;  there 
had  been  a  time  when  they  were  not.      All  the  vicissitude 
that  made  a  human   being  interesting  applied  to  Zeus  ; 
there  was  nothing  in  him   to  oppose  the  idea  of  a  Self. 
But    to    the    Hebrew   the    property   of   God   was    to   go 
out  of  Self.      He  was  the  giver  of  Existence.      He,  the 
absolute    Being,    sought    always    to    bestow    that    which 
could  be  given  of  true  Being.      He  calls  into  existence 
the  things  that   are   not.      He   is   known   to   Man  as  a 
perpetual  Becoming ;   Nature  is  a  ceaseless  stream  from 
the  "  I  am."      The  idea  of  Self  is  wholly  alien  from  such 
a  Being  ;  he  is   known   in   the  action  which,  if  we  are 
to  describe  it  in   the  language  of  human  analogy,  is  a 
perpetual  quitting  of  Self      God  has  thus  for  ever  set 
the  pattern  for  Man.     He  denies  Himself  in  a  mysterious 
but   deeply  important  sense  when   He  bids  this  varied 
Creation  arise  in  which   Man  may  find   objects  of  wor- 
ship  and  forget   the  Creator ;    and    the    claim    on    Man, 
"Go    thou  and  do   likewise,"    is   enforced   by   His  ex- 
ample no  less   than   by   His  authority.       The  Creation 
is  in  a  certain   sense  an  act  of  Self-denial  in  God ;   His 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  373 

Creature  is  called  on  to  copy  when  he  seeks  to  obey  his 
Maker. 

For  that  which   divides  man   from   God   divides   man 
also   from   man.      Self  is    the    separating,    the   isolating 
influence ;   we   must   deny  ourselves  to   become  one  with 
our   kind   no   less    than   with    our   Creator.      The   word 
gathers  up  the  whole  problem   of  Morality ;   it  seems  at 
times  the  most  positive  reality  in   the  world,  at   times  a 
mere  negation.     How  vivid   is   the   sympathy,  how  pro- 
found the  compassion,  how  active  the  benevolence,  which 
has   to   confess   itself  overmastered   by  this   tremendous 
gravitation  !    Only  some  centrifugal  influence  can  measure 
that  central  pull ;   only  he  who  best  loves  his  neighbours 
knows  that  he  does  not  love  them  as  himself.     Yet  there 
are  points  of  view  from  which   this   intense  reality — the 
most  real  thing  in   the  experience  of  many — is  seen  as 
a  mere  limit.      All  physical  experience   brings   us   back 
to  this  limit ;   but  the  impulses  which  quicken  and  elevate 
our  being  reveal  to  us  that  Self  is  only  an  aspect  of  our 
life ;   we  are  members  one  of  another ;   we  have  not  to 
bring  about   that   membership.      In    all    those  moments 
which    reveal    to    us   our   true    being   we    feel    that    the 
We   is    a    reality   as    much    as    the   /,    in    some    sense 
as   much   deeper  as  it  is  a  wider  reality,  and   at   such 
moments  we  are  aware  that  we  touch  on  the  solution  of 
all  morality,  that  we  need  no  more,  in   order  to  satisfy 
the  utmost  claim  of  Duty,  than  to  understand  the  sense 
in    which    the    We   swallows    up    the  /.      The    Hebrew 
reached  this  solution   in   his  vision  of  an  /  which  is  the 
ground  and  basis  of  all   that  we  shadow  forth  when  we 
say  We — a   Unity  which   is   the  measure  of  our  multi- 
plicity, an  absolute  Being  from  whom  our  derived  Being 
takes    all    its    meaning.      He    is    One    in    the    sense   in 
which   there  is  no  other  One,  and   in   sharing  his  one- 
ness we  arc   united  with   each   other.      Self — the  limit, 

S 


274  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  separating  influence — is  that  which  divides  us  from 
Man  as  well  as  from  God. 

It  is  first  on  the  page  of  Philo  that  we  come  upon  the 
idea  of  Selfishness.  We  search  in  vain  through  all  the 
ethical  wealth  of  Greece  for  any  germ  of  belief  which 
could  develop  into  such  a  sentiment ;  we  should  have 
vainl3^  endeavoured,  probably,  to  make  the  feeling  which 
condemns  it  intelligible  to  the  thinkers  who  have  made 
the  Greek  tongue  a  casket  of  imperishable  moral  trea- 
sures. The  very  word  by  which  Philo  describes  it  is 
almost  unknown  to  classical  Greek.^  Self-love  would 
be  to  the  Hellenic  imagination  a  mere  accompaniment 
of  consciousness,  or,  so  far  as  it  partook  of  any  moral 
quality  at  all,  it  would  be  an  element  in  virtue.  "  Know 
thyself,"  is  the  watchword  of  Hellenic  wisdom,  as  "  Deny 
thyself"  is  of  Hebrew  faith  ;  the  goal  of  thought  for  the 
Greek  was  for  the  Jew  a  point  of  departure.  All  that 
affiliates  itself  with  Greek  teaching  enforces  reverence 
for  the  Self;  only  the  Jew  discerned  the  peril  that  lay 
close  to  the  prize,  and  reminded  himself,  and  all  whom 
his  voice  could  reach,  that  "  Man  should  not  regard  the 
world  as  an  appendage  to  himself,  but  himself  as  an 
appendage  to  the  world." "  In  that  strangely  temperate 
injunction  we  have  the  note  of  a  new  morality.  It 
breathes  a  spirit  which  apart  from  Judaism  belongs  wholly 
to  the  modern  world.  Selfishness  is  a  word  of  yester- 
day. When  first  the  thought  dawned  upon  the  world 
it  was  expressed  by  the  same  word  which  it  bears  on 

1  It  is  characteristic  of  Plutarch's  latent  sympathy  with  the  vein  of  thought 
we  have  been  tracing  that  we  find  tpiXavria  also  in  his  writings.  The  passage 
in  which  Plato  comes  nearest  the  idea  is  in  the  Leges,  731,  732,  to  5^  tikriddq.  'ye 
TrdvTCov  afiapTTjiiaTuu  Sto.  Ti]v  crcpo^pa  eavrov  (piXlav  airiov  e/cdcrry  yLyverai 
eKaaroTe.  Any  one  who  studies  the  awkward  involved  passage  of  which  this 
is  the  kernel,  and  compares  it  with  that  given  in  the  text,  will  see  clearly  how 
Plato  was  groping  after  a  new  idea,  while  Philo  was  expressing  one  which  he 
held  in  common  with  the  modern  world. 

2  Quod  Deus  Sit  Immut.,  4. 


THE  JEW  AT  ALEXANDRIA.  275 

the  page  of  Philo ;  ^  our  Saxon  compound  belongs  to 
Protestant  England.  Its  need  was  felt  with  that  post- 
Reformation  morality  which  corresponded  to  the  right  of 
private  judgment  and  justification  by  Faith.  It  expresses 
the  moral  dangers  incident  to  the  complete  development 
of  modern  individuality ;  it  lay  beyond  all  the  abundant 
wealth  of  Shakespearian  thought ;  the  word  does  not 
occur  on  his  page.  When  he  comes  nearest  it,  he  sees 
it  as  Anibitio7t;  if  we  seek  for  a  Shakespearian  parallel 
to  the  warning  of  Philo,  we  may  find  it  best  in  the  warn- 
ing of  Wolse^'  to  Cromwell.  The  Jew  devoid  of  genius 
saw  farther  into  the  moral  world  in  the  dawn  of  modern 
thought  than  did  in  its  full  noon  the  greatest  genius  that 
England  has  ever  produced.  The  Hebrew  vision  of  God 
threw  a  gleam  on  the  whole  history  of  Man,  and  lit  up 
its  moral  development  with  a  meaning  which  was  bor- 
rowed from  a  higher  sphere. 

It  is  the  rise  into  a  dimension  above  morality  which 
has  made  the  Jew  the  moral  lawgiver  of  our  race.  The 
most  exclusive,  the  most  un-Catholic  of  nations  has 
given  modern  life  not  only  its  belief  but  its  moral 
standard.  The  influence  is  visible  in  those  to  whom 
it  is  most  obnoxious ;  to  this  day  the  dialect  of  men 
who  deem  it  an  obsolete  error  to  connect  humanity 
with  aught  beyond  itself  is  stamped  indelibly  with 
the  ideas  and  beliefs  of  those  who  felt  all  its  value 
to  lie  in  such  a  connection  ;  the  protest  against  Scrip- 
tural teaching,  which  is  the  form  in  which  many  in 
our    day    know    most    of    the    Scriptures,    records    their 

1  The  oldest  author  who  used  this  rare  English  word  seems  to  be  Ilolinshed, 
in  his  account  of  the  reign  of  Henry  II.,  published  1577: — "  Here  we  see  I'hil- 
autie,  or  Self-love,  which  rageth  in  men  so  prcposlcrouslic  "  (mark  the  appro- 
priateness of  this  adverb,  which  puis  last  thai  which  should  be  first)  "that 
even  naturall  affection  and  dutie  [are]  quite  forgotten."  It  was  used  as  late  as 
1648  by  the  kcv.  Joseph  I'eaumont,  Professor  of  Divinity  at  Cambridge,  in  his 
"  Psyche,"  an  allegorical  religious  poem  published  in  that  year,  some  parts  of 
which  may  have  given  suggestions  to  Milton  for  his  "  Paradise  Regained." 


276  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

influence  in  inverted  outlines,  ready  to  be  restored  to 
their  original  form  when  mirrored  in  a  sympathetic 
mind.  Hebrew  thought  has  given  its  bias  to  all  moral 
speculation,  not  because  the  Hebrew  mind  was  itself 
specially  interested  in  moral  questions,  but  because  it 
sprang  at  its  initial  movement  to  a  point  above  them, 
and  came  upon  them  from  a  higher  view.  And  for  ever 
afterwards  Man  is  reminded,  in  all  speculations  on  his 
destiny  and  character,  how  imperfect  is  that  attention 
that  sets  up  limits  around  its  object,  and  in  how  deep 
a  sense  "  the  half  exceeds  the  whole."  The  Jew  bears 
witness  to  the  human  race  that  Man  is  but  the  half  of 
that  which  Humanity  implies  and  involves ;  and  that 
unless  we  look  beyond  the  boundaries  of  its  history 
and  the  limits  of  its  nature  we  shall  find  its  deepest 
problems  unintelligible. 


CHAPTER  VII. 
THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL. 

Those  thinkers  who  have  imagined  themselves  to  sim- 
phfy  the  problems  of  life  by  explaining  Virtue  as  a  means 
of  Pleasure,  have  surely  too  readily  taken  for  granted 
that  people  are  any  more  agreed  as  to  what  Pleasure  is 
than  they  are  as  to  what  Virtue  is.  If  you  mean  by 
pleasure  Ihe  end  of  pain,  you  do  indeed  point  out  by  the 
word  a  goal  of  common  human  desire,  indeed  the  goal 
of  common  sentient  desire ;  but  if  you  accept  a  neutral 
starting-point,  if  you  refuse  at  starting  to  presuppose 
suffering,  you  open  just  as  many  controversies  in  asking, 
"  What  is  Pleasure  ?  "  as  in  asking,  "  What  is  Virtue  ?  " 
"  Are  not  the  aims  of  the  intellect  higher  than  the  aims 
of  the  heart  ?  "  asks  the  great  Francis  Bacon  :  his  hum- 
blest reader  may  answer  with  a  confident  negative. 
Most  persons  desire  love,  many  persons  desire  power, 
some  desire  knowledge,  but  you  cannot  say  that  the 
wish  for  any  one  of  these  things  is  absolutely  universal. 
If  we  want  general  consent,  we  must  ask  not  what  men 
desire,  but  what  they  fear.  He  who  thinks  that  the 
aims  of  the  intellect  take  precedence  of  the  aims  of  the 
heart,  and  he  who  thinks  that  the  aims  of  the  heart  take 
precedence  of  the  aims  of  the  intellect,  both  escape  from 
a  fire  with  equal  eagerness  ;  and  the  travellers  whom 
no  possible  intelligence  could  inspire  with  a  common 
hope  feel,  on  the  verge  of  a  precipice,  a  common  fear. 
It  needs  only  the  intensifying  of  physical  pain  to  anguish, 


278  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

or  else  the  prolongation  of  it  to  monotonous  pressure  on 
the  whole  of  life,  to  make  every  one  recognize  that  there 
is  a  negative  wish  stronger  for  the  moment  than  an}' 
positive  desire ;  that  while  Pleasure  is  a  vague  word, 
meaning  something  different  for  every  individual,  the 
word  Pain  points  to  something  more  definite,  more 
simple,  than  any  other  that  is  familiar  to  men. 

The  problem  of  evil  is  inadequately  conceived  when- 
ever men  forget  this  dislocation  of  antithesis  between 
good  and  evil.  To  the  heart  of  the  everyday  man, 
roughing  it  in  the  world,  it  is  not  the  existence  of  what 
is  evil,  but  its  apparent  victory,  that  is  oppressive  and 
bewildering.  It  is  indeed  impossible  for  the  logical  in- 
tellect to  reconcile  the  existence  of  God  and  evil,  apart 
from  any  question  as  to  proportion.  But  let  no  one 
think,  if  a  problem  be  insoluble,  that  its  manner  of  state- 
ment is  unimportant.  What  men  need  is  not  to  have 
this  question  answered,  but  to  have  it  rightly  asked. 
The  whole  moral  grouping  of  mankind  will  be  found 
to  depend  on  those  answers  which  may  quite  truly  be 
described  as  a  mere  translation  of  it  into  various  dialects. 
It  is  not  the  scientific  instinct  in  Man,  alone  or  chiefly, 
which  seeks  to  penetrate  the  origin  of  the  system  in 
which  he  finds  himself.  Men  are  led  to  ask  how  the 
world  arose  by  the  lurking  desire  to  know  wJiy  it  is  as 
it  is ;  and  the  answers  arrange  themselves  according  to 
the  antagonism  of  two  impulses  often  combined,  yet 
always  divergent ;  that  in  which  the  why  predominates, 
and  that  which  conceives  every  statement  in  mere  time 
relations,  and  is  satisfied  with  knowing  the  sequence  of 
events,  without  seeking  to  understand  their  aim.  The 
whole  antithesis  known  to  our  generation  as  that  of 
Religion  and  Science  is  involved  here.  On  the  one  hand 
the  why  gives  a  keynote  to  theory,  and  the  narrative 
of  Man's  origin  takes  its  start  with  a  Fall.     Things  once 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  279 

were  good  and  fair,  but  there  was  a  descent,  variously 
explained,  but  always  conceived  in  terms  of  will  and  aim. 
But  men  discern  that  the  explanation  which  would  ac- 
count for  evil  really  implies  evil.  Adam  fell  because 
the  serpent  tempted  him  ;  but  why  did  God  admit  the 
serpent  into  Eden  ?  The  difficulty  is  moved  a  very 
little  way  farther  back.  Logic  pursues  it.  Thought  is 
wearied,  and  reverts  from  Why  to  How.  Is  not  what 
we  call  Evil  the  mere  stimulus  to  effort,  without  which 
Man  could  never  have  existed  ?  Is  not  failure  of 
balance  the  reminiscence  in  the  human  world  of  that 
"  origin  of  species  by  natural  selection,"  which  means, 
when  we  put  it  into  non-scientific  language,  that  dispro- 
portion between  need  and  the  means  of  its  satisfaction 
which  fills  so  large  a  part  of  life  with  suffering  and 
struggle  ?  The  ascent  of  Man  states  the  facts  of  life 
in  one  way,  the  fall  of  Man  another ;  there  is  no  more 
explanation  in  the  one  case  than  in  the  other.  But 
the  two  answers  gather  up  the  contrasts  between  two 
moral  worlds,  and  when  we  contemplate  them  we  stand 
at  the  parting  of  the  ways,  and  see  where  travellers 
turn  to  the  right  and  the  left  to  meet  no  more. 

What  hypothesis  men  take  up  as  to  the  beginning  of 
things  depends  on  what  they  want  explained  in  things, 
not  on  any  superior  logical  cogency  on  either  hand. 
Logic  begins  to  work  after  the  choice  is  made.  Expe- 
rience is  impartial  in  the  matter.  We  are  every  day 
familiarized  with  the  two  forms  of  production  which 
have  become  the  models  of  the  origin  of  the  universe. 
We  are  familiar  with  growth,  and  we  are  familiar  with 
works  of  art.  Wc  sit  under  the  shade  of  a  lofty  oak, 
and  we  know  that  it  came  from  an  acorn,  such  as  it 
drops  at  our  feet.  We  say  that  the  oak  was  once  an 
acorn,  and  we  mean  something  definite  by  the  words, 
though   it  would    be    possible    to   find   fault  with   them. 


28o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

The  processes  of  Nature  are  constantly  reminding  us  of 
a  change  by  which  the  simple  becomes  the  manifold ; 
and  when  we  try  to  account  for  the  origin  of  Nature, 
the  processes  of  Nature  itself  may  be  thought  to  pro- 
vide us  with  the  most  plausible  analogy.  But  we  watch 
the  building  of  a  house  more  consciously  than  the  growth 
of  a  tree ;  and  Will  is  a  cause  of  which  we  know  more 
than  of  any  other.  It  is,  indeed,  the  only  cause  which,  in 
the  true  sense  of  the  word,  we  can  be  said  to  know.  A 
man  who  feels  within  him  that  ivJiich  originates — who  is 
conscious  of  something  which  begins  in  his  own  nature 
— will  recognize  in  this,  whatever  he  call  it,  the  true 
analogy  to  the  origin  of  all  things.  If  Will  be  a  word 
of  any  significance — if  we  feel  that  it  is  a  cause  in  a 
more  complete  and  typical  sense  than  anything  else  is  a 
cause — then,  with  whatever  intellectual  obstacles,  we  shall 
believe  that  God  created  the  world.  We  may  feel  that 
the  account  in  Genesis  belongs  to  mythology,  the  account 
in  modern  scientific  works  to  history  ;  we  may  look  to  the 
latter  for  all  in  what  we  call  Creation  that  can  be  nar- 
rated, all  that  belongs  to  the  relations  of  time.  But  we 
shall  feel  that  in  a  deep  sense  the  assertion,  "  In  the 
beginning  God  created  the  heavens  and  the  earth,"  even 
when  connected  with  any  amount  of  erroneous  illustra- 
tion, still  remains  as  an  expression  of  the  deepest  truth 
which,  on  this  subject,  it  is  possible  for  us  to  attain. 

This  divergence  is  seen  clearly  by  all  logical  thinkers, 
whether  they  consider  the  belief  in  Creation  important 
truth  or  important  error.  The  two  sides  might  not 
accept  even  the  description  of  their  issue  in  the  same 
words,  but  both  would  allow  it  to  be  extra-logical.  One 
who  holds  that  this  world  was  created  sees  that  his 
belief  is  a  moral  one.  He  does  not  mean  that  every  one 
who  believes  it  is  good,  and  every  one  who  disbelieves  it  is 
bad ;  he  means  that  it  is  a  belief  which  depends  on  some 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  281 

difference  in  the  moral  structure,  and  that  those  who  have  it 
will  use  the  words  good  and  bad  in  a  dififerent  sense  from 
those  who  have  it  not.  A  man  who  holds  Evolution  to 
be  an  adequate  and  exhaustive  account  of  the  origin  of 
this  world,  would  not,  perhaps,  be  so  ready  to  concede 
that  his  was  a  moral  belief,  because  from  his  point  of 
view  what  is  moral  is  opposed  to  what  is  immoral,  rather 
than  to  what  is  intellectual ;  he  supposes  a  moral  belief 
to  be  the  belief  of  a  good  man,  and  hardly  anybody  would 
accept  what  he  would  describe  as  the  belief  of  a  bad  man. 
But  he  would  concede,  or  indeed  urge,  that  those  who 
accepted  and  those  who  rejected  this  belief  in  Creation 
had  different  views  of  most  important  subjects ;  and  this 
is  all  we  mean  in  calling  it  a  moral  belief 

These  views  are  indeed  so  different  that  it  is  difficult 
to  say  that  they  are  dissimilar.  They  are  incomparable, 
they  stand  out  of  relation  to  each  other ;  those  who  hold 
them  are  mutually  unintelligible,  and  all  the  worst  con- 
fusion of  the  world  has  come  from  their  tendency  to  trans- 
late each  other's  assertions  into  their  own  dialect.  We 
might  say,  roughly,  that  growth  excludes  the  idea  of  Evil, 
and  Will  suggests  it.  Whenever  we  contempjate  growth 
we  see  no  evil  but  disease.  Whenever  we  contemplate 
Will  our  thought  touches  the  world  of  Evil  at  every 
moment.  God  made  the  world ;  why,  then,  is  the  world 
no  better  than  it  is  ?  The  man  who  thinks  that  the 
doctrine  of  Evolution  tells  us  all  there  is  to  know  about 
the  world  can  hardly  understand  this  question  enough  to 
dissent  from  the  answers  to  it.  The  world  is,  according 
to  his  view,  growing  better  every  day ;  its  existence  is 
a  continual  approach  towards  the  better.  To  him  the 
better  takes  the  place  of  the  good,  and  there  are  no  two 
ideas  more  irreconcilable. 

This  primal  antithesis  has  various  aspects  for  different 
stages  of  the  world's  histor}'.     Our  generation  knows  it 


283  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

as  the  antithesis  of  Religion  and  Science;  when  we 
trace  it  back  in  History  we  may  discover  it  as  the 
antagonism  of  the  Jew  and  the  Greek.  Our  children, 
perhaps,  will  see  it  under  some  aspect  so  different  that 
they  will  find  it  hard  to  associate  it  with  either  of  these 
earlier  forms  ;  but  through  all  runs  this  recurrent  diver- 
gence of  How  and  Why,  of  Growth  and  Will,  of  the 
spirit  that  is  satisfied  with  the  order  of  time-relations, 
and  one  that  seeks  a  deeper  order,  disturbing  to  the  very 
idea  of  before  and  after,  because  it  tends  to  use  those 
words  in  a  different  sense.  Perhaps  it  is  a  part  of  the 
dislocation  of  our  nature  that  the  antithesis  should  have 
been  recorded  in  controversy  ;  it  may  be  that  what  we 
need  to  harmonize  all  our  thought  is  the  discernment  that 
the  Wh}^  concerns  one  part  of  our  being,  and  the  How 
another.  The  world,  it  is  true,  cannot  have  been  created 
twice ;  when  we  are  considering  its  origin  as  a  question 
of  time  we  must  take  our  choice  between  different  hypo- 
theses ;  no  possible  view  can  bring  the  account  in  the 
Book  of  Genesis  into  one  framework  with  the  "  Origin 
of  Species."  But  may  not  the  translation  of  a  belief 
in  initiative  Will  into  time-relations  be  the  error  on  one 
side,  while  the  description  of  Growth  as  exhausting  the 
whole  question  is  the  error  on  the  other  ?  One  who 
aims  at  following  the  history  of  moral  thought  cannot  do 
less  than  approach  the  question,  or  more  than  suggest  it. 
Art,  even  more  than  Science,  leads  away  from  the 
Eternal.  There  is  a  deep  mysterious  connection  between 
all  that  belongs  to  the  region  of  the  painter  and  the  poet 
and  that  which  is  transient — that  which  is  vanishing 
away.  The  artist  people  less  than  any  other  is  inclined 
to  quit  the  conditions  of  before  and  after.  For  the 
Greek  the  supreme  Artist  was  himself  the  product  of 
something  that  in  modern  language  we  may  term  evolu- 
tion.   He  needed  accounting  for  as  much  as  the  world  did. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  283 

The  governor  of  the  world  is  a  son  of  Time.  They 
who  have  bequeathed  to  the  world  all  the  human  work 
that  it  has  most  loved,  and  the  name  by  which  the 
Creator  is  identified  with  the  Poet  in  all  modern  lan- 
guages, could  neither  conceive  of  what  a  Jew  meant  by 
Creation,  nor  see  in  it  the  difficulties  which  the  Jew 
sought  by  moments  to  explain.  For  the  Greek  there 
was  neither  an  evil  world  to  be  accounted  for,  nor  a 
Holy  Will  to  cause  it  ;  the  creation  was  not  bad  ;  the 
Creator  was  not  what  the  Jew  meant  by  good.  The 
History  of  Greece  is  a  brief  and  concentrated  tragedy, 
and  its  art  is  proportionately  rich  in  tragic  elements. 
The  great  figures  of  the  Athenian  stage  pass  before 
us  in  solemn  procession  as  we  think  of  life's  deepest 
sorrows.  (Edipus,  Antigone,  Electra,  rise  before  the 
mind's  eye  to  confute  the  notion  that  grief  in  the  Greek 
world  threw  no  shadow  on  Art  ;  but  then  this  very 
shadow  is  indispensable  to  Art ;  and  that  it  should  give 
rise,  in  the  feeling  of  the  Artist,  to  anything  of  the  nature 
of  perplexity  is  impossible.  And,  further,  God  is  not 
good  any  more  than  the  world  is  bad.  Perhaps  we  ma}' 
say  it  would  even  more  misrepresent  Greek 'thought  to 
speak  of  a  good  Creator  than  of  a  bad  Creation.  The 
Greek  awarded  a  prize  to  those  creations  which  he  felt 
so  typical  of  the  Creation  as  to  keep  the  name  for  them  ; 
he  meant  by  a  good  Creator  a  good  poet.  That  Creation 
in  which  Sophocles  had  borne  the  prize  from  .^schylus 
and  Euripides  from  Sophocles,  that  work  which  was  good 
according  as  it  was  rich  in  harmony,  and  therefore  in  a 
certain  contrast,  must  give  a  type  of  Creation  in  which 
the  idea  of  Holiness  was  inaccessible.  The  Creator 
could  be  good  only  in  the  sense  in  which  iEschylus  was 
a  good  poet,  and  from  this  point  of  view  the  evil  in  his 
work  was  one  of  its  most  important  elements. 

The   problem   which   was   non-existent  for  the  Greek 


284  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

was  practically  solved  for  the  Jew.  No  nation  is  more 
remote  from  what  we  have  come  to  call  Pessimism  than 
Israel.  It  is  true  that  no  literature  presents  specimens  of 
a  more  profound  melancholy  than  the  Hebrew  Scriptures. 
But  what  the  Jew  in  his  most  despairing  moment  laments 
is,  that  man  has  chosen  evil  rather  than  good.  He 
never  feels  that  good  is  not  there  to  choose.  "  O  Lord, 
how  excellent  are  Thy  works  ;  in  wisdom  hast  Thou  made 
them  all,"  is  the  deepest  utterance  of  his  faith  ;  and  when 
he  has  added,  "  An  unwise  man  doth  not  well  under- 
stand this,"  he  has  made  his  utmost  concession  to  the 
opposite  feeling.  He  could  pour  forth  the  acknowledg- 
ment from  a  heart  overflowing  with  reverent  delight, 
because,  in  the  first  place,  the  works  of  God  never 
included  for  man  his  own  errors  and  imperfections,  or 
anything  that  resulted  from  them  ;  and,  in  the  second 
place,  God  was  still  more  intelligibly  and  practically  the 
Redeemer  than  even  the  Creator.  The  assertion  "  I  am 
the  Lord  thy  God,  who  brought  thee  up  out  of  the 
land  of  Egypt,"  stands  as  the  permanent  aspect  of  the 
Divine  Unity  to  the  chosen  race  ;  and  the  deliverance 
from  Egypt  foreshadows  more  than  a  deliverance  from 
Babylon,  from  Syria,  from  Rome  ;  it  is  the  first  word 
of  a  promise,  whose  full  scope  the  Jew  needed  the 
education  of  the  ages  to  take  in,  and  which  he  sees,  as 
he  dimly  discerns  it,  to  be  for  ever  beyond  the  reach 
of  all  but  a  continually  expanding  grasp.  From  a 
logical  point  of  view  this  celestial  hope  should  have 
left  the  previous  condition  from  which  deliverance  was 
promised  under  a  black  shadow.  Redemption  should 
have  darkened  Creation,  but  it  never  did  so  ;  between 
Creation  and  Redemption,  both  the  work  of  God,  the 
Fall  of  Man  lay  in  shadow  sufficiently  deep  to  bring  out 
their  brightness  and  conceal  its  own  outline.  The  Jew 
never  exactly  knew  what  he  meant  by  the  Fall  of  Man  ; 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  285 

his  accents,  when  he  speaks  of  it,  are  always  hesitating  ; 
he  returns  to  it  afresh,  in  oblivion  that  he  has  dealt 
with  it  before  ;  he  forgets  whether,  after  all,  it  be  the 
fall  of  Man  he  is  speaking  of,  and  his  Adam  becomes  an 
angel.^  But  still  he  meant  something  by  it,  and  some- 
thing that  was  adequate  to  explain  all  he  wanted.  He 
felt  that  the  will  of  God  was  good  and  the  will  of  Man 
was  evil  continually,  and  that  was  enough  for  him.  His 
God  had  called  Man's  spirit  into  being,  and  was  its 
rightful  Lord.  He  also  had  redeemed  it  from  its  evil, 
and  was  its  Saviour.  Man's  own  rebellion  supplied 
the  intellectual  link  between  these  ideas,  and  the  Jew 
needed  no  other. 

Neither  for  the  Jew  nor  the  Greek  apart,  therefore, 
was  the  problem  of  Evil  a  haunting  perplexity  ;  in  dif- 
ferent ways  each  answered  or  avoided  it.  But  effects 
which  result  from  neither  of  two  substances  in  any  pos- 
sible condition  apart,  may  be  inseparable  from  the  union 
of  the  two.  The  fusion  of  Greek  and  Jewish  thought 
produced  an  effervescence  in  which  this  problem  became 
one  of  the  most  seething  elements  in  human  thought. 
For  it  was  in  this  fusion  that  the  Gentile  world  contem- 
plated for  the  first  time  the  idea  of  Almighty  Will  at 
the  world's  origin.  We  cannot  imagine  power  so  great 
that  the  change  to  unlimited  power  tells  as  a  question 
of  degree.  When  the  Creator  is  Almighty  instead  of 
Mighty  the  whole  conception  is  altered.  The  funda- 
mental divergence  of  Jewish  and  Greek  feeling  in  this 
respect  is  disguised  by  their  likeness.      They  both  know 

1  It  is  evident,  from  Gen.  iv.  3-12,  that  Cain  and  Abel  do  not  start  as  the 
members  of  a  fallen  race,  but  that  something  in- the  conduct  of  each  is  the 
ground  of  their  difference.  "  If  thou  doest  well,  shalt  thou  not  be  accepted? 
And  if  thou  doest  not  well,  sin  lieth  at  the  door,"  could  not  be  interpreted, 
except  by  the  advocate  of  a  theological  system,  as  an  address  to  one  who 
inherits  a  legacy  of  guilt.  Note  especially  ver.  12,  "The  ground  shall  not 
henceforth  yield  to  thee  her  fruit  ;  "  hitherto,  then,  it  has  done  so.  See  also  Gen. 
vi.  2,  and  the  Book  of  Enoch. 


286  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  a  Creation,  but  the  two  ideas  are  only  confused  by 
being  seen  in  the  same  line.  The  Hebrew  Creator  looks 
on  His  work,  and  behold  it  is  very  good.  The  Greek 
Creator  looks  on  his  work,  and  knows  that  he  has  made 
it,  "  as  far  as  possible,  the  fairest  and  best,  out  of  things 
which  were  not  good."  ^  "  Out  of  things  which  were 
not  good ;  there  is  no  getting  behind  that.  He  was 
hampered  by  pre-existing  conditions,  and  has  done  the 
best  he  could  under  the  circumstances.  It  is  the  Origin 
of  Species  by  natural  selection  from  a  different  point  of 
view,  and  under  a  different  dialect.  It  has  no  real  con- 
nection with  the  first  chapters  of  Genesis. 

When  the  attempt  is  made  to  bring  the  two  into  one 
framework,  that  which  for  each  separately  was  a  narra- 
tive becomes  a  problem  for  both.  "  Whence,  under  a 
Holy  and  Omnipotent  Creator,  come  the  things  that  are 
not  good  ? "  The  new  dignity  of  Creation  implied  a 
new  attention  given  to  the  dark  side  of  the  world.  Evil 
emerged  into  a  distinctness  for  the  thinker,^  which  has 
led  historians  into  imagining  it  as  occupying  an  excep- 
tional proportion  in  the  life  of  ordinary  men.  Students 
of  this  age  have  explained  its  tendency  to  sombre  feeling 
and  speculation  by  supposing  it  to  be  one  of  special 
disaster.  The  period  on  which  we  have  been  dwelling 
would  not  suggest  such  predominance  of  misfortune  to 
an  impartial  observer,  any  more  than  our  own  time  does. 
The  world  is  so  constituted  that  we  may  find  peculiar 
suffering,  if  we  look  for  it,  in  any  time ;  but  the  age 
of  the  Antonines  has  always  been  reckoned  one  of  the 

^  TO  6e  Tj  ^vvarhv  ws  KciWiffTa  dpiara  re  tf  ovx  ovtws  exovruiv  (Plato, 
Timasus,  53). 

2  See  Gfrorer,  "  Urchristenthum,"  vol.  i. ,  a  work  of  which  much  that  follows 
is  a  transcript.  He  says  of  these  times  that  they  "  gehcirten  zu  den  traurigsten, 
welche  die  Weltgeschichte  kennt."  This  he  means  of  the  time  of  Philo,  i.e., 
about  the  time  of  Christ.  I  cannot  but  think  that  there  must  have  been  much 
more  cause  for  suffering  at  an  earlier  period. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  287 

halcyon  epochs  in  the  stormy  voyage  of  History ;  and 
if  it  does  not  exactly  coincide  with  that  of  which  we 
speak, ^  the  same  conditions  were  common  to  both. 
The  happiness  of  the  world  under  the  Antonines  cannot 
be  wholly  explained  by  the  character  of  its  rulers.  It 
is  impossible  to  remember  what  war  is,  to  imagine  what 
it  was,  and  to  suppose  that  when  it  ceased  the  nations 
were  not  better  off.  Experience  does  not  require  us  to 
believe  in  anything  so  improbable ;  it  is  not  in  lives 
crushed  with  misery  that  we  shall  find  much  perplexity 
as  to  the  existence  of  suffering ;  such  perplexity  rarely, 
indeed,  exists  except  in  the  minds  of  those  whom  the 
world  would  call  prosperous.  But  amid  great  prosperity 
we  may  feel  the  imperious  pressure  of  the  problem  of 
Evil ;  and  though  the  age  of  Death  was  not  one  of  pecu- 
liar suffering,  it  was  one  of  special  suggestion  for  this 
side  of  life. 

Probably  we  have  all  felt,  when  an  individual  human 
life  has  ended,  distress  quite  out  of  proportion  to  any 
vacancy  caused  by  the  departure.  It  is  not  that  the  lost 
presence  was  so  specially  prized  (though  the  feeling  does 
not  arise  without  love)  ;  it  is  rather  the  reflection  origi- 
nating in  tender  memory,  "  With  large  result  so  little 
rife  !  "  Our  inmost  being  craves  achievement  far  more 
persistently  than  enjoyment,  and  as  long  as  life  hurries 
on  to  some  goal  its  bitterness  does  not  pass  into  per- 
plexity. It  is  when  the  movement  of  life  is  at  an  end, 
when  the  vague  possibilities  of  the  future  are  cut  off, 
that  we  are  led  to  the  question.  Is  it  worth  while  ?  Few 
lives  bear  the  question  ;  perhaps  few  ages  would,  if  the 
end  of  an  age  were  as  definite  as  the  end  of  a  life. 

When  for  the  first   time  in   the  world's  histor}'  men 

1  The  second  century  is  the  epoch  of  Gnostic  development,  and  also  of  the 
reign  of  the  Antonines  ;  but  the  remarks  in  tlie  text  take  in  a  somewhat  widei- 
period. 


288  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

confronted  a  dead  past,  they  could  not  avoid  this  question. 
Life  for  the  toiling  millions  was  not  then  harder  than  it 
had  been,  but  to  the  thinking  hundreds  it  was  darker. 
They  saw  it  under  an  aspect  that  revealed  its  nothing- 
ness. A  pause  in  all  action  left  them  leisure  to  brood  over 
the  problem,  Why  did  the  world  ever  originate  ?  The 
word  Almighty,  to  most  of  us  so  familiar  as  to  have  lost 
its  meaning,  represented  a  new  conception  to  the  men 
of  that  da}^,  and  the  contradiction  which  we  drop  out  of 
sight  emerged  for  them  with  the  distinctness  of  novelty. 
As  the  first  rays  of  the  rising  sun  even  less  obviously 
bathe  the  landscape  in  light  than  they  streak  it  with 
shadow,  so  when  the  belief  in  many  gods  deepened  and 
concentrated  itself  into  a  belief  in  God,  the  world,  in  its 
new  character  of  a  Divine  woj'k,  showed  forth,  as  never 
before,  the  flaws  and  misfits  which  removed  it  from  being 
a  satisfactory  exhibition  of  Divine  perfection.  As  a  back- 
ground to  the  varied  movement  of  human  and  Divine 
activity  the  world  was  well  enough  ;  call  it  the  product 
of  Almight}^  Will,  and  it  became  filled  with  evil.^ 

Hence  it  is  that  from  this  time  two  lines  of  theory 
on  the  origin  of  Evil  are  traceable  throughout  all  moral 
speculation.  On  the  one  hand,  the  Greek  antithesis  of 
Spirit  and  Matter  presented  itself  as  a  symbolic  expression 
of  the  contrast  of  good  and  evil,  which  precluded  the 
need  of  its  being  regarded  as  a  problem  ;  on  the  other, 
to  a  race  for  which  Sin  was  the  only  evil,  the  Jewish 
antithesis  of  Creator  and  Creature  appeared  to  offer 
some  real  solution  of  the   problem.      Evil   to  the  Greek 

1  A  sentence  constantly  quoted  from  Euseb.  (Hist.  Eccl. ,  v.  27),  7ro\v6pvXKriToy 
irapa.  toIs  alpeanorais  i^rjT7j/j.a  to  irddev  r/  Kanla,  gives  the  keynote  of  all  the 
theological  and  theosophical  discussion  of  this  time.  See  also  Arnobius  adv. 
Gentes,  ii.  54,  55,  65  ; — "  Mala  ergo  dicetis  unde  sunt  hasc  omnia?  "  this  being 
evidently  the  continual  Heathen  objection,  and  also  the  heretical  objection. 
The  book,  which  is  a  vindication  of  Christianity  from  the  charge  of  being  re- 
sponsible for  the  calamities  of  the  time,  was  written  early  in  the  fourth  century. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  289 

was  what  marble  was  to  the  sculptor,  at  once  the  source 
of  his  labour  and  the  indispensable  material  of  his  work- 
manship ;  from  one  point  of  view  it  veiled  his  creation, 
from  the  other  that  creation  was  expressed  by  it.  His 
ideal  lay  within  the  rock ;  arduous  toil  was  needed  to 
smite  away  the  disguising  material  that  surrounded  it. 
But  then,  from  another  point  of  view,  the  rock  lay 
within  his  ideal,  his  ideal  was  no  more  than  that  which 
gave  it  form.  It  is  the  view  of  a  race  which  looked  on 
Morahty  as  in  the  truest  sense  of  the  word  a  subordi- 
nate province  to  Art.  Some  learned  men  have  imagined 
themselves  to  find  a  concession  to  this  view  in  the  first 
verses  of  Genesis.  "  The  earth  was  without  form  and 
void "  implies,  they  think,  that  the  Creator  had  an 
uncreated  material  for  His  energy,  and  therefore  an  im- 
personal sharer  of  His  eternity.  If  it  were  so,  it  would 
always  be  possible  to  a  logical  mind  to  see  in  this 
antithesis  to  God  the  source  of  Evil.  But  it  is  difficult 
even  to  allow  that  a  Jew  saw  in  this  doctrine  a  con- 
ceivable intellectual  hypothesis ;  it  is  impossible  to 
concede  that  Jews  felt  in  it  a  moral  view,  explanatory 
of  the  nature  of  Evil.  They  had  a  simpler,  not  really  a 
deeper,  but  perhaps  a  more  natural  explanation ;  Evil, 
to  their  view,  was  the  very  opposite  of  a  thing ;  there 
was  no  possible  evil,  except  in  a  choice.  If  to  be  good 
means  to  choose  goodness,  it  must  be  also  possible  to 
choose  evil,  and  evil  must  be  there  to  choose.  The 
answer  will  generally  be  felt  an  inadequate  one  by  those 
who  can  see  the  need  of  any  answer.  But  the  Jew  found 
no  difficulty  in  this  belief,  and  there  must  be  many  who 
find  none ;  for  the  Jewish  answer  has  lasted  ever  since, 
is  incorporated  in  immortal  poetry,  and  is  for  ever  pre- 
senting itself  to  some  minds  as  an  original  answer  to 
the  ever-recurrent  problem  of  humanity.  We  find  it, 
again  and  again,  urged  as  a  great  moral   discovery  that 

T 


290  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

human  free  will  relieves  a  Divine  Creator  of  responsi- 
bility for  the  evil  of  the  world  ;  we  are  continually  being 
led  to  feel  that  this  thought  must  have  some  tranquillizing 
influence  on  the  heart  of  man,  which  cannot  be  translated 
into  intellectual  cogency,  and  must  point  to  some  deep 
truth  which  man  has  not  yet  learned  to  express  in 
language  impregnable  to  some  objections  that  are  both 
obvious  and  forcible. 

To  the  Hellenic  spirit  this  view  was  inconceivable. 
Only  slightly,  and  as  it  were  by  an  intermittent  light, 
did  the  Greek  ever  contemplate  that  which  we  sum  up 
in  the  words  "  human  responsibility."  All  that  we  mean 
by  human  freedom  was  conceived  by  his  race  more 
vividly  than  by  any  other  people  of  the  earth.  But  a 
variation  of  dialect  may  cover  a  chasm  deep  as  the  very 
roots  of  human  thought.  Human  responsibility  is  human 
freedom  contemplated  from  the  point  of  view  of  one  who 
believes  in  Righteousness,  who  sees  Evil  as  Sin.  Some 
gleams  of  such  an  explanation,  as  of  almost  every  thought 
that  has  ever  entered  the  heart  of  man,  may  be  found 
in  Greek  literature  ;  but  all  its  characteristic  expression 
leads  us  in  a  different  direction.  For  the  Artist,  Sin  is 
no  more  than  the  throb  of  life's  pulsation,  the  warp  of 
its  woof,  the  condition  and  prelude  of  all  that  is  desirable 
and  excellent.  The  evil  of  Sin  cannot  indeed  be  entirely 
hidden  from  any  race  or  any  individual ;  and  in  a  race 
whose  every  utterance  has  the  resonance  of  genius,  it 
will  always  be  possible  to  find  in  some  undertone  a 
definite  protest  against  a  view  that  excludes  a  deep  part 
of  our  nature.  But  that  swift  inversion  of  sympathies 
which  is  essential  to  dramatic  genius  precludes  any 
deliberate  concession  that  impulses,  which  fill  life  with 
meaning,  have  no  fitting  place  anywhere.  When  the 
Greek  had  to  explain  Evil  he  could  not  find  refuge  in 
human  Will.     There  could  be  no  Evil  in  Freedom  ;   Evil 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  291 

lay  in  that  which  opposes  itself  to  Freedom — the  world 
of  Necessity,  the  absolute  antithesis  to  and  negation  of 
Will,  the  blind  world  of  Matter.  The  two  theories  meet 
in  sharp,  distinct  contrast ;  the  one  is  the  exact  contrary 
of  the  other.  "  Evil  begins  where  Spirit  ceases  its  free 
play,"  says  the  Greek.  "  No,"  says  the  Jew,  when  he  is 
forced  to  see  what  the  Greek  meant ;  "  it  does  not  begin, 
but  ends  there.  Evil  can  exist  only  in  the  choice  of  a 
Mind.  Man  is  created  to  take  the  attitude  of  a  Crea- 
ture, and  when  he  chooses  that  of  an  independent 
Creator,  the  result  is  that  which  we  call  Evil." 

But  let   us   begin  where  the  Jew  began,  and   under- 
stand first  the  theory  which  he  rejected.     When  we  have 
allowed  that  the  fact  of  man's  material  organization  and 
environment  is  the  cause  of  a  large  part  of  what  is  wrong, 
and  of  a  still   larger  part  of  what  is  painful,  we  appear 
to  have  made  the  utmost  concession  possible,  from  the 
modern    point    of  view,    towards    that    identification    of 
matter  with  evil  which  the  Greek  almost  took  for  granted. 
If  we  were  obliged  to  have  any  theory  on  the  connection 
of  the  two  things,   we  should   be  inclined   to   the  very 
opposite  one.      The  very  sense  of  necessity  involved  in 
our  material   environment,  which  may  be  called   evil,  is 
to  modern  feeling  a  dilution   of  the  fact  of  wrong.      A 
starving  man  steals  a  loaf;   for  the  good  of  society  we 
may    think    some    penalty    should    be    inflicted    on    the 
act,  but  hunger  is  allowed   to   be  a  palliation   of  theft ; 
and    translated    from    legal    into    moral    language,    this 
means   that  guilt  slackens  as  physical   impulse  becomes 
overpowering.      We  cannot  confine  our  ideas  of  wrong 
to    the    region    of  physical    temptation.      Hatred    is    an 
emotion  as  purely  spiritual   as  love.      Happily  it  is   far 
less  common.      But  it  is  not  a  feeling  that  can  be  left 
out  of  account  when  we  are  considering  the  character  of 
good  and  evil.      What  we   call   pain   of  body,  which  we 


292  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

should  rather  call  pain  from  body  (since  all  pain  is  in  a 
mind),  is  considered  by  many  to  be,  when  very  severe, 
the  worst  of  all  pain  ;  but  it  is  not  considered  so  by 
every  one,  and  it  is  certainly  not  the  only  pain.  The 
Greek  thought  that  the  spirit  should  rule  the  body  as 
the  master  the  slave.  We  can  see  that  that  is  another 
way  of  saying  that  the  body  should  not  be  a  part  of 
the  material  world.  There  are  some  forms  of  inversion 
of  this  rightful  rule  which  of  themselves  we  condemn  as 
abnormal ;  they  should  not  have  been  allowed  to  begin. 
But  so  far  as  any  feeling  is  natural,  a  certain  allowance 
is  made  for  it  which  is  quite  incompatible  with  such 
condemnation  as  we  give  to  that  which  in  theological 
language  we  term  sin. 

Yet  there  must  be  some  meaning  in  the  belief  of  the 
greatest  thinkers  of  the  old  world.  The  human  race  is 
not  more  human  at  one  time  than  another.  Its  relation 
to  truth  is  a  permanent  one.  It  is  a  futile  and  sterile 
method  of  study  (though  it  be  a  common  one)  to  fix 
a  date  at  which  thought  begins  to  be  either  true  or  false. 
In  some  sense  all  earnest  thought  must  be  true ;  that 
which  was  meant  by  earnest  thinkers  must  be  true ;  and 
we  may  generally  discover  some  part  of  experience  which 
affords  a  clue  even  to  the  opinions  we  are  furthest  from 
accepting.  It  is  an  important  fact,  that  so  far  as  human 
beings  dwell  within  the  realm  of  sense,  they  are  to  a 
certain  extent  necessarily  rivals.  Envy,  says  Virgil  to 
Dante,  in  the  "  Purgatory,"  arises — 

"  Because  men  set  their  wishes  upon  that 
Wherein  companionship^is  one  with  loss." 

To  some  degree  this  is  what  no  one  can  help  doing. 
One  mouthful  of  bread  will  fill  only  one  mouth.  While 
all  beauty,  all  delight  of  eye  or  ear,  is  common  possession 
to  those  who  are  within  its  reach,  the  food  and  garments 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  293 

which  form  the  lowest  degree  in  the  scale  of  need  cannot 
be  shared  without  being  lessened.  This  holds  good  for 
saint  and  for  sinner,  for  genius  and  for  idiot,  for  crimi- 
nal and  philanthropist.  All,  so  far  as  they  are  animals, 
want  something  that  none  other  can  have  at  the  same 
time  ;  and  all  are  animals  to  some  extent  throughout  the 
whole  of  their  being,  and  through  its  earlier  stages,  when 
first  impressions  are  received,  not  much  besides,  as  far 
as  man  can  see.  An  animal,  so  far  as  it  is  merely  an 
animal,  can  do  neither  right  nor  wrong ;  and  the  not- 
right  may  appear  wrong  as  readily  as  the  not-wrong 
appear  right.  The  animal  nature,  like  some  planet 
which  from  different  parts  of  our  orbit  we  may  visua- 
lize in  constellations  severed  by  distances  imagination 
fails  to  compute,  may  be  identified,  according  to  our 
point  of  view,  with  either  good  or  evil.  Nor  is  man 
an  animal  only  throughout  the  earlier  stages  of  his 
life  on  earth ;  he  is  liable  to  re-enter  this  circuit  of 
animal  necessity  with  a  hundred  accidents  to  which  the 
best  of  men  is  just  as  liable  as  the  worst  is.  Whole 
classes  pass  their  lives  in  that  region  "  wherein  com- 
panionship is  one  with  loss,"  and  only  under  the  most 
favoured  circumstances  does  any  one  pass  through  life 
and  never  feel  he  must  do  without  something  he  needs 
because  there  is  not  enough  of  it  for  two.  The  mere 
fact  of  man's  bodily  environment  thus  becomes  a  source 
of  separation  between  man  and  man,  which  is  perfectly 
inevitable,  and  for  which  no  man  is  responsible ;  and 
while  we  contemplate  that  fact  and  nothing  besides,  we 
may  call  this  bodily  organization  evil. 

This  connection  of  the  bodily  organism  with  evil 
is  equally  evident  in  experience  which  has  no  obvious 
connection  with  the  external  world.  It  is  not  the 
experience  of  ordinary  human  beings  that  sorrow  sepa- 
rates   us    from   our   kind    to    tlic    same    extent    as   docs 


294  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

extreme  pain  of  body.  The  frame  that  is  racked  with 
rheumatism  or  neuralgia  is  a  prison  to  the  spirit  in  a 
sense  that  no  unsatisfied  desire  of  the  heart  is.  In  all 
the  desolation  of  bereavement  a  hungry  man  is  glad  of 
food,  and  a  half-frozen  man  of  fire ;  in  a  paroxysm  of 
bodily  pain  he  can  be  glad  of  nothing.  From  within 
and  without  the  lesson  is  repeated.  As  the  statesman 
knows  that  hunger  is  a  potent  factor  in  a  nation's  fife, 
the  invalid  feels  that  even  a  little  pain  is  imperious,  if  it 
goes  on.  We  are  all  forced  to  feel,  sooner  or  later,  that 
in  man's  bodily  environment  there  is  an  element  not  only 
of  necessity,  but  in  some  sense  even  of  what  appears 
like  falsehood.  It  is  as  if,  with  regard  to  pain,  we  were 
all  forced  to  re-enter  that  sphere  of  illusion  in  which  the 
vine-leaf  is  greater  than  the  star  which  it  hides ;  and 
with  regard  to  pain  of  body,  as  ii  we  lost  that  power  of 
movement  which  enables  us  to  catch  a  glimpse  of  it  to 
the  right  and  the  left  of  the  obstacle  which  hides  it. 
We  are  obliged  to  feel  for  the  moment  as  if  some  sharp 
pain  which  we  have  to  endure  for  a  few  seconds  were 
a  great  thing,  and  some  large  change  affecting  the  per- 
manent fate  of  millions  were  a  small  thing.  It  is  not 
wrong  which  creates  this  illusion,  it  is  only  the  very 
nature  of  our  physical  organization. 

In  the  grasp  on  the  perennial  truth  that  the  world  of 
matter  is  the  world  of  necessity  we  gain  a  clue  to  the 
temporary  belief  that  the  world  of  Matter  is  the  world  of 
Evil.  Necessity  divorced  from  Law  is  Evil.  We  can- 
not sufficiently  shake  off  the  influence  of  scientific  thought 
even  to  imagine  a  physical  world  of  Necessity  divorced 
from  Law.  We  should  first  need  not  only  to  put  away 
all  scientific  conceptions,  but  also  to  strip  our  minds 
of  all  the  associations  that  our  commercial  and  indus- 
trial development  have  interwoven  with  the  very  warp 
and  woof  of  our  intellectual  structure.     Human  will  has 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  295 

gained  a  control  over  the  field  of  Matter  of  which  the 
ancients  knew  nothing.  Nature  is  now  rather  the  field 
where  Will  finds  its  exercise  than  the  barrier  which 
forms  its  limit.  We  confide  an  important  message  to 
the  electric  telegraph,  and  know  that  it  will  be  trans- 
mitted at  least  to  the  end  of  the  wire.  If  we  had 
intrusted  it  to  our  best  friend  he  might  have  forgotten 
to  deliver  it.  Every  time  that  we  cross  the  barrier 
between  things  and  persons  we  are  reminded  that  it 
is  only  on  the  ground  of  things  that  we  can  make 
our  reckoning  with  absolute  security ;  our  antithesis 
between  the  two  is  between  the  world  of  safe  anticipa- 
tion and  the  world  of  what  we  call  accident.  People 
are  whirled  thousands  of  miles  without  anxiety  or 
effort,  because  steam  never  fails  to  move  what  impedes 
its  expansion  ;  and  if  they  are  mutilated  or  killed  on  the 
journey,  it  is  generally  because  some  human  being  has  not 
done  the  thing  he  was  expected  to  do.  The  lesson  that 
this  is  not  necessarily  the  condition  of  human  beings 
with  regard  to  the  outward  world  is  enforced  b}''  the 
contrast  of  ancient  and  modern  thought.  A  Greek 
knew  no  large,  familiar  every-day  illustration  of  what 
we  may  call  the  convenience  of  dealing  with  things. 
Where  we  turn  to  machinery,  he  turned  to  the  reluctant 
service  of  some  captive,  torn  from  his  home  or  brought 
up  under  the  degradation  of  bondage.  All  the  con- 
venient certainty  that  we  associate  with  man's  control 
over  the  forces  of  nature  he  associated  with  the  con- 
trol of  one  class  over  the  will  of  another. 

This  change  has  revolutionized  man's  view  of  the  out- 
ward world.  To  modern  thinkers  Matter  is  the  incarna- 
tion of  Force ;  to  ancient  thinkers  it  was  the  contrary  of 
Spirit.  Of  the  wonderful  cycle  of  laws  which  it  has 
revealed  to  us,  the  only  one  which  they  knew  (and  which 
no  one  can  help  knowing) — gravitation — was  supposed 


296  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

by  them  to  be  a  peculiarity  of  the  only  region  of  space 
subject  to  disorder  and  imperfection.  Those  silent, 
ceaseless  movements  which  for  our  eyes  inscribe  the 
midnight  sky  with  testimony  to  the  universal  domain  of 
gravitation,  exhibited  to  theirs  its  narrow  limits  and 
eternal  opposite.  The  movements  that  end  and  the  move- 
ments that  continue  had  to  their  conception  nothing  in 
common.  Their  knowledge  was  as  misleading  as  their 
ignorance  ;  the  laws  of  Space,  as  they  become  confused 
the  moment  they  are  illustrated  in  any  material  sub- 
stance, encourage  the  belief  that  Matter  knows  no  law. 
Our  modern  investigators  of  Nature  would  have  ap- 
peared to  the  Greek  to  make  exactly  the  same  mistake 
as  a  man  who  cut  triangles  in  chalk  to  test  the  pro- 
blems of  Euclid.  The  world  of  Matter  was  the  world 
of  multiplicity,  of  confusion  ;  truth,  if  attained  here,  was 
attained  only  by  accident. 

The  Greek  had  studied  the  personal  to  far  more 
purpose  than  the  material  world,  but  his  view  even  of 
this  is  different  from  ours.      John  Mill  has  observed —  f 

and  the  observation  is  important  as  coming  from  him, 
because  he  would  be  inclined  rather  to  underrate  rather 
than  overrate  the  truth  he  there  expresses — that  we 
must  never  think  of  the  cruelties  of  antiquit}^  as  if  those 
who  inflicted  them  were  as  bad  as  ive  should  be  if  we 
did  anything  of  the  kind.  Napoleon's  was  a  far  more 
cruel  nature  than  Caesar's,  but  Napoleon  could  not  have 
cut  off  the  hands  of  a  whole  garrison  and  left  them  in 
that  miserable  condition,  as  Caesar  did.  He  durst  not 
have  raised  against  himself  the  indignation  of  the  civilized 
world,  which  such  an  action  from  Caesar  did  not  raise. 
The  whole  moral  standard  of  our  day  is  formed  under 
an  attention  to  individual  need  that  necessarily  changes 
the  very  character  of  duty,  and  affects  what  men  wish  to 
seem,  even  when  it  has  no  influence  on  what  they  wish 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  297 

to  be.  The  State — the  unit  of  the  classical  world — is 
an  unseen  being  ;  the  individual — the  unit  of  the  modern 
world — is  closely  connected  with  the  bodily  organiza- 
tion ;  and  as  the  Self  becomes  more  prominent,  the  body 
becomes  more  sacred.  Asceticism  is  no  more  than  this 
sense  of  sacredness  allied  with  a  desire  for  sacrifice,  and 
its  prevalence  in  the  mediaeval  as  compared  with  the 
classical  world  is  an  illustration  of  the  new  importance 
of  pain.  A  keen  sense  of  its  horror  readily  passes  into 
a  keen  sense  of  its  blessing.  The  nature  to  which  it  is 
comparatively  insignificant  is  equally  remote  from  both. 

We  can  understand  that  those  who  saw  in  the  material 
world  all  that  we  see  in  it  of  danger,  of  compulsion,  of 
necessity,  and  saw  in  it  nothing  of  law ;  who  felt,  as 
every  human  being  must  feel,  its  wonderful  alliance 
with  pain  and  did  not  feel  the  sanctity  of  the  frame- 
work which  enshrines  the  Self; — we  can  understand 
that  to  them  this  formless  negative  entity  became  a  sort 
of  antithesis  to  God,  a  blind  sharer  of  His  eternity  and 
a  limit  to  His  Will.  But  why  give  form  to  what  is  evil? 
Why  enter  on  the  work  of  Creation  ?  It  was  not  a 
question  natural  to  a  race  of  Artists.  Why  carve  a 
statue  ?  The  question  answered  itself.  And  yet  it  re- 
curred again  and  again.  Plato  returns  to  the  suspicion 
that  Creation,  in  some  sense,  implies  degeneracy.  His 
indifference  to  the  whole  physical  universe  is  but  the 
intellectual  expression  of  this  doubt.  If  this  world  had 
been,  in  the  full  sense  of  the  word,  a  creation  of  God,  it 
would  have  been,  as  in  his  view  it  was  not,  a  worthy 
object  of  attention  to  Man.  We  sum  up  his  whole  view 
of  what  we  should  call  Nature  when  wc  remind  the 
reader  that  his  account  of  the  material  world  and  its 
origin  is  the  only  work  in  which  lie  docs  not  take  his 
beloved  master  as  a  guide.  Socrates  appears  in  the 
*'  Timoeus,"  not,  as  in  every  other  dialogue,  as  the  critical 


298  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

investigator,  but  merely  as  the  attentive  listener.  To 
use  his  own  homely  metaphor,  he  ceases  to  practise  his 
mother's  trade  ;  he  delivers  no  pregnant  mind  of  nascent 
truth ;  he  greets  mature  opinion ;  he  does  not  look  for 
infant  knowledge.  From  the  time  that  Timaeus  begins 
his  exposition  Socrates  remains  as  silent  as  some 
modern  man  of  science  beneath  the  pulpit  of  an  eloquent 
preacher ;  there  is  no  occasion  for  him  to  bring  his 
elenchiis  to  bear  on  an  exposition  which  expressly  abdi- 
cates all  pretension  to  bring  the  mind  into  contact  with 
knowledge ;  which  is  content  with  a  probable  and  plau- 
sible set  of  guesses  on  a  subject  respecting  which  nothing 
can  be  known.  Man  cannot  know  what  God  has  not, 
in  the  fullest  sense  of  the  word,  created.  God  did  the 
best  possible  with  matter  ;  He  found  a  Chaos  and  He 
left  a  Cosmos,  but  the  disorder  is  latent  in  the  order  ; 
ever  and  anon  it  recurs,  and  with  it  the  thought  that  in 
some  deep  sense  the  world  where  it  reigns,  is  not  the 
true  home  of  Man. 

The  very  inconsistencies  apparent  in  the  various  forms 
taken  by  this  belief  in  a  Fall  attest  its  strong  hold  on 
the  mind  of  Plato.  Perhaps  the  work  of  Creation  was 
given  up,  at  the  moment  when  Man  was  to  be  called  into 
existence,  into  the  hands  of  inferior  deities  ;  or  perhaps 
it  is  in  the  course  of  history  that  we  must  trace  this 
degeneracy  ;  the  Creator  guided  the  world  at  first,  but 
when  He  let  it  go,  its  course  was  reversed,  and  it  soon 
forgot  His  guidance.  Or  else  (and  this  version  of  the 
belief  would  appear  to  express  his  deepest  thought)  the 
birth  of  every  human  being  is  a  repetition  of  the  Fall ; 
each  soul,  as  it  clothes  itself  in  flesh,  descends  from 
Heaven.'^      "  Perchance  in  truth   the  dead  are  happiest," 

1  Compare  the  account  of  the  Creation  in  the  "Timaeus,"  and  of  what  we  may- 
call  the  Fall  in  the  "  Pohticus  ;  "  the  first  makes  the  last  unnecessary.  For  the 
sense  of  an  individual  degeneracy,  see  the  myth  at  the  end  of  the  "  Republic," 
and  in  the  "  Phaedrus." 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  299 

he  concedes  to  a  scornful  antagonist  who  has  made  the 
statement  as  a  jeer ;  "  truly  thou  sayest  that  life  is  an 
awful  thing."  ^  The  suspicion  led  towards  a  feeling 
the  very  opposite  of  the  Greek  sense  of  life  ;  but  for 
that  very  reason  it  was  familiar  to  the  race  whose 
whole  life  knew  the  rhythm  of  pulsation.  Inversion, 
says  Plato,"  is  the  least  change  of  movement  possible. 
None  recognized  as  the  Greek  did  that  the  opposite 
swing  was  natural — that  to  feel  the  brightness  of  life 
was  but  one  step  from  giving  a  welcome  to  Death. 
"  The  Divinity  thus  gave  a  token  that  it  is  better  to  die 
than  to  live,"  says  Herodotus,  when  he  has  told  a  bright 
child-like  legend  quoted  above.^ 

"  Who  shall  declare  if  seeming  Life  be  Death, 
If  seemincr  Death  be  but  the  dawnin?  Life  ?  " 


•o 


asks  Euripides,'*  in  hardly  more  poetic  words.  He  may 
here  have  been  thinking  of  the  verse  of  an  earlier  poet,^ 
who,  in  describing  earth,  uses  himself  the  very  words 
applied  by  Homer  to  the  "joyless  abodes "  in  which 
Agamemnon  sighed  ^  for  the  life  of  a  slave  on  earth. 
Life  and  death,  Empedocles  thinks,  have  been  inverted ; 
it  is  the  world  of  the  shades  that  we  inhabit  here ; 
our  home  is  elsewhere.  Earth,  in  truth,  is  Hades ;  this 
is  the  world  below  ;  life  and  light  are  to  be  sought 
in  other  realms,  "  Our  birth  is  but  a  sleep  and  a  for- 
getting ;  "  it  is  by  a  fall  that  we  enter  on  this  realm  of 
death,  and  that  which  we  call  birth,  in  truth,  is  dying  to 
the  splendour  of  our  original  home,  and  awakening  to 
a  dreary  exile,  to  an  existence  "  subject  to  mad  strife," 
Life  in   this  world   is   but   banishment,  and   banishment 

1  Gorgias,  492,  2  Politicus,  2G9,  ^  Sec  p.  122. 

*  In  a  Fragment  quoted  by  Plato  in  the  "  Gorgias." 

5  Empedocles. 

"  ijXvOcs,  6<ppa  ioji  vlKvas  koX  arcpiria  X'^pov  (Od.  xi.  94), 


300  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

must  have  been  earned  by  crime.  What  sin  did  the 
Spirit  commit  in  its  mysterious  Paradise  that  it  should 
be  hurled  downwards  to  Earth  ?  The  poet  answers  this 
question  indistinctly,  or  at  least  the  fragments  we  possess 
of  his  poem  bring  us  the  answer  in  an  indistinct  form. 
It  must  have  been  some  awful  guilt  which  took  the  place 
of  Man's  first  disobedience,  and  most  readers  will  feel 
it  the  more  impressive  that  its  character  is  mysterious. 
Yet,  though  more  awful  than  the  sin  of  Adam,  its  con- 
sequences are  less  dark.  The  Heaven  of  which  life  has 
deprived  the  poet  is  one  to  which  death  shall  restore 
him,  if  the  intermediate  world  of  Purgatory  be  rightly 
used.  "  The  amplitude  of  bliss,"  from  which  he  has  been 
hurled  earthwards,  lies  before  him  as  well  as  behind  him  ; 
he  is  separated  from  his  past  Heaven  by  a  long  period 
of  evolution,  during  which  he  has  traversed  the  course 
of  animated  existence,  and  has  reached  the  pinnacle  of 
humanity,  whence  he  may  take  his  Heavenward  flight. 
The  dream  is  one  of  those  which  haunt  poetry  in  every 
age,  and  it  is  difficult  for  readers  to  whom  it  is  familiar 
in  this  form  to  say  how  much  more  than  poetry  it  may 
have  been  in  the  early  ages  when  all  deep  thought 
naturally  took  a  poetic  form. 

The  Fall  of  Man  thus  must  be  accepted  as  a  Greek 
idea,  in  the  sense  that  Greek  thought  again  and  again 
returned  to  it,  and  that  the  deepest  minds  of  the  Nation 
were  the  most  haunted  by  it.  But  it  is  not  a  charac- 
teristic Greek  idea.  Man  a  fallen  being  !  We  cannot  look 
at  a  Greek  statue  and  believe  that.  He  is  perfectly 
beautiful ;  he  is  perfectly  satisfied.  He  seems  to  need 
nothing,  to  remember  nothing  ;  a  creature  of  the  Present, 
at  home  in  the  bright  world  around  him,  and  asking 
nothing  but  that  it  might  continue.  Even  the  limitations 
of  Greek  art  bear  witness  to  this  sense  of  completeness, 
this  satisfaction  in  the  finite.      How  extraordinary  it  is  to 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  301 

turn  to  the  productions  where  the  sense  of  beauty  breathes 
through  mutilated  fragments  of  long-buried  marble,  where 
manhood  and  womanhood  appear  before  us  in  a  perfec- 
tion which  has  given  the  standard  of  all  time,  and  to 
see  no  trace  of  enjoyment  in  the  beauty  of  childhood  ! 
Their  men  and  women  were  children  once  ;  to  our  con- 
ceptions they  must  have  been  lovelier  then  than  ever  ;  for 
what  beauty,  to  our  eyes,  equals  that  of  a  little  child  ? 
It  was  a  beauty,  however,  of  which  Greek  sculpture,  at 
its  best  period,  records  as  little  appreciation  as  does  Greek 
poetry  of  mountain  scenery.  All  that  the  Greek  seemed 
to  remember  about  the  child  was,  that  he  was  smaller  than 
a  man,  or  when  individual  affection  brought  in  more 
definite  feeling,  that  the  curves  of  the  face  are  rounder  ; 
an  inattentive,  clumsy  chubbiness  is  the  nearest  approach 
the  Greek  chisel  can  give  to  the  portraiture  of  a  beloved 
daughter  lost  in  infancy.-'-  Why  were  the  Artist  people 
blind  to  the  beauty  of  infancy  ?  Because  they  had  no 
interest  in  anything  incomplete.  They  lived  in  the 
absolute,  the  finite,  the  full  daylight  of  life  ;  its  dawn 
and  its  twilight  alike  were  to  them  uninteresting.  They 
seem  to  record,  for  all  time,  the  pride  and  glory  of 
youth.  The  Greek,  as  his  sculptured  records  show  him, 
meets  all  the  perils  and  disasters  of  life  with  a  smile — 
sometimes  a  pathetic  smile,  but  a  smile  always.  They 
could  not,  except  in  rare  moments  reached  by  a  few  of 
their  deepest  minds,  contemplate  that  side  of  life  which 
approaches  the  idea  of  a  Fall.  They  could  not  be 
sufficiently  interested  in  the  Imperfect  to  conceive  of 
a  higher  perfection  than  that  which  man  had  attained 
already. 

1  This  must  be  brought  home  to  all  who  have  enjoyed  tlic  beautiful  Atlicnian 
sepulchral  remains,  lately  made  accessible  through  the  photograph.  There  is 
a  touching  relief  of  a  little  girl  caressing  her  pet  dog,  where  one  is  astonished 
to  see  the  execution  of  what  was  evidently  a  task  imposed  by  loving  regret,  so 
clumsy  and  almost  ugly  in  its  result. 


302  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

When  the  world,  moulded  by  Greek  thought,  accepted 
the  faith  of  Judaea,  and  the  two  were  blended  in  a 
mystic  system  which  we  know  as  Gnosticism,  it  was 
in  the  Fall  of  God  rather  than  of  Man,  that  an  answer 
was  sought  to  the  problem  by  which  the  heart  of  the 
Greek  had  never  been  tormented,  and  his  brain  but 
slightly  exercised.  But,  in  truth,  it  is  with  Man's 
relation  to  the  Divine  world  under  the  progress  of 
Religion,  as  with  Man's  relation  to  the  animal  world 
under  the  progress  of  Science.  The  barrier  seems  in 
both  cases  to  disappear.  He  descends  from  the  Divine 
on  one  hand  ;  he  ascends  from  the  animal  on  the  other. 
The  endeavour  to  trace  his  history  on  either  side  shows 
signs  of  hesitation  as  it  speaks  of  origin.  We  see,  when 
we  pursue  any  moral  behef  through  the  course  of  the 
ages,  that  it  crosses  and  recrosses  the  boundary  sepa- 
rating the  Divine  and  human  worlds,  or  rather  that  it 
is  seen  now  on  this  side,  now  on  that,  according  to  the 
position  of  the  mind  that  reflects  it.  Was  it  a  man 
who  fell,  or  a  God  ?  The  fact  seems  more  definite  than 
the  person.  In  some  mysterious  way  the  Creation  was 
connected  with  the  Fall,  and  it  constantly  appears  as 
though  the  Fall  were  the  earlier  event  of  the  two,  as 
if  all  things  earthly  had  their  origin  in  disaster. 

The  message  of  the  Jew  bearing  witness  to  an 
Almighty  One  had  come  into  an  atmosphere  charged 
with  this  deep  sense  of  futility  in  all  things  earthl}^ ; 
the  old  order  of  things  had  passed  away ;  no  stately 
civic  life  awakened  enthusiasm,  no  great  ideas  kept 
the  mental  circulation  vigorous.  It  was  just  when 
men  were  feeling  as  if  the  best  thing  was  death,  that 
they  were  taught  that  Life  was  the  gift  of  God.  The 
world  was  a  ruin,  and  yet  the  world  was  a  unity.  The 
nations  were  united  in  a  single  whole,  but  in  this  vast 
organism  there  was  no  life.      It  was  as  if  a  man  had 


\ 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  303 

succeeded  in  unlocking  a  carefully  guarded  casket,  and 
found  it  empty.  It  was  not  that  the  world  was  then 
specially  bad,  but  men  were  taught  for  the  first  time  to 
wonder  why  it  was  not  good.  The  idea  of  Unity  had 
never  before  been  brought  home  to  European  thinkers ; 
from  within  and  without  alike  the  lesson  was  now  pressed 
upon  them.  They  saw  the  world  arranged  round  one 
centre ;  they  heard  of  one  invisible  Author.  They  saw 
it  for  the  first  time  as  a  whole,  and  they  saw  that  it  was 
not  good. 

It  is  no  temporary  belief  dependent  on  circumstance 
which  leads  men  to  associate  Unity  with  all  perfection. 
It  is  a  result  of  principles  that  lie  within  the  most  pro- 
found depths  that  human  nature  can  penetrate.  When- 
ever man  turns  to  the  Eternal  he  turns  to  the  One. 
Evil  is  by  its  very  nature  multitudinous,  and  all  that  is 
good  is  convergent.  All  good  unites,  confers  on  him 
who  turns  towards  it,  its  own  distinctness  and  purity. 
All  evil  distracts,  reveals  divergence  from  that  which 
should  be  the  centre  of  unity,  shows  will  and  nature, 
which  should  combine  in  harmony,  somehow  at  strife. 
Men  must  have  felt  this  always ;  when  they  felt  it  in 
connection  with  the  new  revelation  of  one  God,  and  the 
near  recollection  of  many  Gods,  they  felt  it  in  the  clue 
to  the  whole  meaning  of  good  and  evil. 

When  men  were  first  taught  by  the  rule  of  the  govern- 
ing race  to  realize  that  humanity  was  one,  and  by  the 
message  of  the  prophetic  race  to  believe  that  God  was 
one,  while  they  at  the  same  time  looked  round  on  the 
world  with  a  sense  of  its  evil,  they  came  to  feel  that 
Creation  was  the  desertion  of  the  region  of  Unity  for 
the  region  of  Multiplicity.  They  identified  the  Creation 
and  the  Fall,  The  sanction  given  by  Divine,  or  at  least 
supernatural  activity,  to  the  evil  world  of  Matter,  took 
to  the  imagination  of  this  age  the  aspect  of  the  Fall  of 


304  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

God,  We  cannot  better  suggest  to  the  reader  the  ima- 
ginative effect  of  this  view  than  by  describing  it  as  the 
first  sketch  for  Milton's  magnificent  picture,  the  super- 
natural figures  crowding  out  the  natural.  In  truth,  all 
that  is  merely  human  in  "  Paradise  Lost "  is  matter  of 
secondaryi  nterest,  "  I  beheld  Satan  fall  from  Heaven," 
almost  the  only  words  in  the  Bible  which  give  any 
groundwork  for  the  poem,  indicate  its  true  scope.  Satan 
is  its  hero;  his  fate  forms  the  focus  of  interest.  His 
abode  is  the  real  world ;  it  is  called  Hell,  but  it  is  not, 
like  Dante's  Hell,  a  place  of  actual  torment ;  we  feel  it  a 
world  of  exile,  but  also  of  grand  possibilities  of  loyal 
devotion  and  of  varied  aims.  Its  inhabitants,  though  de- 
feated, are  still  Gods ;  and  even  in  their  crime  there  is 
something  that  is  majestic  and  impressive.  Satan  is  a 
kindred  figure  with  Prometheus ;  we  may  even  believe 
that  the  poet  was  unconsciously  attracted  towards  his 
theme  by  the  latent  sympathy  with  insurrection  which 
makes  itself  felt  through  his  theology  ;  we  feel  that  his 
heart  is  with  the  rebels,  even  while  his  judgment  approves 
their  fate.  The  world  itself  is  in  some  sense  the  result 
of  their  sin ;  a  human  race  is  called  into  existence  to  re- 
place a  fallen  Divine  race ;  a  vast  calamity  is  commemo- 
rated in  the  very  existence  of  this  framework  of  Being  in 
which  man  finds  his  home.  Thus  man's  very  existence 
is  the  memorial  of  a  Fall ;  his  own  lapse  is  but  the  echo 
and  consequence  of  one  of  vaster  proportions.  The 
Spirit  who  has  himself  decided  it  to  be  "  better  to  reign 
in  Hell  than  serve  in  Heaven,"  inspires  the  creatures  who 
may  almost  be  said  in  an  indirect  way  to  owe  their 
existence  to  him,  with  vague  spiritual  ambition,  and 
throughout  the  whole  poem  we  feel  that  the  keynote  lies 
in  the  ambition  and  the  conquest — for  such,  in  truth, 
the  world  is — of  the  mighty  Tempter. 

The  myth    of  Eden    holds    a   perennial  truth.      The 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  305 

Tempter  said  to  Adam  and  Eve,  "  Ye  shall  be  as  Gods, 
knowing  good  and  evil,"  and  still  speaks  thus  to  every 
son  of  man.  In  the  endeavour  to  know  good  and  evil 
as  God  knows  them,  lies  the  prelude  to  a  fall.  He 
knows  both.  Man  should  only  know  one  ;  and  therefore, 
in  the  sense  in  which  we  can  know  nothing  till  we  know 
its  contrary,  he  should  not  know  even  that  one.  And 
again,  from  the  Fall  comes  Redemption ;  from  the  know- 
ledge of  Evil  springs  the  knowledge  of  a  higher  good. 
We  seem  to  know  God  and  sin  together.  Here  is  the 
perennial  paradox  of  the  moral  life,  ignored  or  inverted 
by  Science  and  by  Art ;  but  to  him  who  seeks  moral 
rightness  above  knowledge  and  above  beauty,  a  perma- 
nent high-water-mark  of  human  thought,  a  limit  to  its 
restless  ebb  and  flow,  testifying  to  a  vast  Beyond,  which 
it  confesses  while  it  abjures  its  right  to  penetrate.  The 
temptation  to  know  sin  ts  sin ;  yet  how  can  man  love 
Truth  and  not  desire  to  know  ?  And  then,  by  a  strange, 
sudden,  inevitable  inversion,  the  seeker  seems  to  discover 
that  the  temptation  to  know  sin  is  the  opportunity  to 
know  God,  or,  at  all  events,  that  it  is  the  prelude  to  the 
deepest  knowledge  of  God  which  man  is  fitted  to  attain. 
In  the  evolution  of  Christianity  this  idea  expanded,  trans- 
cending the  limits  of  humanity,  and  projected  itself  on 
a  superhuman  background.  The  human  temptation  in 
this  view  reaches  to  that  depth  of  humanity  which  seems 
to  need  more  than  a  merely  human  representative.  The 
ideal  man,  it  seemed,  must  be  more  than  man  ;  if  human 
aspirations  have  their  Divine  prototype,  so  have  human 
temptations.  The  Fall  of  man,  as  it  was  conceived  by 
human  thinkers,  was  first  the  fall  of  a  God. 

We  have  already  seen  how,  as  the  shadow  of  Greek 
intellect  falls  on  the  faith  of  Judaea,  the  awful  image  of 
the  Divine  grows  dim  ;  how  in  this  new  atmosphere  the 
Absolute  Being,  as  it  were,  retires,  and  the  Divine  agency 

u 


3o6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

is   carried   on   by   those    personifications   of  the   Divine 
Powers  which  clustered  round  and  centred  in  the  Media- 
tor, the  Divine  ideal  of  Israel.      We  have  here  the  germ 
of  what   may  be   called    a   new   faith;    though,    for   the 
most    part,    its    professors    repudiated    the   name ;    their 
watchword  was  Knowledge.      Of  their  teaching  we  pos- 
sess only  such   fragments  as  their  opponents  have  left 
in  tearing  it  to  pieces ;   we  hardly  know  more  of  it  than 
would  be  known  of  the  science  of  thirty  years  ago  by 
one  who  judged  it  from  quotations  made  by  the  clerical 
opponents  of  scientific  men.^     But  one  who  has  followed 
the   convergent  lines  of   Greek  and  Jewish   thought   to 
their  common  ground  finds  these  broken  fragments  safe 
stepping-stones  between  the  mythology  of  the  Old  world 
and  the  beliefs  of  the  New.      We  see  the  ideas  of  Philo 
blend  with  the  memories  of  Hesiod  ;  we  watch  the  Powers 
of  the  Invisible  and  Formless  One  take  shape   in  a  new 
mythology,  shutting  off  the  awful  abyss  of  Deity  from 
any  contact  with   the  base  world   of  matter,  interposing 
an    intermediate    emanation    s^^stem    whereby    the    One 
should  be  screened,  as  it  were,  from  direct  responsibility 
for  the   realm   of  multiplicity,    of  evil.      We   see   these 
strange  abstractions  hover  on  the  edge  of  personifica- 
tion, and  sometimes  pass  it ;   we  have  to  do  with  beings 
so  faintly  personal  that  we  may  at  any  moment  re-trans- 
late them  into  the  language  of  allegory.      If  we  say  that 
Wisdom,    seeking    to    comprehend    the   Absolute,    sinks 
into    a    region   of  confusion,   and    propagates  error,   we 
speak  metaphysics  ;   if  we  say  that  Sophia,  presuming  to 

1  The  authorities  for  the  following  sketch  of  Gnosticism  are  mainly  the 
polemic  citations  in  the  works  of  the  Fathers,  especially  Irenaeus  adv.  Haereses, 
Tertullian  adv.  Marcionem,  adv.  Valentinianos,  de  Praescriptionibus  HsEreti- 
corum,  contra  Gnosticos  Scorpiacum ;  Clemens  Ale.xandrinus,  Stromata ; 
Plotinus,  Ennead,  ii.  9.  The  last  gives  a  very  interesting  picture  of  Gnosticism 
from  a  Neo-Platonic  point  of  view,  showing  how  large  a  part  of  its  moral 
ground  was  common  to  Christianity. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  307 

approach  the  Supreme  God,  fell  from  Heaven,  and  gave 
birth  to  a  daughter  in  the  region  of  darkness  into  which 
she  sank,  we  describe  a  chapter  in  the  new  mythology 
of  this  age,  but  we  have  hardly  done  more  than  translate 
an  English  word  into  Greek.  According  to  this  mytho- 
logy the  Creator  is  the  son  of  this  lower  Sophia.  The 
Wisdom,  even  indirectly  manifest  in  the  Creation  of  the 
world,  is  a  lower  wisdom,  inheriting  the  memor}"-  of  a 
Fall,  separated  from  the  region  of  celestial  repose  by  a 
long  struggle,  and  the  degradation  of  an  existence  begun 
in  a  fallen  state,  and  bearing  in  its  very  nature  the  marks 
of  disorder  and  imperfection. 

Nothing  more  marks  the  difference  of  Jewish  and 
Greek  feeling  than  a  comparison  of  this  Gnostic  Sophia 
with  the  Sophia  of  the  Proverbs  :  "  While  as  yet  He- 
had  not  made  the  earth,  nor  the  fields,  nor  the  highest 
part  of  the  dust  of  the  world.  When  He  prepared  the 
heavens,  I  was  there :  when  He  set  a  compass  upon 
the  face  of  the  depth  :  when  He  established  the  clouds 
above  :  .  .  .  when  He  gave  to  the  sea  His  decree,  that 
the  waters  should  not  pass  His  commandment :  when 
He  appointed  the  foundations  of  the  earth  :  then  I  was  by 
Him,  as  one  brought  up  with  Him  :  and  I  was  daily  His 
delight,  rejoicing  in  the  habitable  part  of  the  earth  ;  and 
my  delights  were  with  the  sons  of  men."  ^  It  is  almost 
as  if  the  Gnostic  Sophia  grew  out  of  a  distinct  protest 
against  Hebrew  reverence  for  the  Creator.  The  Wisdom 
manifest  in  Creation  was  a  spirit  dating  its  very  existence 
from  a  world  of  disorder,  and  inheriting  a  tradition  of 
struggle  and  failure.  The  Mother  of  the  Creator  is  already 
the  inhabitant  of  a  fallen  world  ;  so  far  must  the  blunder 
of  Creation  be  removed  from  the  Majesty  of  Heaven.  He 
inherits  unconscious  reminiscences  of  presumptuous  aim, 
of  defeat  and  despair;  these  he  incorporates  in  a  Creation 

1  Proverbs  viii.  26-31. 


I 


308  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

which  reflects  them — not,  indeed,  them  alone,  for  a  divine 
spark  is  fallen  into  the  dark  world,  and  the  Creation  is 
higher  than  the  Creator.  But  still  it  is  his  work,  the 
work  of  a  Fallen  Deity.  The  divine  Mother  has  sought 
to  know  God — a  presumptuous  aim.  In  her  son,  this 
presumption  is  heightened  into  the  disastrous  ambition 
of  creating  Man. 

This  new  mythology  provided  for  the  instincts  of 
Hellenism  and  Judaism  alike.  It  gave,  however  faintly, 
the  Many  to  imagination;  it  preserved,  however  illogically, 
the  One  for  thought.  Pallid  abstractions  as  were  its 
deities,  they  did  yet  satisfy,  to  some  extent,  the  instinct 
that  craves  the  Many.  The  tinge  of  Greek  colouring  is 
indistinct,  to  our  eyes  almost  invisible ;  it  lingers  as  the 
traces  of  colour  discovered  by  archaeologists  in  buried 
sculpture ;  yet  still  it  gave  some  shadow  of  satisfaction 
to  minds  steeped  in  Hellenic  feeling  and  yearning  after 
variety  in  the  Heavens  so  recently  emptied  of  their 
bright  inhabitants.  It  has  been  called  "  La  derniere 
apparition  du  monde  ancien,  venant  combattre  son  suc- 
cesseur,  avant  de  lui  ceder  le  genre  humain."  ^  The 
shadowy  and  sublimated  Polytheism  which  we  learn  with 
effort  and  immediately  forget  does  indeed  seem  a  pallid 
ghost  of  that  which  still  glows  in  immortal  poetry  and 
sculpture ;  3^et  it  doubtless  had  its  attraction  for  many  a 
spirit  hesitating  on  the  borders  of  the  new  creed,  and 
sending  looks  of  backward  longing  towards  the  varied 
play,  the  endless  dramatic  interest  of  the  old.  It  was 
prevalent  during  the  dawn  of  the  modern  world,  when 
the  lights  of  Paganism  were  growing  dim  and  the  light 
of  Christianity  growing  strong,  and  its  "  endless  genea- 
logies," carrying  on  the  world  of  Paganism,  doubtless 
found  acceptance  with  many  minds  as  a  harmonizing 
medium  between  the  Heathenism  which  they  had  aban- 
1  By  J.  Matter,  Hist.  Critique  du  Gnosticisme. 


,THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  309 

doned,  and  on  which  so  many  of  their  tendencies  had 
been  formed,  and  the  simple,  perhaps  it  seemed  to  them 
the  meagre,  creed  which  had  succeeded  it.  With  the 
reluctance  with  which  we  sometimes  greet  the  morning 
light  that  dispels  a  fanciful  dream,  many  half  Christians 
must  have  looked  up  to  a  Divine  world  that  had  sud- 
denly become  (as  it  would  seem  to  them)  almost  empty, 
and  sighed  for  the  rich  plastic  variety  of  an  Olympus 
that  mirrored  the  passions,  the  instincts,  the  hopes  and 
fears,  that  quicken  our  human  world.  The  strange  beings 
who  figure  in  Gnostic  legends  formed  an  intermediate 
mythology,  coming  between  the  worship  of  the  Gods  and 
the  worship  of  the  Saints,  and  to  men  craving  after  the 
fulness  of  a  Heaven  from  which  its  bright  inhabitants 
were  lately  banished  almost  any  successors  must  have 
been  welcome  to  fill  the  blank. 

But  Jewish  feeling  found  a  like  shadow  of  satisfaction 
in  this  mythology.  What  the  new  teachers  meant  by 
calling  themselves  Gnostics  was,  that  they  were  initiated 
into  the  hidden  knowledge  of  the  One  beyond  the  Many. 
That  God  was  One  was  being  taught  on  all  sides  ;  they 
inculcated  the  lesson  that,  being  One,  He  is  hidden  in 
remote  inaccessibility  ;  that  the  divine  world  from  which 
this  human  world  has  issued  is  the  world  of  multitude, 
of  division,  of  plurality,  and  hence  its  evil.^  Nothing 
can  seem  more  hostile  to  the  spirit  of  the  Hebrew  belief, 
yet  it  was  by  a  true  Jew  that  this  belief  had  been  read 
into  his  Scriptures.  Philo  had  discovered,  in  the  first 
chapters  of  Genesis,  indications  that  the  creation  of  the 


1  Jehovah,  the  God  of  the  Jews,  being  identified  with  the  blundering  Demi- 
urgus,  they  were  supposed  to  stand  in  a  special  relation  towards  him.  Heathen 
religions,  in  like  manner,  belonged  to  the  dark  realm  of  Matter,  while  Chris- 
lianily  was  a  revelation  from  the  Supreme  God.  Thus  the  three  ideas  of 
Gnosticism  corresponded  to  the  three  religions  of  the  world  at  the  dawn  of  our 
era.  Several  references  in  the  New  Testament  suggest  Gnostical  ideas,  t:£,, 
John  xii.  31,  xiv.  30  ;  2  Cor.  v.  4  ;  Gal.  iii.  19;  i  Cor.  ii.  6,  7;  Eph.  iii.  10. 


310  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

world  was  the  work  of  a  manifold  group,  that  God  was 
only  partially  the  Maker  of  so  imperfect  a  being  as 
man.  This  seemed  to  him  manifest  in  the  expression  in 
which  the  Hebrew  Scripture  narrates  man's  creation.^ 
"  Rightly  is  God  represented  as  saying  to  His  sub- 
ordinates, to  whom  He  deputed  the  formation  of  the 
mortal  part  of  the  soul,  '  Let  us  make  man  in  order 
that  the  blessings  of  the  soul  might  be  referred  to  him, 
its  evils  to  others.'  "      Something  within  man,  he  thought,  I 

was  created  by  God,  but  it  would  not  be  true  to  say 
that  God  created  him.  Man,  as  he  lives  in  this  world, 
is  connected  with  God  only  by  intermediate  emanations  ; 
the  Divine  influence  is  weakened  when  it  reaches  him  as 
that  of  a  magnet  through  a  succession  of  iron  rings. ^ 
His  creator  is  connected  with  the  Divine  world,  but 
is  not  God.  The  very  conception  of  creation  implies 
degeneracy — an  un-Jewish  thought,  but  yet  the  refuge 
of  a  true  Jew,  confronted  with  the  omnipotent  seduction 
of  Greek  culture,  under  the  rule  of  Rome.^ 

A  creator  belonging  to  the  world  not  of  the  One  but 

1  Philo,  Ue  Confusione  Linguarum.  See  also  a  passage  in  "  De  Profugis," 
where  he  imitates  a  similar  passage  in  the  "Timasus"  of  Plato.  Of  the  true 
man  God  is  the  Creator,  but  not  of  man  so  far  as  he  is  evil. 

-  Ibid.,  De  JMundi  Opificio,  48. 

3  The  Gnostical  idea  of  the  Creation  throws  a  vivid  light  on  the  meaning  of 
the  Incarnation.  Irenasus,  summarizing  the  Gnostical  view  of  man's  creation, 
says,  'Ore  TjdeXrjaiv  iiridel^at.  avrbv  (when  God  willed  to  reveal  Himself), 
rovTO  avOpuiros  iXexOe  (Iren.,  i.  12,  3).  The  creation  of  man  was  effected 
through  the  agency  of  the  Demiurgus,  who  was  not  aware  that  he  was  copying 
anything  higher  than  himself,  and  who  was,  hke  Pygmalion,  seized  with  awe  at 
the  result.  Clement  inverts  the  comparison,  Kal  ucrwep  (po^os  iirl  tKelvov  rod 
irXdafxaros  vTrrjp^e  to7s  dyyeXois,  ore  fxei^ova  icpdey^aro  rrjs  irXdaews,  did  tov 
dbparov  iv  avrui  airepfxa  deduKora,  Tr]v  avwOev  ovaiav,  &c.  ;  so  works  of  art 
strike  their  authors  with  a  sort  of  awe  (Strom.,  ii.  375).  This  element  is  sup- 
posed to  be  present  in  Prophecy.  The  Demiurgus  inspires  the  prophets  of 
Israel,  but  he  unawares  chooses  out  for  this  purpose  men  in  whom  is  a  seeti 
of  the  spiritual  life,  and  who  therefore  stand  higher  than  himself.  John  the 
Baptist  "  rejoiceth  greatly  at  the  Bridegroom's  voice"  as  a  representative  of 
the  Demiurgus  (Clem.,  Strom.,  ii.  409). 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  311 

the  Many,  and  therefore  falhble  and  imperfect — a  mate- 
rial in  which  the  germs  of  evil  were  inextricably  mixed 
— a  seed  of  a  loftier  nature,  divine  and  imperishable — 
these  are  the  three  ideas  out  of  which  Gnosticism  de- 
vised a  new  mythology,  satisfying  to  the  needs  of  the 
age.  It  branched  out  into  a  number  of  separate  direc- 
tions and  gave  rise  to  different  groups  of  thought.  But 
difference  between  these  theories  was  unimportant  in 
comparison  with  their  resemblance.  They  all  inter- 
posed a  long  series  of  Emanations  between  God  and 
the  Creator;  they  all  assumed  an  eternal  substratum  of 
creation,  independent  of  the  will  of  God,  and  an  igno- 
rant and  blundering  Creator,  whose  mischievous,  restless 
activity  had  bridged  the  gulf  separating  the  world  of 
Unity  or  Spirit  from  the  world  of  mere  multiplicity 
or  matter ;  and  had  thus  conferred  upon  this  realm  a 
principle  of  development  which  should  never  have 
passed  into  union  with  it.  And  further,  all  recog- 
nized that  while  Nature  is  the  mere  result  of  this 
ignorant  activity,  in  Man  there  is  something  higher. 
He  is  the  work  of  the  Creator,  so  far  as  his  bodily 
organism,  and  what  we  should  call  his  mind,  is  con- 
cerned ;  but  a  higher  influence  has  been  shed  upon  the 
work,  unconsciously  to  the  worker  ;  it  is  as  with  those 
creations  of  genius  embodying  inspiration  which  their 
author  dreamt  not  of,  and  expressing  ideas  which  seem 
to  come  rather  through  than  from  the  mind  that  gives 
them  shape.  The  world  is  the  mistake  of  a  mighty 
blunderer,  but  Man  has  a  loftier  origin.  Like  the  royal 
nursling  of  the  wolf,  he  owns  a  lineage  elevated  far  above 
all  that  surrounds  him,  he  dwells  as  an  exile  in  the  only 
home  he  knows,  and  awaits  a  mysterious  recall  to  regions 
at  once  strange  and  yet  in  some  sense  familiar.  The 
Creator,  so  superior  to  Man  in  Power,  is  in  the  true 
qualities  of  his  inmost  being  distinctly  his  inferior.      He 


312  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

is  the  author  of  Man  so  far  as  Man  belongs  to  the  realm 
of  Nature,  of  which  the  Demiurgus  is  indeed  the  type 
and  representative  ;  but  a  seed  from  a  higher  region  is 
hidden  in  the  nature  of  Man,  and  so  far  he  is  a  revelation 
to  the  Spirit  of  Nature  of  that  which  lies  beyond  and 
above  him,  a  revelation  perfected  in  the  Divine  Man — 
complete  only  when  the  Redeemer  is  revealed  to  the 
Creator.^ 

"  I  feel  that  I  am  happier  than  I  know,"  says  Milton's 
Adam.  The  Gnostical  creator  of  Adam  might  have  felt 
that  he  was  greater  than  he  knew.  He  was  the  mag- 
nified ideal  of  genius  or  inspiration,  that  magic  power 
by  which  the  mind  is  enabled  to  transcend  its  own 
boundaries,  and  become  the  expression  and  instrument 
of  an  influence  larger  than  itself.  Its  work  may  be 
larger  than  itself,  for  a  higher  power  is  active  within 
it,  often  unconsciously  to  the  agent.  The  Jew  at 
Alexandria  had  already  been  taught  to  look  for  an 
inspiration  in  all  his  deepest  utterance,  which  revealed 
to  him  a  world  beyond  himself.  "  Often,"  says  Philo,^ 
"  I  have  found  my  mind  entirely  empty  and  barren  when 
I  wished  to  write,  and  was  obliged  to  retire  without 
leaving  a  finished  sentence.  And  often,  on  the  other 
hand,  coming  quite  empty,  I  have  suddenly  been  full, 
thoughts  pouring  upon  me  like  rain,  so  that,  as  by  a 
divine  inspiration,  I  prophesied,  and  became  ignorant  of 
all  things  around  me  and  of  myself."  What  the  Jew 
felt  of  himself  the  Gnostic  believed  of  the  Creator.  The 
act   of  creation  was   in    both   cases   the  revelation   of  a 

^  A.VTOV  Tov  dpxovTa  eTraKOijffai'Ta  Tr}v  <pa.<nv  tov  SiaKovovfievov  irveilifiaTos, 
eKirkayrival  rq)  Oed/xari  Trap'  iXirldas  evayyeXia/uLhov  (Clem.,  Strom.,  ii.  p. 
37S).  The  saying  which  produced  this  result  is  said  to  be  that  communicated 
to  Christ  at  the  moment  of  the  descent  of  the  Holy  Spirit  ;  and  the  Oedfia  was 
the  glorified  appearance  of  Christ,  or  perhaps  the  sight  of  the  dove.  The 
mission  of  Christ  was  thus  a  Gospel  for  the  Demiurgus,  who  thus  hopes  for 
deliverance  from  the  burdensome  government  of  the  world.  ^ 

2  De  Migratione  Abrahami. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  313 

Higher  One.  "  Let  there  be  light "  was  not  a  command, 
but  a  prayer  from  this  ignorant  blunderer  to  a  Supreme 
Enlightener.  "  I  am  God,  and  there  is  none  beside 
me,"  was  an  empty  boast  or  a  passionate  lament,  calling 
forth  the  revelation  from  a  higher  source — a  consola- 
tion or  a  rebuke,  and  perhaps  both,  as  it  relieved  him 
from  responsibility  for  the  world  which  he  had  made. 
"  Speak  not  falsely,  for  above  thee  is  the  Father  of 
all,  and  not  him  alone."  How  impressive  is  the  dream 
as  a  parable  of  all  the  highest  human  work,  as  a  warn- 
ing against  that  in  man  which  seeks  to  be  as  God,  and 
an  encouragement  to  all  that  within  him  which  seeks 
to  discover  the  work  of  God  !  A  vision  full  of  instruc- 
tion for  all  time  as  to  the  meaning  of  the  least  imperfect 
work  of  Man  came  to  the  generation  which  first  con- 
ceived it  as  a  clue  to  all  that  was  imperfect  in  the  work 
of  God. 

Nor  are  the  dreams  of  these  forgotten  thinkers  without 
their  message  to  our  own  age  ;  in  some  respects  they  are 
specially  worthy  of  the  attention  of  our  own  generation. 
In  them,  as  they  confronted  their  orthodox  opponents,  we 
may  discern  the  first  collision  of  those  ideas  which  we 
know  as  Evolution  and  Creation.  The  question  between 
the  two  antagonists  was.  Is  the  world  the  result  of  an 
act  of  Will,  or  of  a  process  of  development  independent 
of  Will  ?  Is  it  Nature,  or  God,  with  whom  man  has 
to  do  ?  Beneath  all  difference  of  dialect,  of  illustration, 
of  assumption,  the  issue  was  fundamentally  the  same 
then  as  now.  They  personified  Nature,  and  called  it 
the  Demiurgus.  We  leave  it  an  abstraction  ;  but  when 
both  conceptions  are  brought  into  contrast  with  Divine 
Will,  we  sec  that  they  are  closely  akin.  The  Demiur- 
gus creates  the  world,  but  he  works  upon  an  existent 
material ;  he  is  ignorant  of  the  true  nature  of  his  work. 
Creation  thus  understood  is  indistinguisiiable  fi'oni  what 


314  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

we  have  learnt  to  call  Evolution.  "  Speak  not  falsely, 
for  above  Nature  is  the  Father  of  all,"  seems  the  frag- 
ment from  some  parable  specially  devised  for  a  genera- 
tion which  has  committed  itself  to  the  assertion  that  in 
Nature  is  the  Supreme. 

When  we  come  to  realize  the  vast  influence  for  evil 
that  lies  in  ignorant  activity,  we  shall  perhaps  be  sur- 
prised, not  that  this  explanation  of  Evil  ever  existed,  but 
that  it  was  so  much  forgotten.  It  has  been  revived  by 
an  isolated  thinker,  here  and  there ;  and  it  is  curious  to 
reflect  that  one  of  those  who  has  seemed  most  ready  for 
such  an  ideal  impressed  his  contemporaries  as  a  typical 
specimen  of  Atheism.  James  Mill  ^  considered  that  the 
aspect  of  the  world  was  not  hostile  to  one  hypothesis  of 
creation  ;  the  order  of  the  Universe  might,  he  thought, 
be  conceived  as  the  work  of  a  mighty,  but  not  almighty 
artist ;  powers  greater  than  those  of  man,  but  not  dis- 
similar to  those  of  man,  might  be  conceived  as  employed 
in  the  construction  of  this  world,  and  its  disasters  and 
failures  might  conceivably  be  regarded  with  a  certain 
sympathy  for  the  Being  who  was  responsible  for  it,  but 
not  wholly  responsible  for  them.  We  only  need  to  com- 
bine such  a  notion  with  belief  in  the  malignity  of  matter 
to  leave  space  for  any  amount  of  evil  in  the  world.  It 
is  true  that  we  cannot  combine  it  with  that  belief  which 
the  Gnostics  held  and  Mill  rejected.  We  cannot  make 
room  for  God  behind  the  blundering  Creator,  so  as  to 
explain  why  he  permitted  the  elaboration  of  the  evil 
thing  that  was  to  result  in  further  evil.  But  it  is  not  a 
small  thing  that  Divine  rule  should  be  relieved  from 
responsibility  for  evil  in  the  same  way  as  human  rule  is. 
"An  Analogy  of  Religion  to  the  course  of  Nature"  is 
always  an  "  Aid  to  Faith,"  Throughout  the  Roman 
world  men  every  day  were  accustomed  to  the  ills  which 

^  See  the  Autobiography  of  his  son. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  315 

were  due  to  the  crimes  of  a  subordinate  ruler.  Caesar 
was  guiltless  of  much  that  his  ministers  imposed  on  their 
people.  The  Roman  world  in  the  first  ages  of  Chris- 
tianity gave  just  such  a  combination  of  the  One  and  the 
Many  as  the  Gnostics  imagined  for  the  Divine  world, 
and  satisfied  the  mind  of  the  age  with  such  a  harmony 
between  its  inward  and  outward  circumstances  as  men 
constantly  mistake  for  an  explanation  of  both.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  worst  subordinate  might  be  a  ruler 
preferable  to  Caesar ;  but  when  we  see  how  St.  Paul 
could  speak  of  the  dominion  of  Nero,^  we  must  feel  that 
oneness  of  rule  is  an  ideal  so  favourable  to  all  excellence 
that  it  cannot  be  dissociated  from  it  even  by  the  follies 
and  crimes  of  the  worst  of  mankind.  And  although  to 
us  it  is  evident  that  if  Ceesar  had  been  omnipotent  he 
would  have  been  guilty  of  all  that  was  performed  by  his 
agents,  this  inference  did  not  trouble  the  contemporaries 
of  the  Gnostics.  Men  are  slow  to  perceive  an  ultimate 
difficulty.  They  state  their  perplexities  in  many  various 
forms  before  they  perceive  that  they  are  taking  a  para- 
phrase for  an  answer.  They  build  up  long  series  of  the 
explanations  that  move  a  difficulty  one  step  backwards 
before  they  discover  that  this  retrogression  has  left  the 
original  difficulty  undiminished.  And  long  phases  of  the 
life  of  thought  are  sometimes  occupied  with  this  trans- 
lation of  some  problem  into  another  dialect,  under  the 
belief  that  it  has  thus  found  its  solution. 

The  world  began  to  believe  in  the  Will  of  God  eighteen 
hundred  years  ago,  when  the  nation  which  had  always 
believed  in  it  gained  an  intelligible  voice,  and  when  for 
the  first  time  the  world  was  one.  But  men  began  to 
believe  in  it  and  to  question  it  at  once.  The  Creator 
made  the  world  as  a  product  of  Will,  but  he  himself  was 
conceived  of,  again  and   again,    as   a   product   of  a   long 

1  Romans  xiii.  1-7. 


3i6  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

process   of   Evolution    by   which   the   Spirit   approaches 
Matter ;   he  was  for  the  Gnostics  what  man  was  for  the 
modern  Evolutionists  ;   he  was   no  more   than  man  on  a 
grander  scale,  modifying  the  conditions  in  which  he  finds 
himself,  but  not  in  any  true  sense  an  originator  of  them. 
He  moulds,  he   produces,  he   manages,  he  creates  as  the 
artist   creates,   but   according   to   our   idea   of  the  word 
creation    when    it    is    applied    to    the  world,   he    creates 
nothing.      We  have   said    that    according  to   the   Greek 
view  there  was  no  more  reason  that  the  world  should  be 
perfect  than  that  the  Iliad  should   be  perfect,  but  in  fact 
there  was  less.      The  analogy  for  the   Demiurgus  was 
rather  with  Phidias  than  Homer ;   he  had  to  use  intract- 
able material ;   he  worked,  as  it   has   been  finely  said  of 
the   sculptor,    with    a    material   which    hid    his   thought. 
The  Demiurgus,  finding  formless  matter  and  a  disorderly 
movement,    and   leaving    an    organized    Universe   and   a 
set  of  Divine  beings  to  whom  he  deputed  the  creation 
of  mortal  man,  left  things   better  than  he  found  them  ; 
he  put  order   in   the  place  of  disorder;   he  reflected  on 
a   colossal    scale   the  work  of  man    in  face  of  a  rude 
nature,  and  converted  that  which  was  the  mere  nega- 
tion  of  Spirit   into   an   expression    of  his   own   artistic, 
orderly,  harmonious  influence.      He   did   as  a  man  does 
who,  finding  a  shapeless  block  of  stone,  leaves  a  statue. 
But  he  could  only  work  upon  what  he  found  ;   he  did  the 
best  with  it ;   but  the  best  was   necessarily  tinged  with 
imperfection,  and  in  the  new  light  falling  on  the  world, 
imperfection  deepened  into  evil. 

This  Graeco-Judaeic  theory  of  the  Origin  of  Evil  would 
appear  an  answer  to  the  perplexities  of  the  world  only 
to  those  who  confront  its  perplexities  for  the  first  time. 
We  have  been  taught  by  a  long  series  of  vain  efforts, 
that  when  men  seek  to  know  why  God  made  the  world 
as  it  is,   they  are  seeking   to   get  behind  all  the  con- 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  317 

ditions  of  knowledge.  We  see  that  all  which  explains 
to  us  the  reason  for  an  earthly  ruler  choosing  any  evil 
is  that  he  must  choose  some  evil,  and  that  when  this 
explanation  is  cut  off  from  us,  there  is  nothing  for  it 
but  to  confess  that  we  confront  the  inexplicable.  If  we 
start  with  disorder,  we  can  account  for  evil.  The  mind 
seeks  cause  only,  not  reason  ;  asks  how  the  world  was 
developed,  not  why  it  was  created  as  it  is.  We  can 
with  difficulty  represent  to  ourselves  the  condition  of 
those  who  /or  the  first  time  confronted  the  belief  that  the 
seed  of  all  things  lies  in  the  determination  of  a  Mind. 
We  at  the  present  day  are  familiar  with  the  reasoning 
of  those  who  have  rejected  such  a  belief.  But  for  some 
purposes  those  who  deny  are  nearer  to  those  who  assert 
than  they  are  to  those  who  have  never  conceived  of  the 
question  at  issue.  The  men  of  that  age  never  really 
conceived  of  what  we  mean  by  Creation ;  the  Greek  in- 
fluence was  too  strong.  None  who  suppose  the  Creator 
to  have  worked  upon  a  pre-existing  substratum  can 
believe  in  Omnipotence ;  if  God  has  alwa3^s  confronted 
a  lifeless  sharer  of  His  own  eternit}'-,  if  there  is  some- 
thing that  He  cannot  destroy,  His  power  is  bounded. 
As  long  as  Divine  power  was  supposed  to  be  thus 
limited,  the  perplexity  of  Evil  was  hidden  from  the 
minds  of  men  ;  and  the  lingering  influence  of  this  view 
gave  an  illogical  satisfaction  to  feeling,  after  it  had  lost 
its  legitimate  hold  on  thought. 

A  view  which,  under  the  test  of  a  severe  Logic, 
merely  moves  the  difficulty  a  little  backwards,  may  give 
the  spirit  of  man  all  the  explanation  that  it  is  capable 
of  receiving.  It  is  a  deep  instinct  in  the  human  heart 
which  welcomes  any  teaching  implying,  as  Gnosticism 
did,  that  man's  existence  in  this  world  is  by  itself  inexpli- 
cable. Hope  is  ready  to  spring  up  in  the  heart  on  any 
permission  to  regard  the  life  of  the  world  as  a  fragment. 


3i8  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

Whenever  any  form  of  religion  has  helped  to  the  satis- 
faction of  that  craving  which  seeks  to  be  assured  of  the 
existence  of  the  Unknown — whenever  suggestions  are 
brought  forward  which  open  vistas  beyond  the  life  of 
man,  representing  the  career  either  of  the  individual  or 
of  humanity  as  an  episode  in  some  larger  whole,  there 
Hope  finds  room  to  grow.  No  other  promise  so  stirs 
our  human  nature  as  that  of  Redemption.  That  pain  is 
sent  and  wrong  permitted  in  order  to  teach  the  blessing 
of  healing  and  of  forgiveness,  is  no  answer  to  the  child 
who  asks  why  Almighty  God  could  not  give  the  good 
without  the  ill.  But  the  discovery  that  some  kinds  of 
blessedness  are  linked  with  evil  provides  a  dynamic 
impulse  in  dealing  with  the  evils  of  the  world.  Those 
can  strive  against  them  best  who  see  some  meaning  in 
them  ;  to  think  evils  all  evil  is  to  feel  them  irresistible. 
The  paradox  to  logic  is  a  victory  for  life,  and  as  man 
seeks  to  be  a  Redeemer,  he  ceases  to  ask  why  the  world 
needs  redemption. 

This  is  a  truth  for  every  age,  and  in  a  certain  sense 
and  in  a  certain  degree  it  comes  fresh  to  every  age. 
But  it  came  home  to  the  age  in  which  Christianity  was 
born  with  a  force  which  it  could  possess  for  none  later. 
To  that  age  Redemption  was  a  new  idea.  The  world 
penetrated  by  Greek  thought  knew  it  not.  We,  look- 
ing back  on  eighteen  hundred  years  during  which  men 
have  professed  to  believe  it,  and  to  a  great  extent  really 
have  believed  and  acted  on  it,  have  found  that  any  such 
embodiment  of  this  ideal  as  this  world  presents  must  be 
confessed  to  be  disappointing ;  its  influence  on  character 
has  not  given  all  it  seemed  to  promise,  or  after  eighteen 
Christian  centuries  man  would  not  be  what  he  is.  But 
it  arose  to  the  contemporaries  of  the  Gnostics  as  a  new 
hope ;  and  among  the  fragments  of  Gnostic  writing  pre- 
served  to  us  in  the  polemic  refutation  of  the  Orthodox, 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  319 

we  find  thoughts  strangely  familiar  to  Christian  ears, 
expressed  with  the  mingled  awkwardness  and  freshness  of 
a  new  suggestion.  The  joy  with  which  Dante  describes 
the  souls  in  Purgatory  as  welcoming  the  cleansing  pangs 
of  suflfering  should  be,  they  thought,  the  animating  feeling 
of  all  who  suffered,  even  of  those  who  from  the  world's 
point  of  view  seemed  to  suffer  unjustly.  The  world  is 
our  Purgatory,  and  all  pain  is  a  heavenly  promise.  The 
most  perplexing  dispensation  of  earthly  events  is  to  be 
explained  really  by  the  need  of  purification  visible  only 
to  God,  who  can  call  on  no  soul  to  suffer  that  He  does  not 
seek  to  elevate  and  purify.  The  sufferings  of  the  world 
were  a  proof  of  redeeming  energy,  for  they  could  have 
no  other  meaning  under  the  dominion  of  God.  And  this 
faith  in  God  implies  a  faith  in  man,  who  was  made  in 
His  image.  The  soul  of  man  is  invaded  by  an  unseen 
crowd,  through  whose  lawless  sojourn  it  is  filled  with 
pollution,  "  being  like  a  tavern  where  all  is  damaged  and 
defiled  by  the  disorderly  dealings  of  men  who  take  no 
care  of  what  is  not  their  own  ;  "  but  they  come  as  mere 
invaders  ;  and  the  soul  polluted  by  them  shall  become 
holy  and  resplendent  through  the  influence  of  the  One. 
There  will  be  a  time,  says  a  Gnostic  teacher,^  when 
those  who  oppose  themselves  to  "  that  great  and  holy 
Will "  shall  discover  that  they  have  resisted  it  not  in 
strength,  but  in  weakness  and  error ;  when  the  evil  of 
this  world  shall  be  brought  to  an  end,  the  purpose  of 
purification  for  which  it  was  created  being  fulfilled  ;  when 
old  things  shall  pass  away,  and  all  things  become  new. 
"  And  at  the  establishment  of  that  new  world  all  evil 
motions  will  cease,  and  all  rebellions  will  be  brought  to 
an  end,  and  the  foolish  will  be  persuaded,  and  deficiencies 

1  This  is  ascribed  to  Bardesanes,  who  may  be  regarded  as  the  most  Christian 
of  the  Gnostics.  The  first  quotation  is  from  Valcntinus,  in  whom  is  expressed 
the  Platonic  clement  of  Gnosticism. 


320  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

will  be  filled  up,  and  there  will  be  peace  and  safety  by 
the  gift  of  Him  who  is  Lord  of  all  Natures." 

Gnosticism,  embodying  as  it  does  the  new  idea  of 
Redemption,  must  be  regarded  as  an  imperfect  Dualism. 
The  conception  of  Nature  personified  in  the  Demiurgus, 
intervening  between  Matter  and  Spirit,  essentially  em- 
bodies a  protest  against  the  idea  of  a  blank  antagonism 
of  good  and  evil.  We  thus  see  all  being  under  a  three- 
fold aspect,  the  good  and  the  bad  corresponding  to  the 
realms  of  Spirit  and  Matter,  and  between  them  the  in- 
termediate world  of  Nature,  which  was  associated  with 
either  side  according  to  the  varying  point  of  view.  God 
is  the  Fountain  of  Unity,  and  Spirit  bears  the  impress 
of  that  oneness  which  is  complete  alone  in  Him.  His 
complete  antithesis  is  the  world  of  dead  Matter,  in  which 
Unity  is  impossible,  the  world  of  mere  multiplicity,  of 
confusion  opposite  to  God.  In  the  midst  is  the  inter-^ 
mediate  world  of  physical  life  which  we  know  as  Nature. 
Corresponding  to  this  threefold  division  of  the  universe  it 
was  believed  there  was  a  threefold  division  of  humanity. 
There  were  some  spiritual  men — men  who  belonged 
wholly  to  the  realm  of  Order,  of  Unity,  whose  transit 
through  the  confusion  of  material  existence  was  a  mere 
excursion  into  a  foreign  country  ;  there  were  also  mate- 
rial men,  beings  belonging  wholly  to  this  realm  of  Dis- 
order, and  incapable  of  ascending  to  the  realm  of  Spirit ; 
and  there  was  an  intermediate  race,  the  natural  men, 
capable  of  sinking  to  the  lower  or  rising  to  the  higher 
spheres — occupying,  in  fact,  just  that  position  of  choice 
which  the  ordinary  view  assigns  to  the  whole  human 
race.  Or,  again,  these  three  divisions  were  applied  not 
quantitatively  to  the  human  race,  but  qualitatively  to 
every  individual  ;  in  every  man,  it  was  said,  there  was  a 
spiritual  man — a  germ  of  life  and  principle  of  immortality, 
a  seed  of  God  and  spark  of  Divine  fire  given  from  the 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  321 

realms  above  the  Creator  ;  secondly,  a  physical  or  animal 
man,  i.e.,  the  soul,  the  work  of  the  Creator  ;  thirdly,  mate- 
rial man,  the  seat  of  passion,  a  nature  doomed  to  perish. 
Gnosticism  is  thus  an  incomplete  dualism ;  it  is  dualism 
diluted  by  the  Greek  reluctance  to  confront  Evil,  soft- 
ened by  the  Greek  reverence  for  Nature,  which  it  com- 
memorates in  its  divine,  though  ignorant,  impersonation 
of  Nature.  As  such  it  tends  towards  a  more  complete 
dualism,  in  which  the  ignorant  Creator,  and  that  whole 
natural  region  which  is  his  domain,  should  disappear, 
and  the  world  of  Spirit  should  stand  face  to  face  with 
the  world  of  Matter,  as  Good  to  Evil. 

In  truth,  as  soon  as  man  felt  the  evil  of  the  world  an 
oppressive  perplexity,  it  was  quite  as  difficult  to  con^ 
ceive  why  a  mighty  being  should  have  made  the  world 
at  all  as  why  an  almighty  one  should  not  have  made  it 
better  than  it  is.  The  act  of  Creation  was  the  develop- 
ment and  organization  of  that  which,  if  such  a  thing 
were  possible,  had  better  have  been  destroyed  ;  from  this 
point  of  view  the  Creator  is  confused  with  the  Adversary. 
Here  we  pass  from  Greek  soil  to  that  of  the  ancient 
foe  of  Greece  ;  we  feel  the  influence  of  Persian  dual- 
ism stealing  in  be^'^ond  the  personality  of  the  Platonic 
Demiurgus  ;  ^  wc  lose  all  Hellenic  influence,  and  feel  our- 
selves overshadowed  by  some  Oriental  system  in  which 
the  keynote  is  no  longer  the  danger  of  ignorant  activity, 
the  imperfection  of  the  world,  but  the  inherent  evil  of 
matter,  the  primal  antagonism  of  good  and  evil.  The 
passage  from  Gnosticism  to  Manichasanism  is  tlic  logi- 
cal completion  of  this  incomplete  Dualism.  The  ancient 
creed  of  Persia  (at  this  time  lately  revived)  "  mingled  its 

1  The  trace  of  Persian  influence  is  also  discernible  in  (jnosticism,  but 
more  faintly. 

*  Mani  began  to  teach  about  A.n.  270.  Zoroastrianism  had  been  revived 
by  Ardisheer  226  B.C.  It  is  said  to  be  the  only  real  revival  of  an  ancient 
religion. 

X 


322  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

influence  with  the  new  faith  of  Judaea.  The  antithesis 
of  Light  and  Darkness,  with  all  the  associations  of  its 
earlier  symbolism,  pressed  in  as  it  were  upon  the  anti- 
thesis of  spirit  and  matter,  and  relegated  the  material 
world  to  the  dominion  of  an  evil  being.^  The  Creator 
was  no  longer  a  Supreme  Artist,  reducing  the  imperfec- 
tion of  the  world  to  its  minimum  ;  he  gave  form  and  co- 
herence to  that  which  properly  belongs  to  the  dominion 
of  Ahriman.  It  is  indeed  a  curious  inconsequence,  when 
once  the  personal  and  the  material  realms  are  divided  as 
the  realms  respectively  of  good  and  evil,  to  blur  this 
antithesis  by  bringing  in  a  personal  representative  of 
evil ;  but  the  inconsequence  is  full  of  instruction.  The 
explanation  of  Evil,  it  was  urged  sometimes  even  by 
those  who  did  not  see  that  this  plea  rendered  futile  every 
word  of  their  argument,  must  necessarily  partake  in  the 
confusion  of  evil.  This  further  development  was  neces- 
sitated by  the  increased  hold  which  Christianity  had 
gained  upon  all  thought.  Evil  could  no  longer  be  ade- 
quately symbolized,  as  in  Platonic  thought,  by  that  which 
dilutes  and  deadens  good.  Since  Plato  the  idea  of  Re- 
demption had  arisen  on  the  world.  The  Divine  influence 
had  come  into  a  new  relation  to  evil ;  men  saw  it  not 
as  that  which  stood  aloof  from  what  was  imperfect,  but 
as  that  which  opposed  itself  to  what  was  wrong.  The 
new  idea  suggested  an  antagonist,  as  the  old  had  sug- 
gested an  obstacle.  But  this  moral  scheme  embodied 
old  and  new  in  an  illogical  compromise,  keeping  the 
obstacle  and  adding  the  antagonist.  The  principle  of 
disorderly  movement,  which  seemed  dominant  in  the 
material  world  until  men  knew  that  orderly  movement 
is  dominant  there,  became  incarnate  in  a  dark  indistinct 

1  This  account  is  taken  mainly  from  two  works,  Beausobre,  Hist.  Critique  de 
Manich^e,  a  storehouse  of  learning  on  the  subject ;  "  Mani,"  by  Gustav  Fliigel, 
an  account  of  a  fragment  from  an  Arabic  manuscript  of  the  tenth  century. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  323 

being,  and  Satan  appears  as  the  animating  spirit  of  the 
world  of  matter,  which  thus  becomes  identified  with  the 
world  of  sin.  Thus  Ormazd  and  Ahriman  confront  each 
other  once  more,  and  the  primal  antithesis  of  light  and 
darkness  returns  with  fresh  associations,  and  with  the 
old  meaning  confused  by  them. 

The  strange  uncouth  religion  which  we  know  as 
Manichaeanism  was  the  consummation  of  that  tendency 
towards  a  Dualism  diluted  in  the  Gnostic  systems,  the 
natural  or  psychical  region  having  vanished,  and  the 
worlds  of  good  and  evil  confronting  each  other  in  a 
confused  symbolism,  mixing  up  antagonism  of  light  and 
darkness  with  that  of  spirit  and  matter,  so  that  the 
contrasted  worlds  of  spirit  and  matter  both  occupied 
space,  as  the  worlds  of  light  and  darkness  might  do. 
Some  internal  confusion  brought  the  race  of  darkness 
near  to  the  limits  of  the  race  of  light,  and  with  what 
is  surely  a  strange  inconsistency — for  is  not  the  desire 
of  good  itself  good  ? — they  were  filled  with  a  desire 
to  possess  this  new  world  suddenly  made  known  to 
them.  In  the  conflict  which  ensued  Light,  or  Spirit, 
was  somehow  mixed  with  Darkness,  or  Matter — it  was, 
says  the  grotesque  allegory,  swallowed  by  the  evil  race, 
and  the  "  primal  man,"  called  into  existence  to  do  battle 
with  these  hosts  of  darkness,  suffered  a  temporary 
defeat,  and  was  detained  in  this  lower  region  till  de- 
livered by  the  intervention  of  a  higher  Being,  the 
"  Living  Spirit,"  or  the  "  Friend  of  Light."  Through 
this  mysterious  warfare  of  the  powers  of  good  and 
evil  a  seed  of  the  higher  life  had  fallen  into  the  dark 
world  of  Matter,  and  creation  is  an  apparatus  for  re- 
pairing this  calamity  and  recovering  the  treasure  robbed 
by  the  evil  powers  ;  creative  energ}'  is  a  kind  of  ransom 
paid  by  the  world  of  Spirit  to  the  world  of  Matter, 
and  marks  an  episodic  confusion  in  the  eternity  of  dis- 


324  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tinct  dualism  from  which  this  mixed  world  began  and 
towards  which  it  tends.  Thus  the  Creation  is  here  also 
the  result  of  the  Fall.  The  world  of  Spirit  was  un- 
contaminated  by  any  contact  with  the  world  of  Matter 
at  the  beginning  of  the  scheme  which  we  call  Nature, 
and  shall  be  so  again  at  its  end.  Nature  is  the  ceaseless 
martyrdom  of  Soul,  but  its  martyrdom  is  its  deliverance. 
Every  seed  that  breaks  from  the  bosom  of  the  dark 
Earth  is  an  expression  of  the  yearning  after  escape  that 
pervades  the  whole  world  of  Growth ;  the  last  sigh  of 
the  dying  is  the  consummation.  The  drama  of  Redemp- 
tion is  represented  in  a  parable  which  reaches  us  through 
the  citation  of  scornful  opponents,  but  even  so  does  not 
wholly  lose  its  poetry.  The  waxing  of  the  Moon  painted 
to  the  Manichaeans  the  gradual  filling  of  a  bark  with  the 
souls  of  the  departed  ;  when  her  load  was  full  she  bore 
them  to  the  Sun.  And  these  stages  of  the  departure 
from  the  dark  world  are  also  stages  of  purification ;  in 
the  Moon  the  death-freed  soul  undergoes  a  purification 
by  water,  in  the  Sun  by  fire ;  and  this  gradual  trans- 
ference of  the  heavenly  freight  to  the  region  of  light 
repairs  the  original  confusion  of  Matter  and  Spirit. 
When  at  last  this,  the  last  particle  of  Soul,  is  disen- 
tangled from  the  dark  world  into  which  it  has  fallen,  a 
vast  conflagration  is  to  burst  forth,  which  will  consume 
this  universe,  now  a  mere  husk  from  which  the  fruit 
has  been  extracted.  It  endures  only  as  a  medium 
between  the  dark  world  of  Matter  and  the  bright  world 
of  Spirit ;  when  a  medium  is  no  longer  needed  it  is 
to  be  destroyed  as  useless  lumber.  The  Creation  is  a 
necessary  misfortune ;  it  is,  to  use  the  metaphor  of  an 
orthodox  opponent,  as  it  were,  the  amputation  of  a  limb 
— a  disastrous  measure  taken  only  to  avert  a  still  greater 
disaster.  The  final  conflagration  is  to  be  the  reversal  of 
the  original  confusion  of  good  and  evil.     Life,  as  we  see 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  325 

it  here,  may  be  regarded  as  the  hostage  of  a  Divine  race, 
held  by  its  deadly  foe  and  ransomed  at  the  price  of  all 
this  organization  given  to  the  material  universe  which 
we  know  as  Nature. 

Nothing  can  be  more  unlike  the  active,  cheerful, 
hopeful  spirit  of  Zoroastrianism  than  the  timid,  scrupu- 
lous, pessimistic  theory  of  the  world's  origin  which  here 
appears  as  its  progeny.  In  place  of  the  energetic 
spirit  of  the  early  belief,  which  gives  honour  to  in- 
dustry, which  reverences  marriage,  which  stirs  every- 
where a  hopeful  activity,  we  have  a  timid,  scrupulous 
quietism,  a  superstitious  reverence  for  all  lower  forms 
of  life,  a  dread  of  all  that  tends  to  new  life.  A  new 
birth  is  a  misfortune  analogous  to  that  primaeval  blend- 
ing of  the  worlds  of  Spirit  and  of  Matter  which  led  to 
the  act  of  Creation ;  death  commemorates  the  escape  of 
Spirit  from  the  chains  of  Matter.  The  ideal  life,  there- 
fore, must  hold  itself  aloof  from  marriage ;  all  that  tends 
towards  the  act  by  which  Man  sanctions  and  perpetuates 
the  indwelling  of  Spirit  in  Matter  is  evil.  This  ideal 
makes  the  centre  of  a  new  moral  code  ;  it  was  soon  to 
disguise  itself  as  Christianity,  and  in  that  shape  to  in- 
fluence all  thought,  even  down  to  our  own  day.  But 
whence  its  moral  contrast  to  that  creed  of  the  past  with 
which  it  stands  in  a  relation  equally  close  and  unques- 
tionable ?  Why  is  the  new  Dualism  in  spirit  and  feeling 
so  unlike  the  old  ? 

Because  between  the  dawn  of  the  Persian  faith  and 
the  attempt  of  Mani  to  harmonize  it  with  Christianity  a 
world  had  come  and  gone.  Zoroastrianism  arose  in  the 
fresh  youth  of  the  world.  Manichaeanism  was  the  pro- 
duct of  the  Age  of  Deatli.  The  antithesis  of  light  and 
darkness,  the  most  striking  contrast  of  the  natural  world, 
is  in  a  dawning  civilization  the  natural  expression  of 
the  contrast  of  good  and  evil.      It  passes  easily  into  the 


326  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

antithesis  of  Spirit  and  Matter,  and  yet  with  that  change 
its  whole  meaning  is  gone.  We  have  quitted  the  realm 
of  sense  for  the  realm  of  metaphysics.  Darkness  to 
these  early  races  was  evil,  but  Darkness  disappeared 
to  make  way  for  Light.  Matter  was  a  recondite  symbol 
for  evil,  and  Matter  never  disappeared  to  make  way  for 
Spirit.  The  change  of  symbolism  corresponds  to  an 
entire  change  of  sentiment.  Manichaeanism  was  Zoro- 
astrianism  remodelled  as  an  answer  to  the  question. 
Whence  comes  Evil  ?  The  spirit  of  that  early  religion 
was  opposed  to  anything  which  takes  its  starting-point 
from  such  a  question.  But  Christianity  came  into  a 
world  overshadowed  by  the  problem,  and  its  struggle 
with  Manichaeanism  was  recorded  partly  by  an  accept- 
ance, and  partly  by  a  vehement  rejection  of  the  Mani- 
chaean  solution.  It  was  in  this  form  that  the  vague 
speculations  whose  history  we  are  endeavouring  to  trace 
were  mirrored  in  the  great  mind  of  Augustine,  and 
through  his  genius  they  influenced  the  whole  develop- 
ment of  religion,  and  we  may  add  of  irreligion.  Augus- 
tine was  first  an  adherent  and  then  a  fierce  enemy 
of  Manichaeanism,  and  in  him  are  gathered  up  those  ten- 
dencies both  of  direct  influence  and  of  reaction  which 
Manichaeanism  has  left  permanently  stamped  upon  Chris- 
tianity, 

The  spirit  which  opposes  all  natural  impulse  is  a 
mighty  factor  in  the  evolution  of  moral  life.  It  does 
more  than  any  other  to  decide  on  the  character  of 
Posterity.  If  Virtue  mean  resistance  to  Nature,  its 
home  is  in  the  cloister.  The  spiritual  man  refuses  the 
name  of  father,  and  those  alone  bear  onwards  the  in- 
heritance of  humanity  who  turn  from  the  ideal  of  Chris- 
tian purity.  The  doctrine  that  Creation  was  but  the 
prelude  to  a  Fall — even  when  it  disentangled  itself  from 
that  elder  view  which  made  it   the  result  of  a  fall — this 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVIL.  327 

doctrine  was  commemorated  in  a  profound  suspicion  of  > 
all  those  impulses  by  which  man  becomes  in  his  turn 
Creator ;  in  an  arduous  effort  after  that  life  which  knows 
nothing  of  the  blending  of  the  spiritual  and  the  material, 
and  endeavours  to  make  man  lead  the  life  of  spirit  here 
on  earth,  while  it  abandons  the  natural  human  life  to 
irreligious  men,  and  leaves  the  world  to  be  peopled  by 
their  descendants. 

And  this,  in  fact,  was  the  legacy  of  Manichaeanism  to 
its  triumphant  foe.  Manichaeans  were  persecuted,  but 
Manichceanism  prevailed.  Christians  would  not  allow 
that  the  Fall  was  a  superhuman  event  anterior  to  the 
Creation,  but  they  more  and  more  transfigured  the 
simple  story  of  Genesis  with  supernatural  issues,  and 
made  the  actual  constitution  of  things  a  consequence 
of  the  Fall.  What  does  it  signify  that  God  saw  all 
that  He  had  made  as  very  good,  if  this  heavenly  crea-__ 
tion  is  relegated  to  some  b3'gone  phase  of  life,  and  ^ 
the  world  now  stands  under  the  ban  of  God's  reproba-  / 
tion.  Men  believed  that  God  made  the  world,  but  they 
behaved  as  if  it  were  made  by  a  blundering  Demiur- 
gus  ;  their  aspirations,  their  condemnations,  would  have 
gained  coherence  and  justification  if  they  had  been  allied 
with  an  intellectual  scheme  w^hich  recognized  it  as  a 
disaster  that  Spirits  ever  entered  on  their  tenements 
of  clay.  The  wide  remoteness,  the  eternal  distinc- 
tion, of  spiritual  men  from  all  others  was  becoming 
more  and  more  a  canon  of  Christian  orthodoxy ;  and 
although  it  was  a  heresy  to  believe  in  an  embodied 
Spirit  of  Nature  separate  from  God,  and  interposing 
his  organizing  power  between  the  sullying  world  of 
Matter  and  the  Divine  purity,  it  was  more  and  more  the 
teaching  of  Christian  orthodoxy  that  all  the  instincts 
of  Nature  were  allied  with  evil.      The  new   creed   em- 


328  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

bodied  for  a  time  all  that  was  darkest  in  the  religion 
of  Duahsm,  and  when  again  the  belief  of  a  primal  Unity 
returned  as  the  Spirit  of  Science,  the  two  beliefs  stood 
face  to  face  as  deadly  foes,  and  the  battle  cannot  yet 
be  said  to  be  ended. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 
THE   FALL    OF  MAN. 

The  science  of  our  day  has  taught  us  to  regard  the  fact 
of  balanced  movement  as  a  clue  to  the  most  important 
laws  of  the  visible  world.  "  The  imponderable  agencies  " 
of  an  earlier  generation  ;  light,  heat,  and  electricity — the 
metaph^'sic  aspect  of  a  fading  polytheism — are  for  us 
translated  into  the  positive  conception  of  the  swing  of 
atoms ;  we  have  exchanged  the  belief  in  mystic  entities 
for  the  idea  of  that  change  of  place  which  is  the  only 
change  we  can  imagine  in  the  material  world.  All  the 
most  impressive  forces  of  the  material  universe  are  ex- 
plained, so  far  as  they  are  explained  at  all,  by  the  rhythm 
of  vibration  ;  ^  when  Physical  Science  has  brought  us  to 
this  point  she  has  reached  her  Ultima  Thule  ;  our  next 
step  must  be  in  the  realm  of  metaphysics. 

"  What  if  earth 
Be  but  the  shadow  of  Heaven,  and  things  in  each 
To  other  like  ? " 

asks  the  angel  who  in  "  Paradise  Lost  "  expounds  the 
system  of  the  world,  and  the  question  must  often  be 
echoed  by  students  seeking  to  follow  in  his  track.  If 
there  be  a  law  common  to  the  world  without  and  the 
world  within — to  the  mysterious  cause  of  sensation  which 
we  term  matter,  and   to  the  mind  which  feels  sensation 

1  This   idea   has  been  worked  out  by  Sara   S.    Henncll  in  her   "  Present 
Religion." 


330  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  originates  thought — it  is  this  which  in  our  day  has 
taken  such  wide  extension,  and  shown  us  that  which 
makes  all  else  visible  as  in  itself  the  rush  hither  and 
thither  of  invisible  atoms,  swaying  in  rhythmic  balance. 
The  scientific  interpretation  of  Light  gives  a  clue  to  the 
meaning  of  Truth,  as  it  is  mirrored  in  human  minds. 
The  balanced  swing,  which  gives  us  the  vision  of  the 
outward  world,  represents  to  us  that  mental  attitude  by 
which  we  discern  the  world  within  ;  pause,  immobility, 
is  unknown  to  either  region.  The  history  of  thought  is 
a  continual  exhibition  of  the  incapacity  of  the  human 
intellect  to  express  in  any  single  statement  more  than  half 
of  a  truth.  Every  perplexity  which  has  deeply  stirred 
the  human  heart  seems  to  need  two  opposite  answers ; 
and  for  finite  beings  Truth  means  rhythmic  movement. 
The  spirit  which  bids  us  pause  at  any  single  vision  is  that 
which  formerly  promised  Adam  and  Eve,  "  Ye  shall  be  as 
Gods,  knowing  good  and  evil."  God  knows  ai  once  what 
we  can  know  only  in  successive  glimpses  at  the  world  of 
reality  ;  for  us  revelation  itself  implies  change  of  attitude, 
and  there  is  no  conviction  that  will  not  become  error  if, 
in  our  attention  to  it,  we  stiffen  into  immobility  and  lose 
the  palpitating  throb,  which  is  indeed  the  very  pulse  of 
mental  life. 

If  this  be  true  of  all  thought,  it  is  more  eminently 
true  of  thought  which  deals  with  Evil.  In  this  realm 
of  confusion,  if  nowhere  else.  Thought  moves  only  by 
oscillation.  No  single  view  can  be  called  true.  Wher- 
ever we  contemplate  moral  Evil  we  see  something  which 
seems  to  contain  within  itself  a  contradiction,  which  de- 
mands two  statements,  irreconcilable  by  logic.  Perhaps 
there  never  was  a  crime  committed  since  the  world 
began  which  would  not,  to  some  mind,  have  taken  the 
aspect  of  disaster.  Certainly  there  are  very  few  crimes 
in  which  the  element  of  disaster  can  be  forgotten  without 


il 


THE  FALL  OF  xMAN.  ^.-,i 


OJ' 


injustice.  When  we  have  said  all  about  an  action  that 
the  Judge  cares  to  hear,  we  have  yet  to  tell  all  that, 
for  the  ear  of  S3^mpathy,  makes  up  the  true  description  of 
that  action.  The  truth  is  not  in  either  of  these  mental 
points  of  view,  nor  in  a  pause  at  the  intermediate  point 
of  view,  but  in  a  free  movement  between  them.  Human 
justice  has  no  other  meaning  than  a  true  apprehension 
of  the  moment  to  remember  both  the  inevitable  and  the 
voluntary  element  in  wrong ;  what  Divine  justice  is  we 
must  wait  to  know.  At  times  the  idea  of  responsibility 
must  be  discarded  from  the  mind  of  those  who  have  the 
firmest  belief  in  human  responsibility  ;  attention  must  be 
concentrated  solely  on  the  element  of  the  inevitable  in 
human  action.  And  again,  no  one  will  be  just  who  can- 
not forget  this  element.  There  are  moments  in  which  the 
idea  of  responsibility  flashes  through  the  web  of  circum- 
stance, and  bursts  on  the  intellectual  vision  of  those  who 
have  no  belief  in  it ;  nay,  we  may  even  say  that  at  such 
moments  it  is  felt  that  s'//  n'exi'slc  pas,  il faut  Tinventer. 
Wherever  a  man  refuses  to  accept  this  change  of  aspect 
in  human  guilt — wherever  he  stiffens  into  the  contempla- 
tion of  either  the  circumstance  or  the  choice  in  which  it 
has  arisen — there,  however  consistent  his  actions  may 
be  with  a  single  point  of  view,  the  heart  of  his  fellow- 
men  will  fail  to  recognize  justice. 

This  is  not  less  true  for  the  view  that  humanity  has 
taken  of  Evil  than  for  the  view  that  a  man  takes  of 
wrong.  But  the  race  does  not  err  as  the  individual 
does ;  that  vibratory  movement  of  attention  which  is 
the  duty  of  individuals  makes  up  the  history  of  moral 
thought.  We  have  seen  how  the  Greek  mind  explained 
the  existence  of  Evil  by  the  very  fact  of  the  existence  of 
things ;  how  it  emphasized  the  involuntary,  the  excusable 
in  all  human  error  and  crime,  by  sa3'ing  that  Evil 
resides  in  matter.     When  wc   turn  to  the  other  moment 


332  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  the  vibration,  and  note  how  the  Jew,  and  still  more  the 
Gentile  mind  formed  on  Jewish  belief,  explained  all  evil 
by  the  very  fact  of  the  existence  of  persons,  we  realize 
afresh  (what  we  have  to  remember  in  all  controversy)  that 
the  vibration  is  never  simple.  The  antithesis  is  never 
complete.  What  one  man  or  one  party  asserts  is  not 
exactly  what  the  other  denies  ;  men  are  divided  not  by 
accepting  ditferent  answers  to  the  same  questions,  but  by 
asking  different  questions.  Still,  we  shall  find  that  no 
two  theories  are  nearer  being  antithetic  than  that  Greek 
belief  in  the  Evil  resident  in  matter — the  symbol  of 
necessity,  the  type  of  all  Evil  to  the  liberty-loving  race 
— and  the  belief  evolved  in  the  acceptance  by  the  world 
of  the  Hebrew  account  of  Creation  and  the  Hebrew 
horror  of  sin,  that  the  only  evil  was  the  choice  of  Evil. 

The  belief  that  the  very  constitution  of  our  spiritual 
nature  implies  the  possibility  of  Evil,  was  a  natural  re- 
action from  the  belief  that  the  very  constitution  of  our 
material  environment  implies  the  existence  of  Evil.  We 
see  how  Personality  was  made  an  answer  to  the  un- 
answerable problem  only  when  we  see  how  the  very 
opposite  of  Personality  had  at  first  filled  the  place.  We 
understand  best  the  theory  that  finds  the  origin  of  Evil 
in  a  choice  that  may  vary  at  any  moment  when  we 
compare  it  with  the  view  against  which  it  was  a  recoil 
— that  Evil  was  a  definite  tangible  reality,  a  thing 
of  a  certain  fixed  compass  and  amount,  which  might  be 
shut  in  within  its  own  limits,  and  disentangled  from  its 
opposite,  but  which  even  by  Omnipotence  could  not  be 
destroyed.  There  can  be  no  reaction  more  inevitable 
than  that  from  the  spirit  which  sees  in  matter  the  source 
of  Evil,  to  that  which  sees  the  source  of  Evil  in  human 
choice.  It  was  a  natural  thing  to  see  Evil  as  the 
shadow  of  Liberty,  when  men  had  for  long  seen  Evil 
as  the  shadow  of  Necessity. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  333 

This  belief  was  specially  appropriate  to  a  particular 
age.  But  it  is  the  natural  refuge  at  all  times  for  a  mind 
distracted  by  a  view  of  the  eternal  opposites,  Evil  and 
God.  Men  find  in  actual  experience  that  Evil  does 
bring  forth  a  good  which,  so  far  as  they  can  see,  could 
never  be  brought  forth  without  Evil.  It  is  impossible  to 
conceive  of  courage  being  exhibited  or  developed  in  the 
midst  of  safety,  of  honesty  in  the  owner  of  boundless 
wealth,  of  fortitude  amid  luxury,  of  generosity  in  one 
who  had  no  opportunity  of  self-sacrifice.  If  we  are  to 
have  any  virtues,  we  must  have  danger,  privation,  hard- 
ship, difficulty.  "A  brave  man"  is  an  expression  that 
implies  peril ;  we  cannot  say  that  any  one  has  shown 
great  patience  without  also  informing  our  hearer  that  he 
or  she  has  suffered  great  pain  ;  we  could  never  call  any 
one  unselfish  who  had  never  been  in  a  position  where 
he  might  choose  the  unpleasant  for  himself  in  order  that 
he  might  leave  the  pleasant  for  his  neighbour.  Virtue 
could  no  more  exist  without  Evil  than  light  without 
shadow ;  and  if  Virtue  be  the  true  end  of  Man's  being, 
it  was  worth  the  price  of  its  opposite  being  called  into 
existence  at  the  same  time  with  itself  We  cannot 
invest  an  angel  with  the  attributes  of  a  hero  unless 
we  are  prepared  to  see  him  converted  to  a  Satan  ;  and 
if  we  are  to  imagine  a  hero  in  the  Garden  of  Eden,  we 
must  find  the  Tempter  there. 

This  belief  has  alwa^'s  been  the  refuge  of  perplexity, 
and  probably  it  will  still  dawn  upon  many  a  troubled 
spirit  as  a  discovery  that  lightens  the  pressure  of  the 
world's  great  mystery,  and  points  to  a  possible  solution. 
But  in  the  infancy  of  Christianity  it  emerged  into  a  pre- 
dominance it  can  surely  never  regain.  We  have  seen 
how  large  a  part  of  the  moral  energy  of  men  was  occupied 
in  the  contemplation  of  evil  just  at  tlic  time  when  the 
message  of  the  Jew  proclaimed  that  "  God  saw  all  that 


I 


334  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

He  had  made,  and  that  it  was  very  good."  Evil  being 
the  prominent  reality  to  the  mind  of  the  age,  they  had 
to  make  room  for  the  behef  in  a  primal  excellence,  not 
only  as  the  dim  dream  of  a  golden  age  such  as  alwa3's 
haunted  humanity,  and  most  in  its  childhood,  but  in 
that  distinct  and  emphatic  narration  with  which  the  Jew 
described  the  world  as  the  work  of  God  ;  and  as  the 
belief  in  a  Fall  is  the  other  half  of  the  belief  in  a  golden 
age,  this  also  came  into  a  new  distinctness  and  a  much 
greater  prominence.  We  may  say  that  the  early  Christian 
believed  in  the  Fall  as  the  Jew  believed  in  the  Creation. 
Both  believed  both,  but  the  change  of  proportion  made 
the  belief  itself  a  different  thing.  From  the  collision  of 
Greek  and  Jewish  thought  an  idea  that  on  each  side 
separately  was  faint  and  dim  took  vast  proportions  and 
clear-cut  definiteness,  and  a  whole  system  of  theology 
was  elaborated,  finding  its  centre  and  its  form  in  the 
belief  of  a  primal  degeneration.  The  Greek  had  believed 
in  a  Fall  ;  the  thought  of  Greece  was  haunted  by  the 
view  of  this  life  on  earth  as  the  Purgatory  of  the  soul, 
the  dream  that  each  man  who  enters  on  it  has  fallen 
from,  a  Paradise  to  which  he  may  hope  to  return.  The 
history  of  the  legendary  Adam  is  reproduced  in  the  vision 
of  Plato  ^  by  the  life  of  every  son  of  man  who  enters  on 
his  earthly  career  shackled  by  a  supernatural  choice, 
as  every  son  of  Adam,  according  to  a  later  theology,  by 
original  sin.  Or  else  there  has  been  a  fall  of  humanity;^ 
the  race  started  aright,  but  either  by  a  sudden  change  of 
direction  or  by  a  gradual  decay  it  has  turned  from  good 
to  evil,  and  things  are  not  as  they  were ;  anyhow,  man 
now  inhabits  a  fallen  world. 

Again,  on  the  page  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  we  may 
find  this  same  varying  narrative  of  degeneration.      The 

1  In  the  myth  at  the  end  of  the  "  Republic." 

2  In  the  "  PoUticus." 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  335 

Fall  of  Adam  is  but  a  faint  adumbration  of  the  apostasy 
of  Israel ;  in  varied  forms  we  return  upon  it,  for  the 
idea  immediately  grows  dim,  is  forgotten,  and  needs  to 
be  repeated.'^  The  idea  of  an  Omnipotent  Holiness  was 
ever  present  to  the  Jew ;  the  idea  of  human  guilt  was 
only  now  and  then  summoned  to  his  mind  as  the  evil 
world  demanded  such  a  conception.  A  single  page  of 
the  Hebrew  Scriptures  contains  the  narrative  of  the 
Fall ;  the  belief  that  there  is  no  evil  but  in  rebellion 
against  a  Holy  Will  is  stamped  on  every  page.  When 
Evil  became  as  real  as  God  the  proportion  of  these  ideas 
was  inverted.  The  doctrine  of  human  corruption  was 
the  product  of  an  age  in  which  any  theory  that  made  it 
possible  to  believe  both  in  Evil  and  God  was  welcomed 
as  the  satisfaction  of  its  greatest  need.  The  Greek 
view,  which  had  made  some  approach  towards  this  re- 
conciliation through  the  hypothesis  of  the  eternity  of 
Matter,  had  become  impossible  ;  and  the  natural  recourse 
was  to  its  extreme  opposite.  Evil  had  been,  as  it  were, 
banished  from  the  world  of  things  by  the  Jewish  belief 
in  Creation  becoming  the  creed  of  the  world,  and  could 
find  refuge  only  in  the  world  of  persons.  If  God  made 
the  world,  the  evil  in  it  must  be  the  work  of  Man. 
As  the  Gnostics  thought  that  evil  was  inherent  in  the 
nature  which  is  purely  unmoral,  so  their  opponents 
believed  it  to  be  potentially  existent  in  the  very  nature 
of  a  mora/  creature?     Moral  goodness,  it  was  thought, 

1  Apparently  in  Gen.  vi.  1-5. 

-  A  good  specimen  of  this  orthodox  view,  as  against  the  Gnostics,  is  to 
be  found  in  the  dialogue  "  De  Libero  Arbitrio,"  ascribed  to  Methodius.  The 
dialogue  is  between  an  orthodox  Christian  and  a  disciple  of  the  Gnostic 
Valcntinus.  Lactantius,  "  De  Ira  Dei  "  (about  A.D.  321),  says  that  the  answer 
to  the  problem  of  Evil  is  very  simple — "Nisi  prius  malum  agnovcrimus,  nee 
bonum  poterimus  agnoscere."  See  also  Clementina,  Horn.,  xviii.,  xix.,  where 
Peter  confutes  Simon  Magus  by  this  argument.  One  might  multiiily  these 
citations  almost  indefinitely.  Augustine,  "  De  Libero  Arbitrio,"  exhibits  the 
high-water-mark  of  this  line  of  thought. 


336  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

means  the  choice  of  good,  and  the  choice  of  good  imphes 
the  existence  of  evil.  The  one  side  traced  it  to  what 
we  might  describe  as  tJiiugncss,  that  which  we  can  only 
conceive  as  the  opposite  of  Personality  ;  the  other  dis- 
covered it  within  the  very  core  of  Personality  itself. 
Will  could  have  no  meaning,  it  was  thought,  except  as 
the  choice  between  good  and  evil.  A  man  who  could 
not  err  would  be  a  mere  machine ;  goodness,  separated 
from  all  effort,  would  lose  its  moral  character.  To 
transfer  virtue  from  Will  to  Nature  would  be  to  anni- 
hilate it ;  it  means  the  choice  of  good,  and  if  we  suppose 
it  in  the  region  behind  choice  it  ceases  to  exist.  In 
Nature  there  was  no  evil ;  Nature  did  not  admit  of  evil. 
Will  was  something  of  which  the  very  essence  was  its 
capacity  of  manufacturing  evil.  Man  was  created  free 
to  choose  between  good  and  evil,  though  evil  did  not 
exist  till  he  called  it  into  being,  for  the  privilege  of 
remaining  the  voluntary  subject  of  God  implied  the  capa- 
city of  becoming  a  rebel  against  Him. 

From  various  reasons  this  view  has  faded  from  the 
vision  of  our  day,  and  in  endeavouring  to  set  it  forth 
we  naturally  fall  into  the  past  tense.  Those  who  re- 
present the  thought-life  of  our  day  do  not  confront  the 
problem  which  it  aims  at  solving,  and  if  the}^  did  they 
would  not  accept  the  solution.  The  idea  of  Omnipo- 
tence has  faded  from  the  minds  even  of  many  who  keep 
a  belief  in  God  ;  most  persons  have  come  to  admit  a 
doubt  whether  the  word  be  not  altogether  misleading. 
They  see  neither  of  the  two  primal  opposites  ;  God 
is  hidden  behind  Natural  Law ;  Evil  is  resolved  into 
disaster,  mistake,  confusion.  They  see  no  problem  to 
solve  ;  they  feel  no  bewildering  perplexity  to  prepare 
the  mind  for  an  eager  bound  towards  a  possible  explana- 
tion. They  see  evils  on  every  side,  but  in  the  progress 
of  that  science  which   has    made    in   our  century   such 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  337 

gigantic  strides  they  see  also  the  remedy  for  these  evils. 
There  is  no  attitude  of  mind  more  adverse  to  any  specu- 
lation on  the  origin  of  Evil.  The  Darwinian  theory  of 
the  origin  of  species  by  natural  selection  opens  a  view 
of  the  whole  working  of  Evil  in  the  world  of  Nature 
by  which  Evil  is  seen  or  supposed  to  bring  forth  good. 
"  The  survival  of  the  fittest  "  does  not,  indeed,  mean 
anything  more  than  "  the  survival  of  the  fittest  to 
survive  ;  "  the  resulting  good  is  good  merely  from  an 
unmoral  point  of  view.  But  to  minds  occupied  with  the 
part  that  Evil  has  taken  in  fashioning  the  world  as  we 
see  it,  it  is  impossible  to  enter  into  the  perplexity  to 
which  the  early  Christian  view  is  an  answer.  They 
cannot  see  any  problem  to  solve,  and  the  solution,  there- 
fore, is  to  them  unmeaning. 

And  then,  again,  those  who  do  feel  the  perplexity  find 
the  answer  no  longer  sufficient.  It  is  possible  to  imagine 
a  world  in  which  no  sin  and  no  wretchedness  should 
exist  beyond  what  should  be  justified  by  the  virtue  and 
the  joy  visible  by  its  side,  but  to  say  that  this  world  is 
one  which  we  can  thus  explain  is  merely  to  invite  atten- 
tion to  its  failures.  If  the  world  were  arranged  in  order 
that  men  might  see  evil  and  choose  good,  it  has  to  be 
explained  why  men  do,  on  the  whole,  see  good  and  choose 
evil.  He  who  arranges  any  scheme  of  probation  or  edu- 
cation in  the  hope  that  those  subject  to  his  influence  will 
do  one  thing  when  in  fact  they  do  another,  has  made 
a  blunder  ;  and  if  it  is  only  reverence  for  infinite  wisdom 
which  is  to  check  this  criticism  on  a  plan  supposed  Divine, 
that  reverence  had  better  check  the  speculation  at  its 
origin. 

These  difficulties  were  not  felt  at  the  dawn  of  Chris- 
tianity as  they  are  now.  We  have  seen  how,  when 
the  City  had  perished,  and  before  the  Nation  was  born, 
the  individual  life  of  man  emerged  into  a  distinctness 

Y 


33S  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

that  it  never  had  possessed  before,  into  a  separateness 
that  it  has  not  retained.  It  was  not  only  discerned,  its 
independent  capacity  was  enormously  exaggerated.  All 
that  belongs  to  the  life  of  Self  was  for  the  moment 
illuminated  by  the  focal  light  of  exclusive  attention.  In 
the  ancient  world  Man  knew  himself  only  in  relation  to 
the  State.  In  the  modern  world  he  knows  himself  in  a 
much  richer  variety  of  relations ;  and  though,  for  that 
very  reason,  the  word  Self  has  more  meaning  as  a 
separate  reality  than  it  ever  could  have  in  the  ancient 
world,  yet  still  the  other  elements  in  this  relation  are 
objects  exacting  of  attention.  That  which  is  not  man 
has  a  breadth,  a  distinctness,  a  stately  set  of  associations 
with  all  that  is  orderly  and  interesting  which  before  the 
rise  of  Physical  Science  it  could  not  have.  It  was  an 
important  chapter  in  the  history  of  moral  thought  when 
it  paused  between  these  two  phases  of  development — 
when  between  two  continents  a  narrow  isthmus  shut  in 
the  traveller,  and  leaving  him  cut  off  from  all  that  was 
external  to  himself,  forced  him,  for  the  first  time,  to 
study  the  world  within.  It  was  the  starting-point  of  a 
new  phase  of  moral  life.  Much  which  then  began  has 
lasted  ever  since.  But  also  by  the  very  fact  that  this 
age  was  a  starting-point,  much  which  characterized  it 
has  since  passed  away.  The  sense  of  the  completeness 
of  the  individual  life  v/hich  we  meet  first  in  the  writings 
of  the  Stoics,  and  which  was  absorbed  and  intensified  by 
early  Christianity,  is  not  recognized  as  true  by  the  mind 
of  our  day.  In  looking  back  on  it  through  the  develop- 
ment of  subsequent  ages  we  see  it  to  be  an  illusion — 
the  inevitable  illusion  of  the  first  embrace  with  which 
men  greet  a  new  idea.  Man  is  not  free  as  the  Stoic 
thought  him  free.  "  The  hand  cannot  say  to  the  head, 
'  I  have  no  need  of  thee.'  "  That  is  the  warning  of  the 
first  great  man  whom  the  world   knows  as  a  Christian, 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  339 

but  it  was  hardly  realized  in  the  age  which  followed  the 
preaching  of  Paul. 

We  can  say  of  no  other  age  known  to  historians  as 
we  may  of  this,  that  whatever  was  moral  in  it  was  also 
disintegrating.      In    subsequent    ages    Christianity    has 
been  a  strong  influence,  to  bind  or  to  divide,  to  weld  men 
into  groups,  often  mutually  hostile,  but  always  strongly 
coherent  within   themselves.      But    there  was   an  inter- 
val  during  which    Christianity   seems    rather    to    blend 
wnth  the  mystic,  spiritual   tendencies  of  the  world  than 
to  present  any  rallying-ground  for  a  new  army.     A  long 
life  in  the   second  century  after   Christ  might  have  been 
occupied  in   watching  vainly  for  any  sign   that   Christi- 
anit}'-  was  to  remould  the  world.     Everywhere  something 
like  the  new  faith   was  prevalent,  but  perhaps   for  this 
very  reason  that  faith  itself  was  stationary.      The  life  of 
Christ  met  an  aspiration  with  a  narrative,  and  translated 
dim   unspoken    yearnings    into    a    record    of  the  past ; 
these  yearnings   it   found,  and   did   not  create.      Every- 
where  in   that    day  men    were    craving  after  the  hope 
of  immortality.      There  must  have   been   such  a  craving 
always,  but  average  men  had  been   satisfied,  in  the  ages 
of  the   past,   with   a   share  in   the   perennial  life  of  the 
city ;  they  had  hardly  cared  to  ask  themselves  whether 
their  own  life  was  to  be  perpetuated  in  any  other  way. 
Whatever  hopes  were   commemorated   by  the  Mysteries, 
whatever  yearnings   they   half  expressed,  half  satisfied, 
the  true  immortality  for  the  Athenian   citizen  lay  in  the 
immortality  (as  it  seemed)  of  Athens.      As  this  member- 
ship withered,  a  new  vista  opened,  and  men  became  con- 
scious of  an  infinite  possibility  of  hope  and  fear  within 
the  sphere  of  their  own   individuality.      They  felt  stir- 
rings of  something  within   to  which  this  seventy  years 
of  mortal  life  was   as  a  flower-pot  to  a   seedling  oak.^ 
'  A'noblc  spirit,  says  a  writer  of  this  period,  watches  with  satisfaction  the 


340  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

They  awoke  to  a  fuller  consciousness  of  instincts  which 
would  have  been  cramped  and  baffled  within  such  a  span 
of  life  magnified  a  hundred  times.  Men  must  have 
felt  this  always,  for  it  is  the  experience  of  humanity ; 
but  in  the  great  ages  of  Greece  they  had  no  leisure  to 
attend  to  what,  after  all,  was  more  or  less  of  an  interrup- 
tion to  the  interests  of  political  life.  When  this  political 
life  shrivelled,  they  had  leisure  to  listen  to  the  whisper 
that  is  as  much  a  promise  as  a  demand.  They  heard 
the  voice  as  something  new,  and  yet  as  the  explanation 
of  something  familiar.  Apart  from  Christianity,  they 
had  come  to  recognize  an  infinite  value  in  every  human 
soul,  to  suspect  that  in  this  was  implied  an  infinite  future. 
Christianity  committed  itself  to  a  declaration  of  this 
infinite  preciousness  in  a  form  which  could  be  appre- 
hended from  the  outside,  and  translated  into  a  dialect 
comprehensible  to  those  who  had  no  specially  spiritual 
sympathies.  And  thus,  although  it  held  the  germ  of 
closer  union  and  fiercer  antagonism  than  any  corporation 
of  antiquity,  and  was  to  weld  men  into  groups  more 
strongly  cohesive  than  the  republics  of  Greece  or  the 
oligarchy  of  Rome,  its  influence  for  the  moment  was 
threatening  to  all  corporate  life.  It  gave  the  separate 
life  a  new  importance  which  must  dwarf  all  else,  for 
a  time. 

The  thoughts  of  men  on  the  mysterious  future  beyond 
the  grave  appear,  in  our  modern  world,  to  have  less 
influence  than  we  should  expect.  But  we  cannot,  in 
comparing  the  different  feelings  of  those  who  accept  and 
those  who  reject  a  tradition  of  man's  immortality,  form 
any  estimate  of  the  difference  which  that  belief  made 
when  it  was  a    new    thing.      We    inherit    a    literature 

decay  of  the  body,  as  the  crumbling  of  prison  walls  (Maximus  of  Tyre,  Diss., 
xiii.  5).  A  French  translator  (who  dedicates  his  work  to  the  First  Consul,  as 
realizing  the  ideal  of  Plato)  accuses  St.  John  of  plagiarizing  from  Maximus, 
but  no  one  has  suspected  Maximus  of  Christianity. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  341 

tinged    throughout    by    this    belief;    we    have   absorbed 
its  influence,  of  which  we  cannot  divest  ourselves  even 
when  we   deliberately   set   aside   all   that   it   has    taught 
mankind  to  expect.      When  it   first  came  to  be  preached 
— not  as  a  m3^stic  doctrine  to  be  apprehended  by  a  few, 
not  as  a  truth  for  Philosophers,  but  as  a  hope  which  was 
to  bring  comfort  to  the  ignorant,  the  degraded,  the  en- 
slaved—  it  translated  a  belief  into  an  anticipation,  a  lofty 
ideal,   attainable  here   and   there  by  an   Epictetus  or  a 
j\Iarcus  Aurelius,  into  an  announcement   significant   for 
every  one.      However  we  may  explain   it,   it  remains   a 
fact  that  the  greatest  teacher  of  the  Greeks,  as  he  drank 
the  hemlock,  did  not  believe  so  firmly  that  death  opened 
to  him  a  boundless  future  as  did   the  ordinary  common- 
place man  or  woman  when  Christianity  was  new.     The 
belief  in  Immortality,  as  it  existed  in  the  old  world,  was 
an  aristocratic  influence.     The  classical  passage  in  which 
is  recorded  the  high-water-mark  of  ancient  hope  in  this 
direction  commemorates  the  belief  that  great  souls  cannot 
perish  with  the  body.^    When  the  hope  for  a  few  became 
the  certain  conviction  for  all,  it  changed  its  character ;   it 
was  no  longer  a  conception  of  the  destiny  of  genius  or 
heroism,  but  of  every  individual  man  and  woman.      The 
heir  of  immortality  gained  what  the  member  of  the  State 
had  lost — a   share  in   a  perennial   life.     The  ephemeral 
being  had  owed  his  moral  dignity  to  his  relation  to  that 
which  had  seemed  immortal.     Immortality  arose  on  the 
horizon  of  the  Man  as  its  last  glow  faded  from  the  City. 
The  Roman  sailed  round  the  Mediterranean,  and  recog- 
nized that  the  cities  of  the  past  were  not  eternal,  and  with 
the  same  waft  of  conviction  came  a  compensatory  belief, 
that  Eternity  was  the  heritage  of  every  son  of  man." 

1  Tac,  Life  of  Agricola,  46: — "Si,  ut  sapientibus  placet,  non  cum  corporc 
exstinguantur  magna;  anima.-. " 

*  See  the  letter  of  Scrvius  Sulpicius  to  Cicero,  (inolcd  p.  205,  ami  coiniwrc 
it  with  the  letter  of  Cicero  to  Atticus,  x.  8  : — "  Tempus  est,  nos  tie  ill:\  perpetui\ 


342  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

To  men  inheriting  an  unalterable  conviction  that 
Liberty  was  the  ultimate  good  for  man  and  confronting 
a  world  in  which  it  could  not  continue  to  mean  citizen- 
ship in  an  independent  State,  the  idea  of  Moral  Liberty 
came  with  a  sudden  and  partially  illusive  splendour. 
The  orb  just  visible  above  the  horizon  looms  larger  than 
in  its  mid- day  career,  and  all  new  ideas  are  expanded  in 
an  atmosphere  of  intellectual  dawn.  Man,  considered  as 
a  member  of  the  State,  had  found  Liberty  in  his  rela- 
tion to  that  organic  whole  which  explained  and  justified 
his  existence.  This  ideal  perished  when  the  City  was 
swallowed  up  in  the  Empire ;  but  the  aspirations  which 
it  had  nourished  remained  untouched.  Liberty  was  still 
the  word  of  magic  import,  though  the  thing  that  was 
meant  by  Liberty,  on  the  old  ground  and  in  the  old 
meaning,  had  become  impossible.  Around  this  symbol 
all  associations  of  desire  had  gathered,  and  from  this 
they  refused  to  be  separated.  And  thus  the  idea  of 
Liberty,  as  it  was  banished  from  the  domain  of  Politics, 
invaded  another  region.  It  quitted  an  effete  and  almost 
sterile  soil  to  take  root  in  one  which  was  gathering  to 
itself  all  fertilizing  influences.  It  detached  itself  from 
political  life  just  when  political  life  was  shedding  its 
leaves  before  its  long  winter,  and  grafted  itself  upon  that 
individual   life  which  was    to   waken    into   fresh   vigour 

jam,  non  de  hac  exigua  vita  cogitare."  The  letter  was  written  B.C.  50.  I  am 
aware  that  some  interpret  the  passage  differently.  But  compare  it  with  the  follow- 
ing extract  from  the  "  De  Senectute,"  written  five  years  earlier  : — "  Equidemnon 
video,  cur,  quid  ipse  sentiam  de  morte,  non  audeam  vobis  dicere  "  (note  the  tone 
of  hesitation,  as  in  the  enunciation  of  a  new  truth).  "  Ego  vestros  patres  .  .  . 
vivere  arbitror :  et  earn  quidem  vitam,  qua:  est  sola  vita  7iomifianda."  The 
strongly  personal  form  of  this  expression  of  belief  seems  to  me  to  justify  what 
may  be  called  the  Christian  interpretation  of  the  letter.  See  also  the  "  Somnium 
Scipionis."  In  another  direction,  the  craving  after  immortality  is  well  expressed 
in  a  passage  of  that  apocryphal  literature  which,  in  many  ways,  best  expresses 
the  cravings  of  this  age,  and  which  was  written  about  two  centuries  later — the 
vivid  description  of  the  supposed  Clemens  Romanus,  in  the  "  Clementina,"  of 
his  yearning  after  a  certainty  of  a  future  life,  and  the  misery  of  doubt. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  343 

and  fertility.  In  trying  to  account  for  the  evil  of  the 
world  by  what  we  mean  by  Liberty,  we  are  bringing 
together  two  conceptions  which  will  not  fit  each  other ; 
the  lesser  thing  shrinks  and  dwindles  in  the  presence 
of  the  larger.  But  Liberty,  stood  in  these  early  ages 
undwarfed  by  the  neighbourhood  of  all  that  was  might- 
iest. There  was  nothing  that  it  was  not  worth  con- 
fronting to  make  a  Commonwealth  free.  Why  should 
it  be  otherwise  for  a  world  ? 

This  belief  that  Evil  was  the  shadow  of  Liberty  passed, 
as  Christianity  changed  from  a  hope  to  what  must  have 
been  felt  by  many  a  disappointing  fulfilment,  through 
two  stages,  commensurate  with  the  two  stages  of  the 
opposite  belief  that  Evil  was  the  shadow  of  Necessity. 
The  blundering  Demiurgus  of  the  Gnostics  was  an  em- 
bodiment of  Nature,  a  principle  of  error  confused  with 
Evil  as  the  planet  with  the  constellation  immeasurably 
remote  from  it.  The  antithesis  of  spirit  (as  good)  and 
matter  (as  evil)  was  thrown  into  the  background  by  this 
introduction  of  a  spiritual  being  whose  activity  was  pro- 
ductive of  Evil.  Ignorant  activity  dealing  with  Evil  is 
enough  to  account,  as  we  see  daily,  for  any  extension  of 
Evil,  and  whatever  multiplies  Evil  will  seem  to  cause  it  ; 
but  Evil  must  in  truth  be  there  first.  The  Creator  of 
this  dark  world  was  the  actual  cause  of  the  Evil  of  the 
world,  but  he  was  also  an  emanation  from  the  Divine 
Spirit,  and  could  not  represent  Ahriman.  That  more 
complete  form  of  Dualism  for  which  Gnosticism  prepared 
the  way  was  more  distinctly  divided  from  Christianity, 
no  longer  ranking  itself  among  Christian  heresies,  but 
rather  an  intermediate  form  between  Christianity  and 
the  lately  renovated  Persian  faith,  which  seems  to  have 
supplied  all  that  was  vital  in  it.  Nevertheless,  much 
that  many  generations  of  men  have  called  Christianity 
is   the   descendant  of  this   forgotten   creed.      It   was   an 


344  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

influence  both  in  its  direct  infusion  of  belief,  and  also 
in  the  reaction  by  which  it  provoked  a  new  assertion 
of  human  responsibility,  and  gave  a  new  meaning  to 
the  Fall. 

When  Manichaeanism  began  to  be  an  influence  in  the 
Christian  world  a  change  had  taken  place  which  had 
given  the  problem  of  Evil  a  new  significance.^  While 
Christians  were  a  despised  sect,  Redemption  was  of 
necessity  something  that  chose  out  the  individual  from 
the  world,  and  left  the  incorporation  of  the  world  in  the 
society  of  the  Redeemed  as  a  great  future  event  which 
should  repeat,  on  a  gigantic  scale,  the  renewal  of  an 
individual  conversion.  When  this  event  had  taken  its 
place  in  the  past,  and  the  world  went  on  much  as  it  had 
done,  the  problem  of  Evil  had  to  be  re-stated  in  order  to 
adjust  itself  to  a  vast  disappointment.  Redemption,  from 
an  experience,  became  a  dogma ;  from  a  hope  for  the 
race,  the  privilege  of  a  minority.  The  glorious  promise 
of  "  a  new  Heaven  and  a  new  Earth,  wherein  dwelleth 
Righteousness,"  had  to  fade  into  a  dim,  distant  Heaven, 
attained  but  by  few  of  those  who  deemed  themselves, 
and  appeared  to  others,  its  true  heirs.  The  problem  of 
Evil  took  a  new  magnitude  ;  it  was  not  only  Evil  that 
had  to  be  explained,  but  triumphant  Evil. 

No  hope  that  the  world  has  ever  known  can  have 
been  on  a  level  with  that  which  was  felt  by  Christians 
when  first  Christianity  became  the  faith  of  the  world. 
Something  faintly  approaching  it  may  possibly  have 
been  inspired  by  the  dawn  of  the  French  Revolution  ; 
perhaps  something  of  the  same  kind  is  roused  in  the 
minds  of  many  by  that  triumph  of  Democracy  in  our 
day  which  the   French  Revolution   at  once  initiated  and 

1  The  treatise  of  Clement,  "  Quis  Dives  Salvetur,"  seems  to  me  an  expression 
of  the  new  attitude  of  Christianity  to  a  stable  world,  as  compared  with  the 
earlier  spirit  of  waiting  for  the  Lord. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  345 

delayed.  But  never  since  a  despised  and  persecuted 
faith  was  adopted  by  the  ruler  of  the  Western  world 
was  it  possible  that  a  change  should  create  such  hope 
as  was  felt  b}^  the  adherents  of  that  faith,  for  no  change, 
since  then,  has  been  either  so  wide-reaching  or  so  deeply 
penetrating.  We  cannot  say  that  at  any  particular  point 
of  time  Europe  was  Catholic  and  became  Protestant,  or 
that  it  was  aristocratic  and  became  democratic ;  but  we 
may  say  that  at  a  particular  time  (though  no  doubt  one 
less  narrowly  limited  than  is  usually  supposed)  Europe 
was  Pagan  and  became  Christian.  Christianity  conquered 
in  a  sense  that  Protestantism  never  conquered ;  it  was 
always  possible  for  Protestants  to  attribute  the  un- 
satisfactoriness  of  Protestant  Europe  to  the  hostility  of 
Catholic  Europe  ;  but  Christian  Europe  had  no  Pagan 
Europe  to  contend  with.  The  miser}^,  the  disorder,  the 
baffling  tumult  of  the  last  hours  of  Paganism  must  have 
formed  to  the  eyes  of  Christians  a  black  background, 
against  which  they  were  at  last  to  behold  the  image 
of  triumphant  righteousness.  The  Church  was  to  rule 
the  world  ;  the  reign  of  disorder  and  cruelty  must  be 
past  for  ever.  The  disappointment  which  ensued  is 
the  concentration  and  quintessence  of  a  feeling  that 
Christians  must  share,  to  some  extent,  at  all  times. 
A  Christian  thinker  of  our  own  time  has  expressed 
the  feeling  in  words  which  we  may  take  as  its  classic 
utterance  for  every  time.  "  The  world,"  says  John 
Henry  Newman,  "  seems  simply  to  give  the  lie  to  tliat 
great  truth  of  which  my  whole  being  is  full,  and  the 
effect  upon  me  is  in  consequence  as  confusing  as  if 
it  denied  that  I  am  in  existence  myself  If  1  looked 
into  a  mirror  and  did  not  see  my  face,  1  should  have 
that  sort  of  feeling  which  actually  comes  upon  mc  when 
1  look  into  this  living  busy  world  and  sec  no  trace  of 
the  Creator."      Man  still  needs  a  Saviour,  though  here 


346  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  there  men  have  found  a  Saviour.  The  redeemed 
soul  does  not  inhabit  a  redeemed  world.  Centuries  of 
familiarity  almost  take  the  place  of  explanation  ;  we  are 
so  accustomed  to  contemplate  life  as  it  is  and  the  hope 
of  the  Church  side  by  side  that  we  sometimes  feel  as  if 
they  were  reconciled.  But  no  such  possibility  was  open 
to  men  in  whose  time  the  Church  and  the  world  first 
embraced.  They  saw  a  world  farther  even  than  ours 
from  the  ideal  of  Redemption,  and  they  looked  to  see 
the  ideal  of  Redemption  triumphant.  Hence  the  eclipse 
of  a  great  hope  darkened  all  their  thought,  and  the 
theories  which  they  bequeathed  to  posterity  were  coloured 
by  the  need  of  explaining  what  seemed  to  them  the  de- 
feat of  God. 

The  Augustinian  scheme  incorporates  a  disappointment 
without  parallel  in  the  world's  history  in  a  logical  and 
coherent  system.  The  universe,  on  which  God  looked 
and  pronounced  it  very  good,  had  no  history  but  that  of 
disaster ;  the  very  origin  of  all  human  activity  was  a  re- 
nunciation of  loyalty  to  the  Creator.  All  that  man  could 
ever  know  of  human  activity  was  stamped  with  evil,  for 
the  initial  act  of  human  activity  had  been  to  call  evil  into 
existence,  and  from  that  moment  man  was  in  bondage 
to  his  own  Creation.  Thus  the  Creation  itself,  if  it  were 
judged  as  any  work  of  human  endeavour,  must  be  en- 
titled a  gigantic  mistake  ;  the  creature  was  a  rebel  from 
the  moment  of  his  existence.  The  belief  which  we  may 
thus  describe  has  lasted  almost  to  our  own  day.  But 
it  could  surely  have  arisen  only  in  an  epoch  when 
Christianity  had  just  acceded  to  the  government  of  the 
world,  and  men  had  seen  what  it  could  not  do. 

Then  it  was  that  a  great   change  came  over  the  con- 
ception  of  man's    responsibility.^      While    supplemented 

1  There  is   an   interesting   passage    in    Augustine's    treatise,    ' '  De   Libero 
Arbitrio,"  i.,  xii.  24,  wliere  he  seems  to  set  his  face  for  the  first  time  towards 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  347 

by  all  those  vague  anticipations  which  sprang  from  the 
very  existence  of  a  world  awaiting  conversion,  the  moral 
freedom  of  man  bore  the  weight  of  the  world's  evil  as 
a  mere  fact  of  human  consciousness.  When  the  con- 
version of  civilized  society,  as  it  was  known  to  the  men 
of  that  time,  brought  about  no  transformation  of  humanity, 
a  new  dimension,  as  it  were,  was  needed  for  human  failure, 
and  then  first  it  was  that  the  shadow  of  the  Fall,  in  all 
its  depth,  was  cast  upon  the  path  of  Man.  Men,  it  was 
felt,  were  imprisoned  in  evil ;  yet  Man  was  made  by  God. 
Individual  choice  was  too  small  a  thing  to  bear  the 
burden  of  a  world's  despair.  It  demanded  some  vast 
retrospect  of  guilt,  some  Titanic  exercise  of  will,  some 
gigantic  overshadowing  cloud,  reaching  far  beyond  the 
limits  of  an  individual  life.  Human  beings,  here  and 
now,  were  not  free  to  choose  righteousness ;  every  such 
choice  needed  a  miracle  of  Divine  grace  as  its  source 
and  explanation.  But  human  Free  Will  disappeared 
from  the  world  of  the  present  only  to  appear  in  gigantic 
proportions  on  the  dim  cloud-land  of  a  supernatural  Past, 
It  was  raised  to  a  position  of  prominence  and  grandeur 
which  its  strongest  advocates  never  ventured  to  claim 
for  it,  either  before  or  since,  but  it  was  limited  to  a 
mere  moment  in  the  infancy  of  the  race.  Man  had  been 
created  a  free  being — free  in  the  wider  sense  of  that 
word  which  in  classical  thought  was  associated  rather 
with  the  idea  of  dominion  than  of  the  mere  absence  of 
restraint.     But  Man  had   chosen   to  invade   the  preroga- 

thc  idea  of  inherited  guilt,  not  in  the  aspect  under  which  he  was  to  formulate  it 
ultimately,  as  a  corporate  heritage  of  the  race,  hut  rather  as  the  dream  which 
I'lato  seems  to  have  borrowed  from  Empedoclcs,  of  a  pre-natal  fall  from 
Heaven  to  Karth.  It  is  a  question,  he  says,  if  the  mind  did  not  live  elsewhere 
before  its  junction  with  the  body.  He  was  then  urging  the  moral  liberty  of 
Man,  against  the  Manichaians,  as  strenuously  as  he  was  afterwards  to  urge  the 
moral  bondage  of  men  against  the  Pelagians  ;  but  his  future  path  seems  to 
have  suddenly  opened  before  him,  and  this  idea  to  have  suggested  itself  as  a 
meeting-point  b-jtwcen  the  two. 


348  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

tive  of  God.  He  had  not  been  content  to  remain  a 
Creature ;  he  had  chosen  to  be  a  Creator,  and  his  Crea- 
tion was  the  world  of  Evil.  He  had  used  his  power  to 
sell  himself,  and  of  course  his  posterity,  into  slavery. 
The  typical  Man  had  freedom  in  a  sense  that  no  one 
has  ever  claimed  freedom  for  the  average  Man,  but  the 
result  of  his  use  of  it  was  bondage  for  the  human  race, 
throughout  the  whole  course  of  history.-^ 

This  view  of  human  history  gathered  up  that  element 
which  had  been  the  strength  of  Stoicism,  and  joined  it, 
as  no  Stoic  had  done,  to  a  rational  view  of  human  nature 
as  it  is.  As  Plato  had  expounded  the  scope  of  human 
Knowledge,  ignoring  its  limitations  and  confusing  its 
boundaries,  so  had  the  Stoics  expanded  the  scope 
of  human  Will.  Plato  thought  that  the  knowledge 
of  good  involved  the  choice  of  good.  The  Stoics 
thought  that  the  choice  of  good  involved  the  annihila- 
tion of  evil.  Plato  lived  at  a  time  when  the  drama 
of 'history  forbade  men  permanently  to  undervalue  the 
meaning  of  Will  or  overrate  the  importance  of  Thought. 
When  the  time  came  for  an  analogous  exaggeration,  we 
may  almost  say  that  history  had  paused.  The  Stoics 
could  say  anything  they  liked  about  the  grandeur  of 
human  Will,  because  human  Will  had  no  platform  on 
which  its  actual  exercise  would  be  manifested  to  the  eye 
of  the  world.  A  world  without  politics  is  a  world  which 
knows  less  than  half  the  meaning  of  Will.  Humanity, 
as  far  as  individual  experience  goes,  must  at  all  times  be 
familiar  with  that  sense   of  failure  which,  far  more  than 

1  This  is  the  doctrine  of  all  Augustine's  anti- Pelagian  treatises,  and  is  brought 
out  most  distinctly  in  his  "  Opus  Imperfectum  contra  Julianum,"  the  refutation 
which  he  left  unfinished,  at  his  death,  of  the  work  of  that  Pelagian  bishop 
whose  protest  (though  we  know  it  only  under  this  form)  against  all  that  was 
hideous  in  the  doctrine  of  Original  Sin  reveals  a  mind  much  in  advance  of  his 
age,  and  in  some  respects  strikingly  in  harmony  with  ours.  I  wonder  that  we 
do  not  know  the  movement  of  thought  under  his  name  rather  than  that  of 
Pelagius. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  349 

achievement,  conveys  true  instruction  as  to  the  nature 
and  limits  of  human  volition  ;  the  mournful  declaration 
that  "  the  things  that  I  would,  I  do  not,"  is  the  experience 
of  men  and  women  in  every  age.  But  while  it  is  a  mere 
individual  experience,  it  can  never  impress  on  the  human 
imagination  the  inexorable  limits  of  human  capacity,  the 
shadow  of  necessity  that  falls  on  the  very  source  of 
liberty.  To  bring  that  home  to  us  we  need  achievements, 
disappointments,  failures,  all  on  a  scale  of  national  life. 
The  men  who  lived  in  the  Age  of  Death  were  preparing 
for  the  life  of  the  cloister.  Their  aim  was  Resignation, 
and  they  were  free  to  imagine,  therefore,  that  the  realm 
of  Will  was  boundless. 

But  their  theory  of  human  Will,  when  it  came  to  be 
inherited  by  men  who  once  more  knew  a  corporate 
interest,  was  felt  to  be  a  fragment.  To  be  made  con- 
sistent with  the  aspect  of  the  world,  some  addition 
was  necessary  which  should  explain  the  paralysis  of 
that  which  had  been  elevated  to  such  a  height  of  sway ; 
and  this  was  exactly  what  Augustine  supplied.  We  can 
imagine  him  taking  up  a  treatise  of  Epictetus,  and  mak- 
ing it  the  text  of  a  sermon.  Nothing  that  the  Stoics 
had  said  of  the  dignity  and  scope  of  human  Will  was 
exaggerated,  as  far  as  it  applied  to  Man.  Those  only 
could  regard  it  as  an  over-statement  who  tried  to  discover 
its  applicability  to  Men.  Man  had  been  all  that  Epictetus 
thought  him,  supreme  ruler  over  this  subordinate  world 
of  good  and  evil,  subject  only  to  those  laws  of  the  outer 
world  which  belonged  to  a  realm  of  indifference ;  in  all 
the  region  of  desire,  an  absolute  lord.  Men,  it  is  true, 
were  the  exact  opposite  of  this.  They  were  in  bondage 
to  that  which  should  have  been  beneath  them.  So  far 
the  Stoic  and  the  Christian  must  be  at  one  ;  if  any  one 
thought  of  humanity  as  Epictetus  did,  he  must  allow 
that    the    men   who    surrounded    Nero    could    hardly   be 


J3^ 


THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 


taken  as  average  specimens  of  humanity.  But  there  he 
came  to  a  stop.  He  had  to  recognize  a  chasm  between 
typical  humanity  and  average  humanity  which  he  made 
no  effort  to  explain.  His  philosophy  contemplated  Man 
as  he  is  in  blank  despair,  and  could  be  justified  only  by 
the  hope  of  a  marvellous  transformation  in  which  new 
desires,  new  aims,  new  fears,  should  suddenly  become 
the  property  of  the  human  race. 

Christianity,  as  Augustine  remodelled  it,  crossed  this 
chasm  between  the  ideal  and  the  real  Man  by  a  logical 
bridge,  so  firm  in  its  construction  that  it  lasted  for 
centuries,  and  still  remains  as  a  picturesque  ruin,  a  rich 
memorial  of  the  past.  The  Augustinian  theory  of  the 
Fall  discovered  the  Stoic  ideal  man  in  Adam,  and  threw 
on  all  his  descendants  the  shadov/  of  his  rebellion,  a 
state  of  disaster  from  which  a  small  minority  were 
selected  to  inhabit  the  City  of  God.  No  antique  feeling 
was  hurt  by  this  heritage  of  guilt ;  all  antique  feeling 
was  satisfied  by  this  exclusiveness  of  right.  Turn  to 
the  historian  who  gives  his  S3'mpathies  to  Stoicism. 
Read  (but  it  is  difficult)  the  fate  of  the  innocent  child  ^ 
who  owed  her  existence  to  Sejanus,  and  you  will  see 
that  the  condemnation  of  individual  innocence  to  Hell, 
keenly  as  such  a  conception  revolted  the  lofty  antagonist 
of  Augustine,^  had  nothing  necessarily  out  of  keeping 
with  the  ideal  of  the  past.  On  the  other  hand,  his 
system  wedded  Christianity  to  that  ideal  of  the  past. 
He  lived  when,  for  good  and  for  evil,  all  the  distinctions 
which    had    formed    the    pride   of    the    old    w^orld    were 

1  Tac. ,  Ann. ,  v.  9  : — "  Crebro  interrogaret  quod  ob  delictum  et  quo  traheretur 
ticquefactiiram  ultra."  Perhaps  the  populace,  as  in  the  case  of  the  massacre 
of  the  four  hundred  slaves,  may  have  been  vainly  indignant.  But  we  have  to 
consider  the  feeling  of  the  oligarchy. 

2  Julian,  the  Pelagian,  seems  to  me  a  Charles  Kingsley  born  before  his  time. 
But  this  estimate  must  be  confessed  to  be  singular.  I  have  been  astonished  to 
meet  with  no  sympathy  for  him  in  any  account  of  the  controversy. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  351 

passing  away.  A  disorderly  mob  vulgarized  the  proud 
ideal  of  Roman  citizenship,  a  humane  philosophy  soft- 
ened the  absolute  subjection  of  the  slave.  But  the 
spirit  which  the  distinctions  of  citizen  and  alien,  of  bond 
and  free,  had  expressed  and  encouraged  was  just  as 
strong  as  it  had  ever  been.  The  City  of  God  absorbed 
all  that  had  been  exclusive  in  the  spirit  that  defended 
and  enclosed  the  City  of  man.  A  State  without  a  back- 
ground of  aliens  would  have  seemed  as  impossible  to  the 
men  of  that  time  as  a  river  without  banks.  The  whole 
theory  of  ancient  politics  rested  on  national  antagonism  ; 
if  this  attitude  be  changed  to  one  of  conciliation,  the 
fabric  falls  to  pieces.  The  course  of  history  had  ex- 
hibited just  this  very  fact ;  the  instincts  of  a  race  had 
been  justified  by  the  course  of  history.  As  the  privi- 
leges of  citizenship  had  been  cheapened,  the  life  of  civili- 
zation, as  it  was  understood  by  the  ancient  world,  had 
been  imperilled.  All  the  teaching  of  experience  seemed 
to  emphasize  the  exclusive  ideal  of  the  old  world  ;  ^  it 
arose  upon  the  horizon  of  the  inner  world  as  it  dis- 
appeared from  that  of  the  outer,  and  had  hardly  ceased 
to  buttress  the  privileges  of  the  citizen  before  it  was 
seen  in  a  new  aspect,  as  the  peculiar  blessedness  of  the 
believer. 

But  Augustinianism  satisfied  the  spirit  of  the  new 
morality  no  less  fully  than  the  old.  It  allowed  no  con- 
ception of  individual  human  dignity,  such  as  we  have 
seen  in  Marcus  Aurclius  or  Epictetus,  to  surpass  its 
own.  All  that  the  slave  had  conceived  of  spiritual  free- 
dom, all  that  the  monarch  had  conceived  of  spiritual 
dominion,  was  true  of  its  typical  Man.  The  individual 
soul  had  all  that  completeness  which  the  Stoics  had  seen 

1  The  circumstances  durinfj  which  Aiit^ustinc  passed  his  life  were  of  a  nature 
strongly  to  emphasize  this  warning.  He  died  A.u.  430,  during  the  siege  of 
Hippo,  his  episcopal  city,  by  the  Vandals. 


352  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

in  it.  It  had  been  created  by  God  in  His  own  image, 
that  is,  it  had  been  created  a  Creator.  It  was  endowed 
with  initial  power,  as  real  as  the  initial  power  to  which 
its  own  existence  was  owing.  And  it  is  involved  in  the 
very  conception  that  if  this  initial  power  be  misused  it 
will  be  unchecked.  God  could,  in  this  view,  no  more 
create  a  being  at  once  free  and  guarded  from  the  dan- 
gers of  freedom  than  He  could  make  two  straight  lines 
enclose  a  space.  It  was  no  drawback  on  His  Omni- 
potence that  it  w^as  impossible  for  Him  to  achieve  what 
in  truth  stood  out  of  all  relation  to  power. 

The  typical  Adam  of  this  scheme  is,  in  fact,  the 
modern  ideal  of  humanity  transfigured  and  thrown  back, 
in  gigantic  outline,  on  an  ideal  past.  Man,  we  have 
been  forced  to  repeat  again  and  again,  was  to  the 
ancient  world  a  part  of  the  State.  Man  is  to  the 
modern  world  primarily  a  whole  within  himself.  We 
do  not  get  at  a  specimen  of  humanity  by  taking  the 
State  to  pieces ;  Ave  get  at  the  State  by  multiplying 
specimens  of  humanity.  Now  Adam,  as  he  was  re- 
created by  the  genius  of  Augustine,  stood  on  the  thres- 
hold of  Christian  thought ;  and  of  all  human  beings 
Adam  alone  stood  out  of  relation  to  society.  The  modern 
mind,  it  is  true,  does  not  contemplate  Man  apart  from 
society,  any  more  than  the  Greek  mind  did,  but  it  re- 
cognizes in  him  something  that  social  relations  do  not 
exhaust ;  from  the  modern  point  of  view  he  is,  x'i  we 
may  borrow  the  language  of  philosophy,  transcendent 
with  respect  to  the  State  ;  from  the  ancient,  he  was  im- 
manent within  it.  And  the  Augustinian  image  of  Adam 
was  no  more  than  this  idea  detached  and  magnified. 
He  was  the  first  creation  of  the  new  spirit,  which  dealt 
no  longer  with  Man,  the  fragment  of  the  State,  but  with 
Man  the  unit  of  morality,  the  molecule  of  all  those 
spiritual  forces  which  make  up  the  moral  world,  the  inte- 


J 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  353 

gral  object  of  moral  attention,  the  starting-point  at  once 
and  goal  of  moral  thought. 

If  the  typical  Man  must  be  this,  the  actual  Man  must 
be  the  very  reverse.  The  depth  of  his  fall  must  measure 
the  height  of  his  origin.  No  conception  that  had  been 
hitherto  entertained  of  Divine  wrath  and  human  re- 
bellion could  match  that  which  should  be  raised  by  the 
legend  of  Adam  when  once  it  was  mirrored  in  a  mind 
that  interpreted  it,  as  Augustine  did,  by  the  light  of  a 
vivid  personal  experience — by  the  intimate  sense  of  that 
need  of  redemption  of  which  it  was  the  logical  counter- 
part. Such  glimmerings  of  the  legend  as  show  them- 
selves in  Greek  mythology  do  no  more  than  exhibit  its 
loss  of  all  meaning  when  it  is  detached  from  the  sense 
of  Sin.  Prometheus  on  his  rock  is  a  memorial  of  the 
wrath  of  offended  Jove,  but  he  is  also  a  memorial  of  his 
impotence,  as  against  the  dauntless  spirit  that  dares  to 
defy  him  ;  he  is,  in  fact,  like  almost  all  the  more  charac- 
teristic expressions  of  Greek  genius,  an  expression  of 
the  Greek  demand  for  temperance  and  balance,  its  pro- 
test against  unbridled  claim,  its  dread  of  the  infinite. 
Prometheus  and  Adam  side  by  side  exhibit  in  their 
sharpest  antagonism  the  contrast  of  the  Greek  spirit 
with  that  which  has  given  the  legend  of  Adam  its 
significance  and  its  grandeur.  The  Greek  spirit  takes 
part  with  the  rebel,  or  rather  the  antithesis  lies  between 
gigantic  might  and  dauntless  liberty.  We  hear  the 
echoes  of  Salamis  ;  we  are  reminded  that  the  poet  was 
also  the  warrior.  But  since  iEschylus  wrote,  tlie  whole 
purport  of  history  was  changed.  In  place  of  the  great 
King,  whose  power  overshadowed,  as  a  blight,  the 
growing  life  of  a  young  and  vigorous  race,  was  the 
Emperor  of  Rome,  whose  shelter  was  synonymous  with 
the  rule  of  law,  and  whose  dominion  included  nothing 
that   had    independent  life.      All   cnnobh"ng  associations 

z 


354  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

had  died  away  from  resistance  to  domination.  It  had 
been  set  to  the  sweetest  melody  of  national  life  ;  it  now 
recalled  only  the  jarring  discords  of  hopeless  and  life- 
crushing  rebellion. 

Perhaps  all  that  is  most  hurtful  in  the  spiritual  history 
of  mankind  comes  from  the  endeavour  of  great  men 
to  exhibit  the  truth  that  has  been  felt  in  experience  as 
part  of  a  logical  scheme.  If  Augustine  had  been  content 
to  utter  the  convictions  of  his  spirit,  untrammelled  by 
the  activity  of  his  intellect,  he  would  never  have  dis- 
torted the  teaching  of  Christianity  by  adding  to  it  the 
Manichaean  dream  of  a  dark  world  for  ever  confronting 
the  world  of  light.  He  left  as  a  hard  dogma,  crushing 
to  the  spirits  of  men,  and  lacerating  to  their  hearts, 
that  belief  in  a  Fall  which  he  felt  as  a  clue  to  all 
that  was  most  vital  in  his  own  history,  because  he 
thought  he  must  complete  the  Divine  message  before 
delivering  it.  That  ambition,  which  is  truly  the  last  infir- 
mity of  noble  minds,  is  the  ambition  of  the  systematizer. 
"  By  that  sin  fell  the  angels  ;  "  thereby  vital  truth  is 
associated  with  deadly  error ;  and  the  permanence  of 
conviction  grounded  in  experience  is  shared  by  the 
product  of  mere  logical  activity,  unchecked  by  veri- 
fication, or  by  the  action  of  any  faculty  in  man  higher 
than  the  understanding. 

The  groundwork  of  all  Augustine's  reasoning  was 
that  experience  which  made  him  regard  Redemption  as 
the  central  truth  of  the  world.  This  was  no  logical 
creation  made  in  the  interests  of  theory,  this  was  a  mere 
gathering  up  the  results  of  his  inmost  experience.  He 
passed  from  sin  to  holiness  as  suddenly  and  as  irrevo- 
cably as  his  ideal  Adam  had  passed  from  holiness  to  sin. 
So,  at  least,  he  imagined  the  transition,  and  for  the 
purpose  of  history  it  is  his  imagination  which  is  the 
fact.     Redeeming   power  was   the   thing   he  was   most 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  355 

sure  of  in  this  world  ;  Heaven  itself  could  not  deepen 
that  absolute  certainty  ;  he  knew  that  it  was  a  law  of 
the  spiritual  world  as  Faraday  knew  that  electricity  was 
a  law  of  the  physical  world.  Had  he  been  content 
to  proclaim  that  which  he  had  himself  experienced,  no 
man  of  science  would  have  left  less  to  grow  obsolete 
or  unmeaning  for  subsequent  generations.  But  he  was 
not  thus  content.  He  must  incorporate  his  own  experi- 
ence in  a  scheme  of  the  universe,  and  thereby  he  has 
veiled  its  significance  for  all  posterity.  We  have  seen 
how  in  the  primitive  Persian  faith  the  world  of  Ormazd 
is  an  actual  transcript,  on  the  moral  consciousness,  of 
the  Heaven  of  light  above  us ;  while  the  world  of 
Ahriman  is  a  creation  of  the  logical  intellect,  seeking  to 
give  balance  and  antithesis  to  the  actual  immensity  of 
light  by  an  imaginary  abyss  of  darkness.  This  process 
is  repeated  again  and  again.  The  Fall  was  emphasized 
to  explain  Redemption.  The  dark  world  was  an  imagined 
necessity  in  order  to  explain  the  light  world.  If  Adam 
had  not  fallen,  how  could  his  descendant  know  a  Saviour  ? 
Thus  the  fragment  of  experience  was  buried  in  a  world  of 
reasoning,  and  the  truth  of  one  age,  striving  to  complete 
itself,  became  hurtful  falsehood  for  all  which  followed. 

The  Fall  of  Man,  as  the  readers  of  Milton  have  learnt 
to  think  of  it,  dates  from  the  age  of  Augustine.  But  we 
have  seen  already  that  the  sense  of  a  Fall  is  common  to 
both  those  races  whose  antithetic  feelings  and  tendencies 
almost  exhaust  the  range  of  moral  influences  which  have 
built  up  modern  Europe.  This  feeling  haunts  Greek 
thought  from  its  dawn,^  recurring  in  various  forms ;  to 
the  Greek  mind,  the  conception  of  Man's  whole  life  on 
earth  as  the  result  of  some  decadence  from  a  condition 

1  See  the  fragment  of  iMiipcrloclcs,  quoted  on  p.  299.  It  seems  to  Iiavc  much 
impressed  Clement  of  Alexandria,  who  twice  refers  to  it  (Strom.,  iii.  432,  and 
iv.  479). 


356  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

of  previous  splendour  was  perfectly  familiar.  And  then 
again  we  have  seen  how  Jewish  thought  approached 
this  idea,  and  yet  seemed  borne  away  from  it ;  how 
evanescent  at  once  and  yet  vivid  was  the  sense  of  human 
failure  in  the  mind  that  was  possessed  with  the  idea 
of  Divine  Holiness.  But  before  the  complete  fusion  of 
Greek  and  Jewish  belief  brought  this  common  element 
into  a  new  activity  it  was  stirred  by  another  influence  ; 
Jewish  thought,  "  cross-fertilized "  by  that  of  Persia, 
developed  a  new  phase  of  the  belief  in  the  Fall.  It 
passed  beyond  the  limits  of  humanity  into  that  world  of 
spiritual  beings,  which  in  this  later  Jewish  conception 
surrounds  humanity  as  the  atmosphere  the  earth.  The 
Fall  of  the  Angels  is  more  closely  connected  with  the 
system  we  have  set  forth  than  the  Fall  of  Adam  is.  We 
may  speak  of  "  the  first  man,"  but  in  truth  the  Adam  of 
Augustine  is  more  than  man,  coming  nearer  to  the  Sons 
of  God,  whose  fall  is  narrated  in  the  Book  of  Enoch, ^ 
than  with  the  father  of  mankind  as  he  appears  in  the 
Book  of  Genesis.  The  story  must  have  taken  a  wide 
popularity,  since  Shakespeare — the  interpreter  of  the 
vague  diffused  beliefs  of  the  world — alludes  to  it  before 
"  Paradise   Lost "  was   written.^      But  when    he   makes 

1  The  Book  of  Enoch  was  probably  the  work  of  a  Jew  writing  in  the  early 
part  of  the  reign  of  Herod,  i.e.,  about  40  B.C.,  and  though  so  httle  older  than 
the  New  Testament,  was,  as  we  see  by  its  citation  in  the  Epistle  of  Jude,  sup- 
posed to  be  the  actual  composition  of  the  patriarch  whose  name  it  has  retained. 
It  was  quoted  by  Tertullian  as  inspired  Scripture,  and  by  Origen  as  an  alle- 
gorical descr  ption  of  the  descent  of  human  souls  into  bodies,  that  being 
symbolized  by  the  "  Fall  of  the  Angels"  which  it  narrates.  It  is  allied  to  the 
account  of  the  Fall  of  Man  in  Genesis  by  a  great  stress  being  laid  on  the  sin  of 
the  Angels  in  betraying  the  secrets  of  Heaven  to  the  women  by  whose  love  they 
were  seduced — "  Durch  dieses  Geheimnisz  richten  die  Manner  und  Weiber  viel 
Uebel  auf  Erden  an"  (Book  of  Enoch,  translated  by  A.  Dillman).  The  legend 
is  thus  a  link  between  that  of  Adam  and  Prometheus. 

2  And  long  before  Shakespeare  or  Milton  it  was  dramatized  by  the  monk  at 
Whitby,  Csedmon  (ob.  680).  Milton  indeed  probably  borrowed  much  from 
liim,  but  there  is  some  difficulty  as  to  his  being  able  to  read  Anglo-Sa.xon,  and 
the  "  Fall  of  Man  "  was  not  then  translated. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  357 

Wolsey  use  it  to  point  his  warning  against  ambition, 
he  follows  a  different  version  of  the  legend  from  that 
we  find  in  the  Jewish  records  open  to  us.  The  sin  of 
the  Angels  who  fell  from  Heaven  to  Earth  was  indeed 
the  very  opposite  of  ambition ;  their  offence  was  not 
the  desire  to  reign  in  Heaven,  but  the  unwillingness 
to  remain  there  ;  it  was  an  incapacity  to  refrain  from 
desires  unsuited  to  their  spiritual  condition,  a  readiness 
to  part  with  their  birthright  for  temptations  no  less 
material  than  Esau's.  The  life  of  spirit  was  insufficient 
for  them ;  the  seductions  of  carnal  life  brought  them  to 
abdicate  their  place  in  Heaven  and  descend  to  life  on 
Earth — to  life,  and  also  to  death.  For  it  was  indeed  the 
yearning  of  spiritual  beings  after  sensual  enjoyment 
which  "  brought  death  into  their  world,  and  all  our  woe." 
The  actions  which  are  innocent  in  mankind,  because  they 
are  necessary  for  the  continued  existence  of  mankind, 
become  a  deadly  sin  in  those  whose  eternal  life  ought 
to  have  been  enough  for  them,  and  in  the  day  when 
they  entered  on  that  lower  life  they  entered  on  the 
realm  of  death. 

This  legend  repeats  and  varies  the  fall  of  Adam  in  a 
form  which  gives  us  more  of  the  true  scope  of  that 
event  as  the  centre  of  a  great  mythologic  system  than 
does  the  simple  narrative  which  is  its  actual  basis.  It 
shows  us  the  associations  of  evil  with  the  men  of  that 
time  ;  it  shows  us  what  temptation  was  to  them  the  type 
of  all  temptation.  Sin,  if  sin  exist  nt  all,  is  surely 
abdication,  the  willingness  to  enter  a  lower  world,  to 
quit  the  highest  plane  of  being  on  which  existence  is 
possible  and  choose  the  good  of  one  beneath  it.  This 
is  one  aspect  of  sin,  as  the  desire  to  be  as  God,  know- 
ing good  and  evi7,  is  the  other.  What  we  mean  when 
we  say  that  God  knows  evil  we  cannot  tell,  but  that 
God  docs  know  it  in  some  sense  must  be  believed  by 


358  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

all  who  believe  that  God  knows  anything.  What  we 
mean  when  we  say  that  Man  knows  evil  is  that  Man  has 
known  temptation.  He  cannot  strive  to  take  the  place  of 
that  which  is  above  him  without  descending  to  that  which 
is  below  him ;  ambition,  in  the  Angels,  is  abdication. 
Wolsey  could  truly  say,  "  By  that  sin  fell  the  Angels ; " 
the  ambition  by  which  he  had  fallen  was  but  one  form 
of  the  sin  by  which  they  had  fallen.  And  by  a  natural 
parallax  of  human  thought,  the  narrator  of  the  Fall  of  the 
Angels  sees  that  same  sin  as  the  very  reverse  of  ambi- 
tion ;  the  desire  to  create  new  life  was  inseparable  in 
them  from  the  desire  to  sink  into  lower  life.  There  is 
a  deep  meaning  in  the  double  sense  of  the  verb  to  know 
as  we  find  it  in  the  English  preserved  by  our  Authorized 
Version  of  the  Scripture  ;  through  this  we  may  perhaps 
come  to  understand  how  the  Fall  of  the  Angels  and  the 
Fall  of  Man  are  but  two  expressions  of  one  dim,  large 
idea,  hovering  before  the  mind  of  men  who  pondered 
over  their  dislocated  condition  here,  and  found  one  side 
of  the  antithesis  inadequate. 

Adam  in  Paradise,  it  was  supposed  by  some  early 
thinkers,^  was  a  purely  spiritual  being  ;  the  consciousness 
of  his  nakedness  was  his  awaking  to  the  need  of  that 
covering  which  only  to  a  perfectly  sinless  being  could  be 
unnecessary.  The  clothing  with  skins  was  in  truth  (in 
this  earlier  version  of  the  legend)  the  creation  of  Man  as 
we  know  him  now,  inhabiting  a  body ;  and  all  that  went 
before  must  be  regarded  as  but  another  form  of  that 
experience  which  hovered  before  the  mind  of  the  Greek 
poet  when  he  imagined  himself  "  obedient  to  mad  strife  " 
because  in  a  mysterious  pre-natal  condition  he  had  dis- 
obeyed the  law  of  his  being,  and  was  condemned  in 
consequence  to  sojourn  on  the  Purgatory  of  this  earth. 
A  faint  allusion  in  the  Old  Testament  and  an  exclama- 

1  Especially  Origen. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  359 

tion  of  Christ  form  the  whole  Scriptural  authority  for 
the  Fall  of  the  Angels,  but  the  legend  would  explain 
the  depravity  of  mankind  in  a  manner  more  consistent 
with  subsequent  orthodox  speculation  than  does  that  by 
which  it  has  been  obliterated — the  Fall  of  Man.  We  are 
more  in  harmony  with  that  speculation  when  we  repre- 
sent to  ourselves  the  original  disaster  "as  caused  by  sen- 
sual temptation  rather  than  by  ambition  of  intellectual 
gain. 

For  Redemption  was  to  the  mind  of  that  age  above 
all  a  deliverance  from  sensual  temptation.  Augustine  is 
an  inverted  Adam  ;  he  shows  by  the  measure  of  his  own 
miraculous  gain  what  the  ideal  Man  appeared  to  him 
to  have  lost  at  the  Fall.  When  we  come  to  ask  what 
actually  happened,  we  are,  from  a  modern  point  of  view, 
inclined  to  think  that  there  was  as  much  wrong  after 
his  conversion  as  before  it.  We  have  to  take  his  own 
point  of  view  before  we  can  regard  it  as  an  instance  of 
a  soul  turning  from  darkness  to  light.  Nothing  more 
brings  out  the  difference  between  his  view  and  ours 
than  the  fact  that  he  initiated  his  Christian  life  not  by 
marriage  with  but  repudiation  of  the  woman  who  had 
already  borne  him  a  son.^  Was  there,  the  reader  asks, 
no  pure  domestic  life  in  those  days  ?  Doubtless  there 
is  in  all  ages  ;  the  pieties  of  the  domestic  hearth  de- 
pend on  no  rule  and  no  religion.  Augustine  himself 
was  both  a  loving  son  and  a  loving  father,  and  every 
indication  of  personal  feeling  as  well  as  of  ideal  standard 
points  to  a  high  estimate  of  family  claims,  when  once 
they  existed.  His  mother's  love  indeed  seems  to  have 
taken,  to  his  mind,  in  a  peculiar  degree,  the  t3'pical  aspect 
of  Divine  mercy ;  the  fact  that  he  had  known  a  human 
love  not  earned  by  merit,  not  alienated  b}'  great  demerit, 

'  Sec  all  that  relates  to  her  in  the  "Confessions."    She  appears  cntin-ly  to 
have  acquiesced  in  tlieir  separation. 


36o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

was  always  in  his  mind  when  he  spoke  of  the  love  of 
God.  But  though  he  knew,  in  its  best  form,  parental  love 
from  both  sides,  all  that  prepares  the  parental  relation 
was  in  his  eyes  associated  with  evil.  Original  sin  has 
become  a  mere  vague  synonym  for  the  frailty  of  human 
nature.  In  the  dialect  of  Augustine  it  has  a  perfectly 
definite  and  consistent  meaning.  He  felt  that  the  clue 
to  his  whole  history,  and  therefore  to  the  history  of 
humanity,  lay  in  his  deliverance  from  that  impulse  apart 
from  which  family  life  would  hardly  exist.  It  was  only  as 
an  impulse  he  thought  it  evil ;  he  would  have  had  nothing 
to  say  against  it  as  a  volition.  That  a  man  should  choose 
to  be  a  father  by  an  exercise  of  his  free  will,  as  he  might 
choose  to  be  a  physician  or  a  traveller,  presented  nothing 
evil  to  his  mind ;  but  family  life,  as  we  do  actually  know 
it,  lay  for  him  under  a  curse.  The  love  of  man  to 
woman  was  incurably  associated  with  that  instinct  origi- 
nating new  life  which  he  felt  to  be  not  only  evil,  but 
the  evil.  All  family  life  was  a  commemoration  of  the 
original  disaster  whereby  the  body  manifested  its  inde- 
pendence of  the  spirit.  And  wherever  a  new  human 
life  began,  there  was  repeated  that  initial  act  of  will  by 
which  Man  claimed  to  himself  the  prerogative  of  God, 
and  the  creature  became  the  creator.  The  creature  was 
in  one  sense  to  have  been  the  creator  in  any  case.  The 
human  race  was  to  have  been  continued  through  the 
instrumentality  of  Man.  But  the  act  of  insubordination 
by  which  Adam  refused  the  attitude  of  a  subject  and 
became  "  as  God,  knowing  good  and  evil " — this  act 
disturbed  the  whole  hierarchy  of  being,  and  infused  into 
the  originally  innocent  and  legitimate  decision  to  carry 
on  the  race,  and  thus  share  the  Divine  work,  an  element 
of  the  dark  world  known  to  ancient  thought  as  the 
opposite  of  Personality.  As  God  was  to  have  been 
Supreme  above  all  Spirits,  so  Spirit  was  to  be  supreme 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  361 

above  ever3'thing  material  ;  but  within  the  material 
framework  of  ]\lan  was  something  that  commemorated 
the  disturbance  of  this  order,  and  supplied  a  rebel  to  his 
will,  as  his  will  had  become  a  rebel  to  God.  He  had 
stood  midway  between  God  and  the  material  creation, 
mysteriously  related  to  both,  as  far  above  Matter  as  he 
was  below  God.  But  Matter  always  kept  its  symbolic 
alliance  with  Evil,  and  this  alliance,  under  this  line  of 
reasoning,  was  drawn  closer.  Man's  fall  was  comme- 
morated in  sexual  desire,  and  his  regeneration  was  to  be 
manifested  in  sexual  separateness. 

We  shall  best  understand  this  scheme  if  we  consider 
where  modern  sympathy  breaks  off  from  it.  Animal 
man,  as  we  have  said,  is  to  us  neither  good  nor  bad. 
To  bear  hunger  and  thirst  is  indeed  noble,  but  to  feel 
hunger  and  thirst  is  perfectly  innocent.  It  is  the  cause 
of  much  that  is  wrong ;  it  could  not  otherwise  give  the 
opportunity  for  anything  that  is  right,  but  in  itself  it 
is  neither  right  nor  wrong.  Still  it  is  a  fact  that  does 
inevitably  tell  upon  the  desires  of  man,  and  therefore,  in 
all  but  the  most  heroic  natures,  on  his  will.  We  may 
account  for  all  the  vice  and  much  of  the  crime  of  the 
world  by  the  activity  of  animal  desires,  and  it  is  a  natural 
and  slight  distortion  of  that  truth  to  say  that  animal 
desire  is  itself  of  the  nature  of  evil.  Hunger  and  thirst 
are  not  merely  facts  concerning  the  physical  organization. 
They  are  facts,  and  not  the  only  ones,  which  concern  the 
mental  condition  of  him  whom  they  affect.  Such  facts 
represent  a  certain  dominion,  so  we  might  express  it,  of 
the  world  of  matter  over  the  world  of  mind  ;  an  inversion 
which  seemed  to  the  men  of  that  age  the  very  essence  of 
evil.  They  could  conceive  no  greater  evil  than  that  the 
slave  should  rule.  We  have  come  to  look  on  right  or 
wrong,  good  and  evil,  with  difTcrent  eyes  from  those  of 
Augustine  and   his   contemporaries,  and  only  by  a  great 


363  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

effort  see  any  meaning  in  this  view.  We  have  gone  to 
the  opposite  pole  from  the  aristocratic  ideal  of  antiquity. 
The  idea  that  the  slave  should  rule  does  not  necessarily 
suggest  to  us  anything  evil ;  it  is  not  the  person  but  the 
condition  which  is  evil  for  us.  It  does  not  seem  to  us 
so  very  much  worse  that  the  slave  should  rule  than  that 
he  should  obey. 

It  is  impossible  for  us  to  subtract  in  imagination  the 
influence  of  our  environment,  so  as  to  conceive  what  we 
should  be  in  a  universe  of  pure  spiritual  emotion,  but 
any  approach  to  such  a  condition  no  longer  rouses  within 
us  an  aspiration  of  desire.  Life  in  Paradise,  to  the  mind 
of  our  day,  represents  itself  as  coloured  by  that  tedium 
which  drove  Rasselas,  Prince  of  Abyssinia,  to  quit  the 
happy  valley  and  seek  the  trials  and  difficulties  of  the 
world.  It  took  a  different  aspect  to  our  fathers.  Their 
imaginations  loved  to  dwell  on  that  state  of  primaeval 
innocence  where  all  that  gives  life  an  object  was  lack- 
ing. They  were  ready  to  fill  up  its  details  in  a  way 
that  astonishes  us,  when  we  compare  the  result  with  the 
few  verses  of  Scripture  whence  they  took  their  material, 
at  the  large  amount  of  imaginative  reasoning  implied 
by  those  pictures  of  a  lost  blessedness.  Learned  men 
are  not  ready  to  answer,  about  tolerably  familiar  periods 
of  history,  questions  which  the  men  of  that  time  thought 
any  one  might  answer  with  respect  to  the  condition  of 
our  first  parents  before  the  Fall.  They  imagined  know- 
ledge because  they  felt  desire.  It  was  as  the  inheritance 
of  privileged  humanity  that  they  looked  for  a  renewal 
of  the  Eden  life  of  the  Past. 

The  Creation  had  been  a  failure,  and  all  the  varied 
events  in  the  life  of  man  commemorated  that  failure. 
All  History  was  an  interruption,  a  parenthesis,  in  the 
far-off  Golden  Age.  Thence  human  development  took 
its  start  downward  in  the  Fall;   thither  human  develop- 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  363 

ment  took  its  start  upward  in  the  regeneration  of  Christ's 
new  influence  on  humanity.  The  hght  of  Eden  fell  on 
the  path  of  man  in  the  remote  past,  and  lit  up  the 
future  of  men,  as  they  turned  to  the  near,  mysterious 
Heaven.  Between  these  kindred  bursts  of  splendour 
lay  an  interval  of  deep  shadow,  shrouding  the  hopes 
and  occupations  that  now  make  up  the  staple  of  human 
interest, — a  shadow  concentrated  upon  those  emotions 
which  modern  reserve  indeed  shrouds  in  silence,  but  in 
the  silence  of  reverent  and  fearless  sympathy.  We  may 
find  it  difficult  to  conceive  how  all  that  makes  up  the  inte- 
rest of  average  secular  life  should  ever  have  been  regarded 
as  a  mere  interpolation  in  the  sequence  of  all  that  is 
truly  significant  for  man.  But  we  shall  never  understand 
the  moral  life  of  the  past  unless  we  accept  the  fact  that 
there  was  a  time  when,  as  the  refuge  from  life's  ills  was 
actually  found  in  the  cloister,  so  the  ideal  of  life's  per- 
fection lay  in  a  projection  of  cloister  life  on  the  back- 
ground of  a  fairy-like  Paradise. 

However  strange  it  be  to  regard  this  new  morality 
as  one  claiming  affiliation  with  the  faith  made  known 
to  us  in  the  Jewish  Scriptures,  however  perplexing  its 
relation  to  a  morality  which  set  the  highest  honour  on 
family  life,  and  gave  a  peculiar  sanction  to  the  desire  for 
posterity,  the  rise  of  such  an  ideal  at  such  a  point  in  the 
world's  history  is  clearly  explicable.  It  is  the  morality 
of  the  Age  of  Death,  made  logical  by  an  intellectual 
scheme,  and  religious  by  a  new  mythology.  Augustine 
claimed  no  greater  detachment  from  all  objects  of  human 
desire  than  had  been  enjoined  by  Seneca,  but  the  later 
claim  was  at  once  more  imaginative  and  more  logical  than 
the  earlier.  lie  called  in  God  to  enforce  this  detach- 
ment ;  he  remodelled  cosmogony  in  accordance  with  it. 
He  made  the  order  of  things  in  which  we  live  take  its 
rise  in  a  crime,  the  shadow  of  wiiich  fell  on  all  subse- 


364  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

quent  exercise  of  human  activity,  and  was  commemo- 
rated in  every  new  life.  That  which  was  most  intensely 
original,  that  in  which  the  whole  man,  soul  and  body, 
put  forth  initial  energy,  was  of  the  nature  of  sin.  Life 
was  tainted  with  evil.  Death  was  blessed.  The  literal 
death  by  which  we  quit  this  world  was  blessed,  remov- 
ing us  from  a  region  of  possible  sin  to  one  of  necessary 
holiness,  from  a  world  overshadowed  by  a  vast  initial 
calamity  to  one  where  the  pristine  condition  of  a  spiritual 
nature  should  be  restored  and  secured  from  all  further 
dislocation.  And  then  the  next  best  thing  was  to  live 
in  this  world  as  one  dead,  to  give  no  need  to  its  solicita- 
tions, to  take  no  interest  in  its  business,  to  dwell  here  as 
a  Peregrinus  whose  city  was  elsewhere.  The  claims  of 
family  life  were  all  of  the  nature  of  temptation  ;  he  was 
happiest  who  avoided  all  those  that  could  be  avoided.^ 
The  act  which  made  Man  a  parent,  however  innocent, 
was  a  commemoration  of  sin.  The  higher  life  avoided 
it ;  the  soul  that  had  entered  into  union  with  God 
needed  no  other  union. 

Here  we  have  the  disintegrating  tendency  of  the  new 
morality,  at  its  highest  point.  We  are  carried  to  the 
extreme  opposite  of  the  citizen  ideal  of  antiquity.  While 
that  regarded  Man  as  a  part  of  the  State,  this  regarded 
him  as — we  are  driven  to  the  paradoxical  expression — 
a  part  of  himself.  It  was  not  the  whole  man  on  which 
the  redeeming  power,  as  here  conceived,  put  forth  its 
influence.  Man,  as  he  was  a  part  of  Nature,  was 
accursed.  Let  him,  if  he  would  attain  his  true  blessed- 
ness, cease  to  belong  to  Nature;  let  him  sever  him- 
self from  all  that  owned  her  sway,  let  him  renounce  all 


1  See,  for  instance,  the  letter  of  Augustine  to  Count  Boniface,  Ep.,  220,  in 
Caillau's  edition.  Boniface  had  invited  the  Vandals  to  invade  Africa,  but 
Augustine  speaks  with  far  greater  horror  of  his  second  marriage,  against  a 
vow  of  celibacy. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  365 

impulse  centripetal  within  her  orbit,  then  first  would  the 
attraction  of  another  centre  act  upon  him  unimpaired.  So 
that  in  the  great  shipwreck  of  humanity  all  was  to  be 
cast  to  the  waves  except  that  which  was  distinctively 
spiritual.  Only  a  fraction  of  that  which  is  most  intensely 
personal  was  to  be  hallowed  with  the  conservative  in- 
fluence of  a  new  life.  Man  had  been  a  member  of  an 
organism  larger  than  himself,  and  so  he  was  to  continue. 
But  first  he  must  sever  his  true  self  from  a  part  of  him- 
self, must  recognize  as  a  mere  accretion  that  which 
had  seemed  the  most  vigorous  outgrowth  from  his  own 
nature.  First  he  must  recognize  that  which  had  seemed 
a  part  as  more  than  the  whole :  then  he  should  re- 
cognize in  the  seeming  fraction  a  link  to  the  Infinite. 
Men  were  atoms,  but  each  atom  was  a  world  ;  on  the 
stage  of  each  man's  Personality  was  worked  out  the 
drama  of  Redemption.  At  the  core  of  human  individu- 
ality Divine  power  exhibited  its  marvels,  restoring  the 
order  that  was  lost  at  the  fall  of  corporate  humanit}^,  and 
giving  back  to  Man  both  his  supreme  and  his  subordinate 
position.  What  were  the  rise  and  fall  of  States  to  a 
drama  in  which  God  took  part  ?  The  soul  was  the  scene 
of  conflicts  too  tremendous  to  leave  much  attention  for 
any  struggle  that  was  merely  outward,  and  all  tics  were 
outward,  except  that  by  which  men  were  bound  within 
the  folds  of  the  Church. 

The  Augustinian  scheme,  therefore,  forms  a  bridge 
between  the  old  world  and  the  new,  connecting  the 
great  central  ideas  of  the  classic  and  the  Christian 
world.  While  it  looked  back,  in  the  idea  of  Original 
Sin,  with  a  glance  of  S3'mpathctic  retrospect  to  the 
corporate  morality  of  Greece  and  Rome,  it  gathered 
up  and  prefigured  in  gigantic  outline  the  new  man 
of  Protestant  ethics.  Adam  was  a  magnified  image 
of    the    new    humanity    which    after    a    tliousand    years 


366  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

was  to  blossom  into  rich  and  various  development  and 
assert  itself  in  the  various  conflicts  of  modern  life. 
This  conflict  has  mirrored  itself  in  the  delineations  of 
modern  art.  The  distinctive  charm  of  modern  literature, 
felt  first  and  most  in  Shakespeare,  but  more  or  less  in 
all  modern  fiction,  as  contrasted  with  the  great  works 
of  the  ancient  world,  is  the  interest  of  individuality,  the 
representation  of  character,  as  an  independent  subject 
of  attention  and  investigation.  Imaginative  genius  must, 
no  doubt,  always  express  itself  through  character ;  it 
has  no  other  language.  But  the  interest  in  a  character, 
as  a  whole  within  itself — the  interest  that  we  feel  in 
Hamlet,  in  Macbeth,  in  the  Baron  of  Bradwardine,  in 
Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie,  in  the  best  creations  of  Thackeray 
and  of  George  Eliot — this  has  no  place  in  ancient 
literature.  OEdipus  is  as  definite  as  Hamlet ;  but  the 
crisis  of  the  Greek  drama  turns  on  the  fate,  not  the 
character,  of  the  hero.  Achilles,  in  the  tale  of  Troy 
divine,  is  the  typical  Greek ;  of  Hamlet  what  can  we 
say  but  that  he  is  Hamlet  ?  Now  this  idea  of  a  whole 
within  itself — of  Man  as  a  complete  being,  not  claimed 
and  dominated  by  the  State,  but  independent  and  decid- 
ing by  his  own  will  into  what  relations  he  will  enter 
with  any  other  being — this  ideal  is  in  Adam  presented 
with  all  the  exaggeration  of  a  new  conception.  We 
are  speaking  of  the  Augustinian  Adam,  the  Adam  of 
"  Paradise  Lost ; "  one  who  read  the  simple  narrative 
of  Genesis  for  the  first  time  would  wonder  that  it  had 
been  made  to  bear  the  weight  of  such  significance,  and 
perhaps  the  reluctance  of  Augustine  to  use  the  name  of 
Adam  is  a  witness  to  some  undercurrent  of  conscious- 
ness that  the  myth,  on  which  he  rested  the  actual 
condition  of  the  human  race,  was  hardly  suggested 
in  the  records  whence  he  had  to  gather  all  that  he 
could  actually  know  of  the  first  man.      "The  abysmal 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  367 

depths  of  personality  "  are  prefigured  in  Adam.  All  that 
romance  and  essay  have  imagined  of  human  capacity 
is  condensed  in  that  ideal  of  tragic  but  not  despicable 
choice.  IVi'll  is  exhibited,  in  that  grand  drama,  as  it 
never  could  be  again ;  the  ideal  of  the  new  world  is 
cast  in  lurid  relief  on  the  background  of  all  that  is 
darkest  in  the  actual  condition  of  the  old  world. 

The  Augustinian  scheme  presents  us  with  a  new  cx- 
clusiveness  in  place  of  the  old.     We  confront  in  it  a  new 
application   of   the  aristocratic  principle  of  antiquity   to 
the  grouping  of  human  life.     Apart  from  the  Church  men 
were  nothing,  just  as  apart  from  the  City  men  had  been 
nothing.      Man  was,  indeed,  older  than  the  Church  ;  he 
had   known  an    ideal   condition  in  which   he   had   stood 
alone,  above   Nature,   beyond   Society,   and  only  subor- 
dinate to  God  ;   but  in  his  actual  condition  he  owed  all 
his  value   to   his   incorporation   in   a   Society   inheriting 
from   the   past  the   boundless   claims   of  the  State,  con- 
ferring  the    same    inestimable   privileges,   and   therefore 
repeating  the  same  inevitable  exclusions.      And  the  new 
exclusiveness  was  so  much  more  inclusive  than  the  old 
that   it   seemed   to   include   everything.      The   enclosure 
which  took  in  Greek  and  barbarian,  bond  and  free,  seemed 
to  those  who  had  known  these  opposites  as  divided  by  an 
impassable  chasm,  to  be  one  which  had  practically  no  limit. 
That  which   revolts  us  in  what  we  know  as   Calvinism, 
and  what  we  should  know,  if  we  traced  the  exclusiveness 
of  Christianity  to  its  true  author,  as  Augustinianism,  is 
but  a  transference  of  the  earthly  city   to  the  Heavens. 
To  the  eager  gaze  of  Augustine   the  earthly  city  had  no 
other  object  than  a  symbolism  whereby  it  prefigured  the 
heavenly   state.      The  Church  everywhere  inherited  the 
legacy  of  the  City.^     The  stately  traditions  of  Rome  had 

1  See  the  whole  treatise,  "  De  Civiiate  Dei."     It  should  be  compared  wiili 
the  treatise  of  Plutarch  cited  above  on  the  Fortune  of  Rome. 


368  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

no  other  object  than  to  supply,  with  their  pictures  of 
devotion  to  an  earthly  state,  reproach  or  warning  for  the 
less  loyal  citizen  of  the  heavenly  city.  The  unshaken 
fidelity  of  Regulus,  the  stern  simplicity  of  Cincinnatus, 
the  heroic  fortitude  which  triumphed  over  parental  fond- 
ness and  anticipated  in  the  person  of  Torquatus  or  Brutus 
the  denunciation,  "  Whoever  loveth  son  or  daughter  more 
than  me  is  unworthy  of  me  " — all  this  was  in  parable  the 
ideal  history  of  the  Church.  The  narrative  of  what  had 
happened  was  an  injunction  as  to  what  should  happen. 
Even  details  which  suggest  no  such  typical  significance 
to  our  minds,  the  "  Asylum  "  of  Romulus  (where  a  few 
robbers,  secured  by  impunity,  formed  the  origin  of  the 
almost  immortal  state)  prefigured  that  Divine  mercy 
which  in  Christ  should  deliver  from  the  bondage  of  sin 
to  the  hope  of  righteousness.  "  For  our  sakes  this  was 
written  ;  "  yes,  and  done  also.  In  the  eyes  of  Augustine, 
the  majesty  of  Rome  had  no  value  but  as  a  mere  sym- 
bolic rehearsal  of  the  victory  of  the  Church. 

The  work  which  contained  this  fantastic  exegesis  of 
Roman  history  was  undertaken  to  refute  an  opinion 
common  at  the  time  among  Pagans,  that  the  sack  of 
Rome  by  the  Goths  was  the  consequence  of  the  abandon- 
ment of  the  ancient  religion  for  Christianity.^  The  course 
of  history  of  itself  so  little  tended  to  exhibit  the  Church 
as  the  ideal  State,  that  Augustine  was  reduced  almost  to 
refine  away  the  very  existence  of  the  actual  State  in 
order  to  bring  the  two  into  relation.  It  was  only  by 
making  the  history  of  Rome  a  type  of  the  claims  of 
the  Church  that  he  could  weld  the  two  in  a  single 
whole ;  and  when  once  a  divine  inner  meaning  had  re- 
placed the  obvious  significance  of  outer  fact,  the  calamity, 
vast  as  it  was,  which  put  the  capital  of  the  world  at  the 

1  Compare  it  with  the  treatise  of  Salvian,   "  De  Gubernatione  Dei  " — a  far 
tteeper  and  nobler  view  of  the  facts,  to  my  mind. 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN.  369 

mercy  of  barbarians,  took  a  different  aspect,  and  was  no 
longer  a  break-up  of  all  the  hopes  of  civilized  humanit3^ 
The  downfall  of  the  State  might  mean  the  emergence  of 
the  Church ;  and  just  as  Greek  implied  Barbarian,  and 
the  empress  city  implied  a  population  of  slaves,  so  the 
City  of  God  must  imply  a  world  given  over  to  the  powers 
of  evil.  Man,  not  adopted  by  Christ,  must  belong  to 
Satan.  The  corporate  life  in  which  he  already  partook 
was  an  evil  thing.  It  included  the  vast  majority  of  the 
descendants  of  Adam,  and  represented  their  natural  con- 
dition. It  represented  the  confusion  of  evil  as  contrasted 
with  the  distinctness  and  individuality  of  original  and 
sinless  humanity.  The  antithesis  carried  on  the  one 
great  contrast  of  the  ancient  world  between  freedom  and 
slavery.  Adam  was  the  one  freeman  of  the  human  race  ; 
humanity  was  in  bondage.  Christ  was  the  liberator ; 
but  the  deliverance  was  into  an  altogether  exceptional 
condition  ;  the  natural  condition  was  that  of  slavery  to 
evil.  The  first  man  stood  apart  from  all  his  sons,  as  the 
freeman  from  the  slave.  Whatever  they  were,  it  was 
natural  that  he  should  jwi  be.  Hence  the  aristocratic 
principle  of  antiquity  passed  into  a  worship  of  the  excep- 
tional that  characterized  modern  thought  (taking  the  epi- 
thet in  its  largest  sense),  until  by  the  natural  process  of 
inversion  it  passed  into  its  opposite — the  worship  of  the 
universal.  The  commonwealth  was  no  longer  sacred. 
What  was  sacred  was  something  taken  out  of  it — some- 
thing removed  from  the  secular  enclosure  of  national  life, 
and  transferred,  as  it  were,  from  the  wreck  to  the  life- 
boat. All  the  arrogance,  all  the  exclusiveness,  all  the 
love  of  privilege,  for  which  the  city  of  man  no  longer 
afforded  any  scope,  found  a  refuge  in  the  City  of  God. 

In  this  system  were  thus  combined  the  common  ex- 
clusiveness of  the  old  Morality  and  of  tlie  new.  The 
Platonic  Republic  is  the  ancient  state    made  logical,  as 

2   A 


370  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  monastic  life  was  the  Augustinian  ideal  made  logical. 
Domestic  life,  with  all  that  it  implies,  was  equally  to  be 
banished  from  both.  From  one  it  was  to  be  banished 
because  the  guardian  was  not  to  know  his  own  children  ; 
from  the  other,  because  the  monk  was  not  to  have  any 
children.  In  both  cases  equally  the  common  mass  of 
humanity  was  to  be  indulged  with  the  ordinary  relations 
that  make  up  the  home ;  in  both,  the  saints  were  called 
upon  to  renounce  them,  to  live  a  life  superior  to  and  ap- 
parently poorer  than  that  of  the  common  herd.  Augustine 
and  Plato  coincided  in  throwing  the  shadow  of  inferiority 
on  all  that  is  symbolized  by  the  domestic  hearth,  on 
all  private  relation,  and  all  the  virtues  which  it  elicits 
and  implies.  For  centuries  the  holiest  men  of  Europe 
left  no  posterity.  The  holiest  men  in  Plato's  Republic 
would  have  been  obliged  to  leave  a  posterity,  though 
they  would  never  have  known  their  own  children. 
But  in  each  case  the  love  of  man  to  woman,  of  parent 
to  child,  was  proscribed  with  equal  rigour ;  in  each 
the  ties  of  kindred  were  to  be  stripped  of  the  sanctities 
of  duty,  and  the  object  of  entire  devotion  was  to  be 
invisible.  The  Augustinian  saint,  an  actual  human 
being,  stood  aside  from  the  path  of  inheritance  and 
left  it  to  the  ruffian  and  the  sot  to  bequeath  his  evil 
tendency  to  his  country  for  ever ;  the  Platonic  guardian 
never  existed,  but  as  far  as  he  was  a  model,  the  result 
was  much  the  same.  In  the  one  case  the  man  belonged 
to  the  State,  in  the  other  to  the  Church  ;  in  both  cases 
men  ceased  to  belong  to  the  family.  The  moral  nature 
was  a  mutilated  one.  That  twofold  life,  in  which  man  and 
woman  became  one,  was  in  both  a  mere  concession  to  the 
ordinary  unblessed,  animal  desires  of  the  common  herd, 
and  all  the  affections  and  virtues  which  find  their  root  on 
this  soil  were  smitten  with  the  blight  of  moral  neglect. 
Man  needs  Divine  sympathy  in  all  his  ideals.      If  the 


THE  FALL  OF  MAN:  371 

Divine  act  of  Creation  was  a  blunder ;  if  the  Creation 
was  either  the  result  of,  or  a  mere  prelude  to,  the  fall  of 
spiritual  beings,  then  all  impulse  in  Man  which  tends 
towards  the  continuance  of  Creation  is  mistaken  likewise. 
If  God  would  have  done  better  not  to  have  created 
Man,  Man  would  do  better  not  to  create  Man.  Augus- 
tine thought  that  all  God's  acts  were  holy,  and  that 
therefore  the  Creation  was  holy.  He  believed  this 
firmly,  but  he  did  not  teach  it.  His  system  exhibited 
Creation  as  a  vast  blunder,  an  exercise  of  mischievous 
activity  far  beyond  that  of  any  Gnostic  Demiurgus. 
This  consequence  of  his  theology  was  felt  at  first,  by 
honest  thinkers  who  perished,  as  obscure  rebels  against 
the  truth,  and  were  forgotten.  But  the  idea  lived,  and 
centuries  afterwards  it  bore  fruit  in  a  renovated  world. 

In  the  meantime  the  sense  of  the  mistake  of  Creation 
tinged  the  whole  ideal  of  Man's  moral  life.  It  darkened 
Earth  at  once  and  Heaven  ;  as  it  lowered  the  earthly 
father  to  a  mere  animal,  it  changed  the  Heavenly  Father 
to  a  being  endowed  with  cruelty,  such  as  we  conceive  of 
in  a  devil.  It  gave  up  earthly  love  to  lawless  impulse; 
it  stamped  heavenly  love  with  the  narrowest  partiality, 
and  deprived  it  in  imagination  oP  that  expansive  power 
which  is  of  the  very  essence  of  love.  What  we  would 
point  out  is  the  connection  between  these  two  things. 
The  ban  on  married  love  follows,  in  logical  sequence,  on 
the  disastrous  issue  of  the  Creation.  If  Creation  was  a 
blunder.  Procreation  is  a  crime. 

The  repulsiveness  of  this  whole  range  of  thought,  for 
modern  feeling,  too  much  conceals  from  us  a  clue  to 
truth.  Love  is  felt  by  every  one  to  be  the  spring  of  all 
that  is  excellent  in  human  life.  Perhaps  it  is  but  follow- 
ing out  that  belief  on  its  negative  side  to  see  that  the 
distortion  of  Love,  which  we  know  as  Lust,  is  not  only 
one  of  the  greatest  evils  in  the  human  world,  but  the  very 


372  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

focal  centre  of  evil.  That  impulse,  under  the  control  of 
which  persons  are  treated  as  things,  and  human  bonds 
are  as  fugitive  as  human  impulse,  is  the  very  antithesis 
of  all  that  binds  humanity  in  groups,  and  forms  the 
school  of  duty.  All  that  is  evil  in  human  relation  is  at 
its  height  when  man  and  woman  seek  the  closest  inti- 
macy apart  from  the  resolve,  with  all  its  latent  self- 
sacrifice,  to  make  this  an  exclusive  bond.  Wherever 
there  is  selfishness,  wherever  there  is  cruelty,  wherever 
there  is  falsehood,  there  is  something  that  is  at  its 
height  in  lust.  If  anything  of  the  inevitable  mingles  in 
this  temptation  to  all  that  is  worst — if  the  mere  animal 
nature,  the  very  type  of  innocence,  be  found  in  alliance 
with  that  in  Man  which  tramples  on  the  rights  of  his 
kind,  which  desolates  a  life  to  satisfy  an  impulse,  and 
brings  confusion  into  the  very  source  of  family  life — may 
we  not  say  that  there,  it  would  seem,  is  the  result  of 
some  vast  moral  dislocation,  far  transcending  the  indi- 
vidual life,  and  needing  some  redemption  equally  vast 
before  the  life  of  Man  can  be  purified  ? 


CHAPTER  IX. 
THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY. 

That  which  gives  life  its  keynote  is,  not  what  men  think 
good,  but  what  they  think  best.  True,  this  is  not  the 
part  of  belief  which  is  embodied  in  conduct :  the  ordi- 
nary man  tries  to  avoid  only  what  is  obviously  wrong ;  J 
the  best  of  men  does  not  always  make  us  aware  that  he 
is  striving  after  what  is  right.  We  do  not  see  people 
growing  into  the  resemblance  of  what  they  admire  ;  it  is 
much  if  we  can  see  them  growing  into  the  unlikeness  of 
that  which  they  condemn.  But  the  dominant  influence 
of  life  lies  ever  in  the  unrealized.  While  all  that  we 
discern  is  the  negative  aspect  of  a  man's  ideal,  that  ideal 
itself  lives  by  admiration  which  never  clothes  itself  in 
word  or  deed.  In  seeing  what  he  avoids  we  judge  only 
the  least  important  part  of  his  standard  ;  it  is  that  which 
he  never  strives  to  realize  in  his  own  person  which  makes 
him  what  he  is.  The  average,  secular  man  of  to-day  is 
a  different  being  because  Christendom  has  hallowed  the 
precept  to  give  the  cloak  to  him  who  asks  the  coat ;  it 
would  be  easier  to  argue  tiiat  this  claim  for  what  most 
would  call  an  impossible  virtue  has  been  injurious  than 
that  it  has  been  impotent.  Christianity  has  moulded  ^ 
character,  where  we  should  vainly  seek  to  discern  that  it 
had  influenced  conduct.  Not  the  criminal  code,  but  the 
counsel  of  perfection  shows  us  what  a  nation  is  becom- 
ing ;  and  he  who  casts  on  any  set  of  duties  the  shadow 
of  the  second  best,  so  far  as  he  is  successful,  does  more 


374  'THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

to  influence  the  moral  ideal  than  he  who  succeeds  in 
passing  a  new  law. 

Thus  it  was  that  while  the  mediaeval  and  the  classi- 
cal ideal  of  morality  on  one  side  were  exact  opposites, 
they  had  this  in  common — that  they  threw  discredit  on 
a  large  part  of  that  which  makes  man  what  he  is.  In 
neither  was  there  a  full  sanction  to  the  bond  that  makes 
man  and  woman  one.  There  was,  in  early  Chris- 
tianity, an  emphatic  declaration  that  the  bond  should 
be  exclusive,  but  there  was  an  equally  emphatic  declara- 
tion that  it  had  better  not  exist.  Vain  is  the  effort  to 
render  pure  and  orderly  the  life  which  is  thrown 
into  shadow  by  the  consciousness  of  an  ideal  towards 
which  it  is  not  tending.  The  magistrate  may  regulate 
such  a  life,  the  legislator  may  concern  himself  with 
its  details,  but  that  in  man  which  seeks  rightness  will 
turn  elsewhere. 

Man  is  the  member  of  a  society  to  w^hich  he  is  joined 
by  the  principle  of  resemblance,  and  of  a  union  to  which 
he  is  joined  by  the  principle  of  difference.  He  has 
fellow-citizens,  to  w^hom  he  is  bound  by  common  inte- 
rests and  duties ;  he  has  a  family,  to  which  he  is  joined 
by  reciprocal  and  correlative  duties.  We  cannot,  indeed, 
group  any  human  relations  in  sharply  antithetic  divisions 
— the  citizen  must  recognize  special  claim  (though  less 
and  less  with  the  progress  of  ages)  ;  the  brother  knows 
common  interests  and  the  bond  of  resemblance.  But 
these  are  the  exceptional  elements  respectively  of  civil 
and  family  life.  The  duties  of  the  father  are  not  the 
duties  of  the  son,  and  the  charm  of  conjugal  happiness 
would  be  gone  if  husband  and  wdfe  received  from  each 
other  nothing  that  he  or  she  was  not  prepared  to  return. 
All  that  makes  up  the  poetry  of  the  mutual  love  of  man 
and  woman  is  an  expression  of  the  fact  that  it  contains 
something  which   is  not  mutual,  something  which  does 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  37c 

not  merely  invert  all  self-centred  feeling  and  teach  men 
to  turn  the  passive  desire  into  the  active  exertion,  but 
which  supplies  self  with  a  complement  and  teaches  men 
concession  to  needs  they  do  not  feel.  Each  of  these 
relations  is  incomplete  without  the  other.  In  all  human 
relation,  it  is  obvious,  men  need  to  treat  each  other  from 
some  points  of  view  as  beings  of  similar  nature  and  equal 
claim ;  this  is  true  even  in  the  mutual  relation  of  adults 
and  children.  But  also  in  every  human  being  as  com- 
pared with  every  other  there  is  something  of  which  the 
duties  of  sex,  the  duties  of  differing  age,  are  the  true 
type.  In  the  most  ordinar}',  the  most  commonplace  man  ^ 
is  something  that  his  brother  man  does  not  share  and 
cannot  estimate.  Civil  life  ignores  this  element.  It  was 
not  so  in  the  ancient  world.  Status  was  a  fact  of  which 
ancient  law  took  cognizance,  of  which  modern  law  is  only 
at  this  hour  ceasing  to  take  cognizance.  But  the  whole 
development  of  modern  life  is  towards  that  view  of  things 
in  which  men  recognize  no  duty  that  is  not  mutual,  no 
need  that  is  not  common.  This  was  alwa3's  to  a  great 
extent  the  civil  basis  of  life  ;  it  is  so  now  entirely.  As  a 
citizen  a  man  is  blameless  if  he  give  his  brother  man 
what  he  claims  himself.  This  is  justice  on  this  plane 
of  being,  and  we  must  ascend  to  a  higher  if  we  would 
understand  any  other  justice. 

But  how  poor,  how  meagre  were  our  moral  life  if  this 
were  all !  How  poor  were  even  the  typical  life  of  equality 
if  it  caught  no  reflected  lights  from  the  life  of  inequality  ! 
It  is  the  relations  of  family  life  which  make  up  the 
focus  of  rightness.  Family  life  may  no  doubt,  when 
this  principle  is  forgotten,  become  a  mere  magnified 
selfishness.  When  two  become  one,  and  imagine  that 
they  keep  their  original  separatencss,  their  dual  selfish- 
ness far  exceeds  the  worst  selfishness  of  an  individual. 
For  what  keeps  down   the  selfishness   of  an  individual 


376  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

is  surely  the  consciousness  that  every  other  man  is  a 
"  self;  "  and  if  those  whose  needs  are  identified  with  our 
own  are  allowed  to  count  as  others,  the  double  pull  of 
vicarious  and  natural  selfishness  locks  up  all  attention. 
When  the  most  unselfish  of  men  looks  upon  his  care  for 
wife  and  children  from  this  point  of  view,  he  multiplies 
unawares  his  own  claims,  and  flatters  himself  that  he 
has  given  much,  when  he  has  merely  transferred  some- 
thing from  his  right  hand  to  his  left.  The  Family  thus 
becomes  a  disguise  in  which  selfishness  invades  the  army 
of  the  virtues  and  paralyzes  their  movement.  Neverthe- 
less it  is  the  non-mutual  relations  which  call  out  the 
larger  part  of  man's  moral  nature,  and  give  the  Con- 
science and  the  Will  their  fullest  exercise.  Where  men 
cease  to  speak  of  rights,  there  Right  finds  its  centre. 
While  no  service  to  the  State  can  make  him  a  good 
citizen  who  bequeathes  to  his  posterity  the  influence  of 
a  bad  father,  the  man  who  is  faithful  to  one  woman, 
who  has  brought  no  children  into  the  world  without 
endeavouring  to  ensure  their  welfare,  who  has  paid  back 
to  his  parents  that  tribute  of  protection  and  care  he  has 
received  from  them — such  a  man  may  be  counted  by  the 
State  among  her  true  sons,  though  he  have  contributed 
no  service  beyond  mere  obedience  to  her  laws.  The 
realm  of  civil  right,  contrasted  with  that  of  conjugal, 
paternal,  filial  duty,  shows  how  all  that  is  most  truly 
moral  in  our  nature  demands  the  life  of  contrast,  the 
presence  of  that  element  in  character  which  claims  and 
exercises  Faith. 

This  life  it  was  that  fell  into  shadow,  when  Christian 
faith  was  a  vivid,  dynamic  reality,  remoulding  the  world. 
All  lofty  spiritual  impulse  passed  it  by,  all  fervent  desire 
for  the  Divine  life  hurried  away  from  it ;  its  neighbour- 
hood was  drained  of  all  that  elevates,  purifies,  and  spiri- 
tualizes  humanity.      When   a  man   sought   to  complete 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  377 

his  life  by  that  union  which  gives  the  world  its  true 
moral  unit,  he  was  taught  to  regard  himself  as  a  mere 
animal ;  and  that  which  should  have  been  the  school  of 
the  Conscience  was  abandoned  to  lawless  impulse  and 
unhallowed  desire. 

One  tribe  alone  in  our  race  has  fully  recognized  the 
place  of  the  Family  in  the  moral  education  of  Man.  We 
are  occupied,  through  perhaps  the  most  interesting  and 
important  stages  of  the  history  of  Israel,  with  a  mere 
family  narrative  ;  and  the  lives  of  Abraham,  Isaac,  and 
Jacob  take  more  space  than  many  centuries  of  the  later 
history.  The  Jew  could  never  ignore  the  bond  of  family 
life.  It  lay  at  the  root  of  his  history.  Where  other 
races  traced  their  course  backwards  in  a  genealogy  that, 
ending  in  some  deit}',  threw  a  shadow  of  repudiation  on 
the  bonds  of  mere  human  kindred,  this  people  found 
their  national  records  occupied  with  the  relations  of  a 
husband  and  wife  whose  fears,  jealousies,  and  affections 
might  be  paralleled  in  the  most  insignificant  of  their 
descendants  ;  and  the  last  word  of  their  Scriptures  was 
the  promise  that  a  representative  of  their  nation  should 
turn  the  hearts  of  the  fathers  to  the  children,  and  the 
children  to  the  fathers.  But  Christendom,  which  should 
have  inherited  the  lesson,  has  been,  in  some  sense,  even 
a  loser  by  the  lesson  of  Judaism.  Refusing  to  recog- 
nize that  the  object  of  its  reverence,  whatever  else  he 
was,  was  a  typical  Jew,  it  has  missed  the  meaning  of  a 
teaching  that  has  thus  been  violently  dissevered  from  all 
that  it  implied  as  its  groundwork.  A  mournful  declara- 
tion of  the  inevitable  has  been  interpreted  as  a  precept,^ 
a  sense  of  the  expansion  needed  to  keep  an  ideal  alive 
has  been   taken   for  a  rejection   of  that  ideal,   and   that 

1  Luke  xiv.  26.  Compare  xii.  49-53,  a  passa,';i,'  apparently  spoken  sliortly 
before,  and  turn  to  the  passage  whicli  our  Lord  is  Irtc  (piolinfj  fioin  Micali 
vii.  :  "  Woe  is  me  !  for  I  am  as  when  they  have  gathered  the  summer  fruits  .  .  . 
the  good  man  is  perished  out  of  the  earth  .  .  .  'I'rust  ye  not  in  a  friend  .  .  . 


378  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

consecration  of  all  family  bonds  which  was  a  part  of  the 
religion  of  the  Jew  has  been  ignored  or  defied  by  what 
should  have  been  the  expansion  and  fulfilment  of  Judaism. 
To  our  generation  Christianity  seems  associated  with  the 
sanction  of  all  the  ties  of  kindred,  especially  the  conjugal 
bond  ;  but  man}'  generations  would  need  to  pass  away 
before  the  natural  bonds  which  man  at  once  finds  and 
chooses  could  be  hallowed  by  a  Christian  association  as 
deeply  rooted  in  the  past  as  that  which  opposes  it ;  and 
the  protest  thus  stirred  up,  like  all  protest,  must  intensify 
what  it  opposes.  It  is  not  the  fierce  recoil  from  asce- 
ticism which  brings  us  near  the  true  union  of  the  sexes ; 
that,  though  a  necessary  preliminary  in  the  history  of  the 
race,  of  itself  adds  to  the  disorder  which  it  finds.  The 
element  of  protest,  inevitable  in  all  moral  evolution,  is 
always  distorting,  and  no  other  phase  of  the  moral  life  is 
so  much  distorted  by  strain  and  stress  as  this,  The 
protest  must  die  away  and  be  forgotten  before  a  true 
ideal  of  marriage  can  spring  up  and  ally  itself  with  all 
that  is  holiest  in  man. 

The  great  teachers  of  the  mediaeval  and  the  classical 
world  left  their  descendants  a  mutilated  ideal  of  humanity  ; 
not  only  an  incomplete  ideal,  but  one  that  was  cut  off 
from  its  natural  expansion.  In  that  fractional  ideal 
which  all  are  compelled  to  choose  who  refuse  to  regard 
the  bond  which  unites  man  and  woman  as  sacred, 
Augustine  and  Plato  each  took  the  ideal  of  a  different 
sex.      Plato    set    his    seal    on    the    virtues    of  the   man, 

keep  the  doors  of  thy  mouth  from  her  that  lieth  in  thy  bosom  ;  for  the  son 
dishonoureth  the  father,  the  daughter  riseth  up  against  her  mother,  the  daughter- 
in-law  against  her  mother-in-law  ;  a  man's  enemies  are  the  men  of  his  own 
house."  Is  it  possible  to  doubt  that  the  lament  of  the  earlier  prophet  was 
echoed  by  Him  who  saw  that  these  ills  were  the  inevitable  result  of  His  own 
claim,  knowing  that  human  beings  confuse  the  gradation  of  love  with  hatred? 
See  for  a  similar  confusion  Rom.  ix.  13,  and  the  passage  itself  which  St. 
Paul  is  there  quoting,  MaH.  2,  3,  also  Matt.  vi.  24,  which  seems  the  quota- 
tion of  some  familiar  expression. 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  379 

Augustine  on  those  of  the  woman.  The  guardian  of 
the  RepubHc  was  to  be  courageous,  patriotic,  energetic, 
resolute ;  the  monk  in  the  cloister  was  to  be  chaste, 
meek,  obedient,  self-den3'ing.  It  seems  strange  that 
when  a  man  traces  all  evil  to  the  attraction  of  woman  he 
makes  womanl}'  virtue  his  ideal.  And  yet  it  is  natural. 
All  that  is  moral  in  human  nature  finds  its  focus  in  the 
relation  of  man  to  woman,  and  sooner  or  later  we  shall 
exaggerate  the  scope  of  whatever  we  refuse  to  acknow- 
ledge in  its  own  proper  place.  The  teacher  of  mediaeval 
moralit}',  seeking  to  dissever  the  influence  of  woman 
from  the  character  of  man,  did  actually  effect,  so  far  as 
he  impressed  his  ideal  on  mankind,  that  the  virtue  of  the 
man  should  be  none  other  than  the  virtue  of  the  woman. 
The  worship  of  the  Virgin  is  but  the  expression,  on  the 
side  of  art,  of  this  mediaeval  ideal  of  humanity  ;  the  love 
of  woman,  denied  its  natural  scope,  avenged  itself  by 
invading  a  foreign  domain.  Manly  virtue  was  as  much 
lost  to  the  aspiration  of  the  age  as  womanh'  virtue  had 
been  to  that  of  an  earlier  age,  but  never  in  any  previous 
age  had  human  excellence  been  contracted  within  limits 
so  narrow. 

How  eagerly,  after  centuries  of  this  frost,  must  the 
human  spirit  have  turned  to  the  sunshine  of  Greece  and 
Rome,  when  it  broke  anew  through  the  clouds  !  All  that 
is  extravagant  in  that  revival  is  explained  when  we  see 
what  had  gone  before.  Men  had  been  taught  for  hundreds 
of  years  that  a  man's  life  was  the  lower  life  ;  they  suddenly 
found  themselves  in  contact  with  a  literature  which  ex- 
hibited it  as  the  only  life.  They  had  been  taught  to  look 
upon  nature  as  something  evil ;  they  saw  it  suddenly  rise 
and  expand  to  something  Divine.  All  impulse  had  been 
allied  with  sin ;  all  impulse  was  now  shown  as  por- 
tra^'cd  in  glorious  art,  and  of  itself  the  creator  of  a  noble 
world  rich  in  beauty  and  variety,  and  needing  no  re- 


38o  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

demption.  We  think  of  science  and  literature  as  hostile, 
but,  though  foes  now,  they  were  nursed  in  one  cradle. 
The  release  from  one  cramped,  unnatural  attitude  set 
free  the  spirit  of  man  to  enter  for  the  first  time  into  the 
study  of  nature,  in  all  its  aspects — nature  in  man,  and 
nature  in  the  world  ;  wearied  with  the  keen  knife-edge 
antithesis  of  Truth  and  Error,  it  turned  with  rapture 
to  the  gentle  slope  of  gradation  that  severs  Knowledge 
from  Ignorance.  Men  looked  on  the  world  with  new 
eyes,  and  for  the  first  time  they  saw  it  as  it  was.  "And 
lo !  Creation  widened  to  man's  view."  The  universe 
expanded.  Earth  lost  her  central  place,  but  found  her- 
self one  of  many  earths ;  the  sister  worlds  seemed 
to  inscribe  the  nightly  skies  with  their  lesson  of  the 
heavenly  in  the  earthly.  For  as  Heaven  disappeared 
from  the  vault  above,  it  reappeared,  in  some  sense,  on 
earth.  This  dark  earth  became  a  star,  taking  its  place 
in  the  bright  choir  that  had  seemed  the  ideal  home  of 
purified  spirits.  As  this  antithesis  vanished — as  earth 
changed  from  the  dark,  motionless  centre  of  the  universe 
to  one  of  the  host  of  Heaven — its  own  expanse  widened, 
new  realms  opened  in  the  west,  man's  home  became  a 
boundless  estate  for  the  expanding  human  race,  and  yet 
was  seen  to  be  a  mere  speck  in  the  universe.  Man 
entered  on  a  double  inheritance — new  worlds  in  the 
Heavens,  new  lands  beyond  the  seas.  A  boundless  uni- 
verse opened  upon  him  on  every  side,  to  explore  with 
eye  or  mind,  and  unexpected  aid  sprang  up  in  every 
quarter.  Even  the  weapons  of  mutual  slaughter  afforded 
patterns  of  the  heavenly  movements,^  while  a  new  vehicle 

1  Those  speculations  on  the  laws  of  motion  which  attained  their  culminating 
point  in  the  Newtonian  astronomy  appear  to  have  received  much  stimulus  from 
the  study  of  projectiles,  which  occupied  many  mechanicians  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  as,  e.g.,  Anderson,  "Art  of  Gunnery"  (1674),  Blondel,  "  Art  de  Jeter  les 
Bombes,"  1683.  The  true  theory  of  projectiles  was  somewhat  delayed  by  an  ex- 
cessive deference  to  Galileo,  who  had  overrated  the  analogy  of  their  movement 
to  that  of  the  planets.    SeeWhewell,  "  History  of  the  Inductive  Sciences,"  ii.  56. 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  381 

for  the  record  of  thought  gave  thought  rapidity.  Man 
entered  upon  the  rehabilitation  of  nature.  His  home 
was  no  longer  overshadowed  by  the  recollection  of  a  pris- 
tine crime.  It  was  a  glorious  palace,  and  its  inhabitants 
must  be  a  regal  race. 

It  is  by  no  fanciful  association  that  we  may  see  in  the 
new  astronomy  a  type  of  the  development  of  thought  by 
which  the  life  of  Man  became  vivid,  various,  dramatic. 
"  Heaven  and  Earth "  was  originally  a  description  of 
the  ideal  Universe.  When  we  turn  to  the  poem  of 
Dante,  and  mark  the  prosaic,  consistent  literalness  with 
which  he  conceived  the  material  framework  of  his  ima- 
ginative creation,  we  reahze  that  he  was  not  building 
up  a  new  universe  to  suit  his  poetry,  but  merely  giving 
definiteness  to  the  ordinary  and  familiar  conceptions  of 
his  contemporaries.  The  world  was  all,  so  to  speak, 
laid  out  to  fit  the  drama  of  judgment.  Heaven  was 
above  our  head  ;  Hell  might  well  be  below  our  feet ;  the 
earth  itself,  the  centre  of  the  universe,  had  nothing  in 
common  with 

"  The  wandering  fires  which  moved 
In  mystic  dance,  not  without  song  " 


When  once  Galileo  and  Newton  had  forced  the  world  to 
recognize  that  Heaven,  if  it  was  anywhere,  was  every- 
where, then  morals  took  a  new  direction.  The  antithesis 
of  Heaven  and  Earth  vanished  from  the  inward  as  well 
as  from  the  outward  world.  Human  nature  became  in- 
teresting for  its  own  sake.  The  stress  and  strain  of 
a  conflict  between  the  powers  of  darkness  and  of  light 
vanished,  to  make  way  for  the  development  of  various 
aims,  of  many-sided  feelings,  of  hopes  in  which  there  was 
no  edge  of  terror,  of  interests  which,  instead  of  merely 
emphasizing  the  common  attitude  of  different  spirits  to 
the  Eternal,  brought  out  and  stimulated  their  differences, 


382  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and    developed    all    that   was    individual,    all    that    was 
specific,  in  each. 

"  If  any  one  doubt  the  connection  of  this  new  interest 
in  character  with  the  new  interest  in  science,  let  him  turn 
to  Bacon's  Essays.  There  he  will  find  an  attention  to 
the  specific  tendencies  of  the  human  mind,  apart  from  all 
preconceived  ideas  of  what  that  inquiring  glance  should 
discern,  which  is  the  true  attitude  for  the  investigator  of 
nature.  "  A  mixture  of  a  lie  doth  ever  add  pleasure." 
"  There  is  no  passion  in  the  mind  of  man  so  weak  but 
it  mates  and  masters  the  fear  of  death."  "  Chaste  women 
are  often  proud  and  froward,  as  presuming  on  the  merit 
of  their  chastity."  "  Men  of  noble  birth  are  noted  to  be 
envious  towards  new  men  when  they  rise,  for  the  distance 
is  altered,  and  it  is  like  a  deceit  of  the  eye,  that  when 
others  come  on  they  think  themselves  go  back."  "  The 
wiser  sort  of  great  persons  bring  in  ever  upon  the  stage 
somebody  upon  whom  to  derive  the  envy  that  would 
come  upon  themselves."  That  is  criticism  of  character 
in  the  spirit  of  the  observer  of  nature.  Men  are  re- 
garded not  as  righteous  or  wicked,  but  as  formed  by 
circumstance,  as  the  result  of  natural  law.  We  have 
returned  to  the  Greek  sense  of  variety  ;  we  have  lost 
all  remembrance  of  a  great  division-line  separating  the 
travellers  to  Heaven  or  Hell.  We  are  already  in  the 
modern  world  of  secular,  scientific  interest ;  we  observ^e 
moral  tendencies  as  facts  just  like  any  other  facts ;  the}' 
have  lost  their  overwhelming  significance  as  hints  of 
an  eternal  distinction.  It  is  difficult  for  us  to  realize 
that  this  ever  came  upon  the  world  as  a  new  thing. 
It  is  the  spirit  of  art  at  all  periods  of  the  world's 
history,  and  it  is  also  the  spirit  of  science.  But  as  a 
broad,  catholic  influence  it  came  upon  the  world  in  the 
breath  of  the  Renaissance,  and  buried  germs  of  life  felt 
the  influence  and  rushed  into  the  genial  air. 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  383 

In  this  sunshine  of  a  new  life  sprang  up  the  luxuriant 
and  various  vegetation  of  modern  literature — literature 
as  it  is  impressed  with  the  revival  of  classical  life,  as  it 
bears  still  the  character  given  it  by  the  rebound  from 
a  gloomy  and  mutilated  theology.  The  modern  drama 
commemorates  the  reawakening  of  individual  human 
interests  after  their  long  sleep,  the  sudden  influx  of 
sap  into  the  withered  boughs  that  had  felt  the  frost 
of  the  long  winter.  The  love  of  woman  changes  from 
the  centre  of  human  temptation  to  the  centre  of  human 
desire.  A  halo  of  romance  succeeds  a  shadow  of  sin. 
Human  passion  gathers  up  all  the  associations  of  poetry 
and  drama ;  it  appears  in  connection  with  whatever  is 
stately,  whatever  is  vigorous,  whatever  is  pure.  Man's 
spirit  is  no  longer  a  battlefield  for  the  contending  forces 
of  Heaven  and  Hell.  It  is  a  rich  and  varied  landscape, 
full  of  beauty,  full  of  interest ;  its  qualities  cannot  be 
tabulated  under  antithetic  heads  of  good  and  evil ;  they 
are  various,  and  interesting  for  their  own  sake.  Once 
more,  as  to  the  Greek,  Nature  becomes  sacred  ;  her  laws 
succeed  her  deities.  Gravitation  binds  the  world  in  a 
golden  chain,  and  in  its  completeness  prepares  men's 
minds  to  be  satisfied  with  all  the  wealth  and  variety 
contained  therein,  and  to  cease  from  all  striving  towards 
that  which  lies  above  and  beyond  it. 

This  line  of  development  could  not  be  followed  out 
unbroken  to  our  own  day  ;  if  we  were  to  keep  it  so  we 
should  have  to  ignore  the  Reformation.  Protestantism 
is  a  revival  of  Augustinianism  ;  though  Augustine  was 
the  great  Doctor  of  the  Roman  Church,  his  true  suc- 
cessor is  Luther.  That  crisis  in  the  history  of  a  man 
which  we  call  Conversion — a  crisis  which  we  may  find 
in  the  lives  of  some  men  who  care  nothing  for  religion — 
is  not  a  natural,  not  at  least  an  inevitable  incident  in  the 
life  of  the  member  of  a  Church.     The  fact  of  a  relation 


384.  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

and  the  consciousness  of  a  relation  are  indeed  two 
things,  and  the  fact  that  when  Augustine  lived  Baptism 
was  still  an  expression  of  individual  conviction — that 
the  new  member  of  the  Church  was  not  an  unconscious 
babe,  but  a  man  or  woman  desirous  to  enter  its  fold — 
this  fact  prevented,  at  this  time,  any  discernment  of  the 
inchoate  divergence  between  two  systems  which  were 
not  logically  irreconcilable.  But  the  Church,  which  sets 
her  seal  on  every  unconscious  infant,  demands  no  spiritual 
crisis  as  the  pledge  of  membership,  and  cannot  emphasize 
the  emotion  which  testifies  to  a  new  perception.  The 
doctrine  that  man  is  justified  by  faith — that  an  inward 
emotion  sets  each  individual  in  his  right  place,  and  that 
this  is  a  transaction  between  the  soul  and  God — this  view 
is  not  obviously  harmonious  with  the  ideal  of  a  Catholic 
Church.  Catholicism  had  developed  the  corporate  element 
in  Augustinianism  ;  Protestantism  went  back  to  its  indivi- 
dual element.  These  two  were  harmonious  in  the  mind 
of  Augustine,  but  they  diverged  with  the  progress  of  the 
asres,  and  the  two  divisions  of  Christendom  have  divided 
the  two  elements  between  them. 

Protestantism,  therefore,  which  is  often  regarded  as  a 
step  forward  in  the  progress  from  the  age  of  undoubting 
faith  to  the  age  of  critical  reason,  was  in  reality  a  step 
backwards.  Or  perhaps,  rather,  it  was  an  excursion  away 
from  the  path.  It  gave  new  vitality  to  the  doctrine  of 
the  Fall.  That  doctrine,  though  accepted  by  the  Catho- 
lic Church,  is  not  a  distinctively  Catholic  belief.  We 
find  scarcely  a  trace  of  it  in  the  poem  of  Dante,  where 
our  first  father,  with  a  few  selected  spirits  alone  of 
those  who  knew  not  Christ,  is  to  be  found  in  Paradise. 
The  Catholic  Church  remembered  only  that  man  was 
the  member  of  an  organism ;  she  never  taught  that  man 
must  in  his  own  history  reverse  the  part  of  Adam. 
Protestantism  took  up  this  lesson,  and  gave  emphasis  to 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  385 

the  doctrine  of  the  Fall  by  the  doctrine  of  individual 
Redemption.  But  Protestant  and  Catholic,  deadly  foes 
as  they  were,  might  Lave  joined  hands  against  the  Re- 
naissance, if  they  could  have  understood  the  path  of 
Histor3\  The}^  were  like  Athens  and  Sparta,  wasting  their 
strength  in  internecine  combat,  in  presence  of  the  grow- 
ing power  of  Macedon ;  their  differences  vanished  before 
their  common  interest,  in  the  presence  of  a  common  foe. 
A  new  epoch  was  at  hand,  in  which  the  struggle  should 
be  transferred  to  other  issues  than  those  which  divided 
Protestants  from  Catholics.  The  French  Revolution 
took  up  the  lesson  of  the  Renaissance.  It  received  its 
heritage,  not  from  men  who  dethroned  an  infallible 
Church  to  make  way  for  an  infallible  book,  but  from  men 
who  taught  that  nothing  was  infallible  but  the  spirit  of 
universal  humanity.  It  proclaimed  the  sanctity  of  nature. 
It  repudiated  the  doctrine  of  the  Fall.  The  repudiation 
was  too  complete  to  be  conscious.  But  the  ideal  of  Demo- 
cracy, started  by  the  American,  and  made  emphatic  by  the 
French  Revolution — what  is  it  but  the  doctrine  of  Origi- 
nal Sin  inverted  ?  Man's  nature  is  corrupt,  said  Augus- 
tine, education  should  be  the  victory  over  Nature.  Man's 
nature  is  holy,  said  Rousseau,  education  should  be  the 
victory  over  all  that  is  artificial.  The  strange  hankering 
after  savage  life  which  distinguished  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  found  its  interpreter  in  Rousseau,  was  the 
reversal  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Fall.  Those  who  most 
dwelt  on  it  may  never  have  heard  of  the  doctrine  of  the 
Fall  ;  none  the  less  the  whole  meaning  of  the  second 
doctrine  depends  on  the  meaning  of  the  first.  The 
Rights  of  Man,  the  Goddess  of  Reason,  the  worship  of 
Humanity — all  arc  the  sonorous,  the  emphatic,  the  pas- 
sionate unsayin,']^  of  ^hc  doctrine  of  Original  Sin,  the  Fall 
of  Man,  the  evil  of  Nature  ;  and,  lastly,  in  our  own  day, 
the  Darwinian  theory  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest  and 

2  u 


386  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

the  origin  of  humanity  by  natural  selection,  has  come  to 
bind  the  scientific  and  the  moral  members  of  this  new- 
development  into  a  complete  whole.  Nature  had  been 
the  invading,  disturbing  influence  in  Creation  :  she  is 
now  enthroned  as  the  Creator. 

We  underrate  the  power  of  reaction  in  thought.  We 
seldom  give  an  adequate  place  to  that  element  in  all 
assertion  which  is  truly  denial.  God,  says  an  Indian 
sage  (and  he  repeats  the  phrase  more  than  once),  is  only 
to  be  described  by  No  No.  That  is,  so  many  of  Man's 
thoughts  of  God  are  unworthy,  that  the  true  doctrine 
concerning  Him  is  largely  made  up  of  protest.  The 
"  No  No "  may  be  heard  in  every  earnest  doctrine. 
How  much  of  modern  science  is  made  up  of  it  we 
are  hardly  yet  able  to  appreciate.  The  men  who  give 
attention  to  Nature,  as  to  something  Divine,  may  be 
even  ignorant  that  there  was  a  time  when  Nature  was 
traduced  as  something  almost  Satanic ;  but  they  are 
none  the  less  protestants  against  that  belief.  The  con- 
scious participation  in  thought  and  feeling  granted  to 
every  son  of  man  is  but  a  small  part  of  that  which  he 
truly  IS.  Far  below  the  stratum  of  consciousness  in  each 
one  of  us  lie  the  unsounded  depths  of  a  heritage  we  can 
as  little  abjure  as  discern.  In  some  mysterious  thrill, 
in  some  strange  unintelligible  foreboding,  in  some  vague 
unexplained  ecstasy  of  hope,  the  struggles  of  our  fathers 
make  themselves  felt  in  our  hearts.  And  what  for  a 
thousand  years  men  believed  leaves  its  record  for  cen- 
turies in  a  protest  after  it  has  ceased  to  exist  as  a  creed. 
The  doctrine  owes  all  its  distinctness  to  what  it  has  over- 
thrown, even  when  that  is,  in  the  mind  of  the  teacher, 
utterly  forgotten. 

It  is  by  a  vain  and  shallow  explanation  of  that  great 
reaction  of  thought  against  Christianity  characteristic  of 
our   day,   that  men  would  trace  it  to  any   discrepancy 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  ^Sj 

between  the  account  of  the  genesis  of  things  contained 
in  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  and  that  which  is  the  result 
of  modern   research.      A  divergence   setting  men's  feet 
in  paths  which  increase  their  remoteness  at  every  step 
could  never  be  removed   by  omitting  a  few  lines  from  a 
narrative.      The  men  of  our  day  turn  away  from  Chris- 
tianity not    because  it  is  committed    to   any  assertions 
about  the  beginning  of  things,  but  because  the   idea  of 
Evolution,  as  they  hold  it,  implies  a  sanction  on  all  desire 
and    choice,    and    bars   the    possibility    of   any   relation 
between  Man  and  his  acts  in  which  he  should  stand  out- 
side them  as  the  Creator  from   the  Creation.      All  that 
Man  does  is  from  this  point  of  view  but  a  part  of  Man, 
and  any  demand  that  some  part  should  be  renounced, 
that  the  true  Self  should  be  disentangled  from  elements 
which  yet  are  torn  away  with   more  sense  of  severance 
than   those  in  which  the  true   Self  is  found — such   an 
attempt  revolts  the  instincts   that  are  bred  of  exclusive 
attention    to   the   external    world.      When    a    man   thus 
formed   uses   the  old  language    and  speaks  of  God,  he 
means  something  quite  different  from  the  God  of  Chris- 
tians.     He  means  the  sum  of  things,  and  whatever  that 
principle  is  which  lies  at  their  root — that  principle  which 
explains  them  as  gravitation   explains   the  movement  of 
the  planets,  and  is  exhausted  by  such  manifestation.      It 
was   possible,  in   former  days,   for   Faith  to  slumber  in 
some  closed  chamber  of  the  mind  while  the  logical  under- 
standing seized    on    all    present   event  as   its    exclusive 
property,  and  felt  that  its  negative  conclusion  could  not 
touch  God.      Now  that  we  see  every  moment   to   be  as 
full  of  Him  as  any  moment  ever  was,  we  must  trust  Him 
infinitely  more,  or  must  cease  to  trust  Him  at  all. 

The  Science  of  our  day  stands  towards  Time  as  the 
Science  of  the  Renaissance  stood  towards  Space.  As 
the  astronomers  of  the  seventeenth   century,  in  destroy- 


388  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

ing  the  old  cosmogony  of  the  earth  below  and  the 
heavens  above,  discovered  a  new  star  in  this  seeming 
dark  earth,  so  the  men  of  Science  of  the  nineteenth 
have  discovered  in  the  seemingly  undivine  processes 
of  all  growth  the  work  of  the  Creator.  The  six  days 
of  Creation  have  expanded  to  take  in  the  course  of 
all  the  years,  as  the  realm  of  Heaven  expanded  to 
take  in  the  orb  that  holds  all  that  is  known  of  life. 
Yet  the  men  of  the  seventeenth  century  recognized 
with  glad  reverence  that  their  discoveries  were  but  an 
enormous  expansion  of  the  Divine,  and  the  men  of 
the  nineteenth  deem  that  their  discoveries  eliminate 
the  Divine  from  the  realm  of  all  that  man  can  know. 
Whence  this  vast  difference  of  spirit  in  two  revolutions 
identical  in  principle  ?  Why  was  it  easy  to  recognize 
the  Divine  influence  throughout  all  Space,  while  it  seems 
impossible  to  recognize  that  influence  throughout  all 
Time  without  a  degradation  and  dilution  of  the  meaning 
in  what  is  Divine  that  practically  leaves  men,  as  far  as 
consciousness  goes,  superior  to  the  force  which  they 
know,  while  it  cannot  know  them  ? 

Our  aim  is  history,  but  if  history  land  us  on  a  pro- 
blem, we  cannot  conclude  our  review  without  attempting 
to  suggest  the  direction  in  which  the  answer  is  to  be 
found.  Such  an  attempt,  made  in  face  of  a  problem 
so  vast  and  so  ancient,  can  be  but  little  more  than 
an  indication  of  tendencies  inadequately  recognized,  and 
truths  obvious  indeed,  but  not  obviously  connected  with 
the  questions  which  give  them  their  most  important  illus- 
tration. The  contrast  between  the  earnest  and  devout 
astronomy  of  the  seventeenth  century  and  the  irreverent 
and  narrowing  physiology  of  the  nineteenth  seems  to  us 
explained,  so  far  as  it  is  explained  at  all,  by  the  far 
greater  stress  on  Faith  which  is  demanded  by  an  exten- 
sion of  the  Divine  Agency  to  all  Time  than  to  all  Space. 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  389 

Time  is  the  common  element  of  the  inner  and  the  outer 
experience.  Space  belongs  only  to  the  last.  We  can- 
not think,  we  cannot  feel,  we  cannot  dream,  without  some 
change,  imperceptible  as  it  may  be,  and  inadequate  as  it 
may  seem  to  its  content,  of  the  shadow  on  the  dial.  To 
be  told  that  the  Divine  working  is  nozv,  is  a  far  greater 
revelation  than  to  be  told  that  the  Divine  Presence  is 
here.  It  forced  men  to  a  recognition,  immensely  and 
immeasurably  greater,  of  that  distinction  in  the  Divine 
Agency  which  separates  the  manifestation  of  Divine  Will 
from  the  manifestation  of  Divine  Character.  It  did  not 
introduce  that  distinction.  When  men  believed  that  the 
tiger's  claws  and  the  sensitive  nerves  which  feel  lacerated 
flesh  were  the  work  of  a  moment  in  the  sixth  day  of 
Creation,  they  did  not  feel  it  impossible  to  say,  "  The 
infliction  of  pain,  apart  from  penal  decision,  must  no 
doubt  be  accepted  as  a  decision  of  the  Creator,  but  in- 
dications of  His  character  must  be  sought  elsewhere." 
They  find  it  impossible  to  keep  hold  of  this  conviction 
when  the  sharpening  of  the  claw  and  the  increased  sensi- 
tiveness of  the  nerve  is  exhibited  as  a  gradual  process, 
part  of  the  whole  course  of  things  which,  as  far  as  con- 
cerns what  we  call  Nature,  was  in  the  beginning,  is  now, 
and  ever  shall  be.  Nothing  is  brought  before  them  but 
a  change  concerning  time,  but  what  seems  to  have  hap- 
pened is,  that  God  has  been  dethroned  to  make  way  for 
Nature. 

The  fervour  of  modern  Democracy  is  explained,  as 
well  as  the  fervour  of  modern  Science,  by  their  common 
recoil  from  an  abandoned  creed.  This  doctrine  we  have 
been  studying,  wliich  called  itself  Christianity,  was  in  its 
whole  political  aspect  a  worship  of  the  exceptional.  The 
ordinary  course  of  tilings  was  unblessed  ;  salvation  was 
a  setting  aside  the  ordinary  course  of  things,  an  escape 
into  some  realm   that  was   no   inheritance   of  humanity. 


390  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

In  our  day,  on  the  other  hand,  if  any  desire  is  widely 
felt,  that  fact  is  supposed  to  establish  its  legitimacy. 
We  imagine  ourselves  to  approach  the  ideal  of  govern- 
ment in  proportion  as  we  give  a  larger  number  of  indi- 
viduals a  chance  of  influencing  government.  The  divine 
right  of  kings  has  been  succeeded  by  the  divine  right  of 
multitudes.  There  is  a  virtue,  it  is  thought,  in  multi- 
plication. If  each  individual  wants  something  wrong, 
they  cannot  all  together  want  something  wrong.  Human 
nature  is  elevated  into  a  sort  of  Divine  rule,  regulating 
the  disorders  of  individual  will.  The  worship  of  the 
exceptional  is  changed  into  the  worship  of  the  universal, 
even  at  times  into  the  worship  of  the  average.  The 
"  worship  of  humanity  "  by  a  small  but  influential  sect 
among  us  is  but  the  caricature  of  what  is  felt  by  all  who 
exercise  an  obvious  and  lively  influence  on  our  own 
generation. 

It  may  thus  seem  at  times  as  if  the  epoch  of  indi- 
vidualism, which  began  with  the  modern  world,  were  at 
last  at  an  end.  We  are  apparently  returning  towards  the 
ideal  of  antique  life,  according  to  which  the  unit  of  moral 
thought  was  not  the  individual  but  the  group.  Modern 
Democracy,  with  its  bias  towards  Socialism,  its  deference 
towards  "  the  masses,"  appears  to  revive  the  classical 
reverence  for  the  State  at  the  expense  of  the  individual. 
Modern  Science,  with  its  great  idea  of  Evolution,  opens 
a  backward  vista  in  the  history  of  every  man  which 
exhibits  his  seventy  years  of  individual  life  as  an  insig- 
nificant fragment  of  all  that  makes  up  his  true  history, 
and  thus  arresting  all  judgment  until  his  moral  bio- 
graphy be  completed  by  all  its  ancestral  preface,  returns 
towards  the  Augustinian  idea  of  Original  Sin,  seen 
under  the  fainter  light  of  a  day  which  knows  only  evils 
and  not  Evil.  Yet  all,  probably,  which  is  vital  in  this 
revival  of  a  past  ideal,  is  of  the  hour.      Never  can  a 


11 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  391 

principle  of  incorporation  which  depended  for  its  life  on 
repulsion  widen  to  include  the  human  race.  And  then 
again  never  can  the  Individual  lose  the  indefeasible  claim 
that  Immortality  has  symbolised  for  mankind.  Science, 
explaining  every  man's  life  by  a  finite  prelude,  cannot 
undo  the  work  of  belief  in  an  infinite  future  ;  it  is  not 
anticipation  alone  which  has  been  affected  by  that  belief, 
nor  may  its  influence  be  banished  when  it  is  itself  re- 
jected. Men  and  women  may  refuse  to  regard  them- 
selves as  heirs  of  immortalit}^,  but  they  can  neither 
abdicate  nor  refuse  to  concede  the  claims  which  only 
began  to  exist  with  that  high  anticipation.  The  words 
"  for  ever,"  uttered  by  lips  on  which  they  were  a  hope  or 
a  fear,  do  not  lose  their  meaning  as  they  fall  on  ears- 
which  receive  them  as  a  mere  fiction.  Those  who  deny 
must  explain  them,  and  whatever  the  explanation,  it 
must  involve  a  consciousness  in  man — were  he  cut  ofT 
from  all  political  grouping,  were  he  alone  in  Juan 
Fernandez,  never  expecting  to  look  on  the  face  of  a 
fellow-man  again  —  of  something  that  seems  eternal. 
The  eternal  can  never  be  subordinated  to  the  perishable 
— even  though  the  eternity  be  but  a  hope,  and  the 
transient  far  outlast  the  span  of  man's  sojourn  on  earth. 
The  questions  that  concern  the  being  in  whom  an 
infinite  hope  has  arisen  can  never  again  be  subordi- 
nated to  those  which  concern  the  framework  of  his  life 
in  this  world,  however  inferior  be  the  span  of  his  own 
life  here,  and  however  faint  and  dim  the  hope  of  any 
other. 

We  have  seen  how  the  evolution  of  the  moral  life  of 
Humanity  passes  in  throbs  of  antagonism  from  race  to 
race,  and  how  yet  this  antagonism  is  never  a  mere  recoil  ; 
so  that,  when  the  Persian  Dualism  arose  to  protest  against 
the  confusion  of  Good  and  Evil  in  the  Indian  Pantheism, 
this  dualism  held  some  hint  of  an  ultimate  Unity,  which, 


392  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

as  the  goal  of  all  existence,  must  also  have  been  in  some 
sense  its  starting-point.  And  then,  again,  we  have  seen 
how,  when  the  process  was  reversed,  and  the  rich  variety 
of  the  artist  people  was  exchanged  for  the  monotony  of 
the  world's  lawgivers,  there  was  yet  a  sort  of  escape  from 
that  monotony  in  the  influence  which  made  of  Rome  the 
mediator  of  the  nations,  enclosing  in  its  hard  frame-work 
the  variety  of  the  Greek  world.  No  stage  of  thought, 
in  an  individual  life  or  in  that  of  the  world,  can  be  a 
mere  unsaying  of  what  has  gone  before.  Yet  thought 
progresses  by  a  continual  turn  towards  such  an  unsay- 
ing. When  the  consciousness  of  the  race  passed  from 
that  conviction  which  was  the  groundwork  of  all  ancient 
morals,  that  the  State  was  a  unity,  to  the  double  con- 
viction that  the  individual  is  a  unity,  and  that  the  human 
race  is  a  unity,  it  made  an  advance  which  could  never 
again  be  lost,  but  which  with  the  progress  of  the  ages 
withers  into  as  exclusive  a  doctrine  as  that  against  which 
it  was  a  reaction.  Man,  to  the  old  world,  was  a  mere 
fragment  of  the  Republic.  To  the  modern  world  the 
starting-point  of  thought  has  been  the  individual  man. 
Perhaps  no  greater  revolution  ever  moved  the  world  of 
thought  than  that  which  effected  this  change  in  its  moral 
unit;  it  has  needed  nearly  two  thousand  years  to  work  out 
its  consequences,  and  exhibit  the  morality  of  the  "Self" 
as  the  classic  world  exhibited  the  morality  of  the  citizen. 
And  now,  it  would  seem,  a  new  epoch  of  expansion  dawns 
on  the  world.  Science  has  given  the  word  Self  a  new 
meaning ;  in  the  light  of  Evolution  it  is  seen  to  contain 
as  a  part  of  its  very  being  a  relation  to  the  Past.  We 
need  to  carry  on  this  expansion  into  a  different  direction. 
What  each  man  means  when  he  says  "  I  "  is  but  a  frag- 
ment. The  true  I  is  made  up  of  relation  to  something 
larger  than  itself;  its  instincts  are  centrifugal  as  well  as 
centripetal ;  it  has  not   to  create  bonds  with  other  per- 


THE  HERITAGE  OF  TO-DAY.  393 

sonalities ;  it  need  but  recognize  those  which  make  up  a 
part  of  its  own  being.  Personality  is  the  very  source  of 
Unity  ;  but  it  has  been  the  constant  temptation  of  human 
beings  to  impoverish  this  Unity,  to  refuse  to  recognize 
its  organic  relational  character,  to  ignore  the  multiplicity 
which  lies  at  its  base.  We  shall  discern  this  multi- 
plicity when  we  discern  the  larger  Unity  which  encloses 
it.  We  shall  see  that  Self  means  relation  to  Man  when 
we  see  that  it  means  also  relation  to  God. 

All  the  strength  of  ancient  life  was  wrought  up  witli 
its  exclusiveness.  A  few  persons  were  welded  into  a 
closer  unity  than  that  attained  by  any  modern  State, 
because  a  number  of  persons,  quite  as  necessary  to  its 
existence  as  any  of  its  members,  were  treated  as  things. 
Towards  this  unity  we  can  never  return.  We  cannot 
so  unlearn  the  lessons  that  we  inherit  with  our  bodily 
structure  as  ever  to  combine  in  a  conscious  unity  which 
is  to  shut  out  others  of  our  kind.  We  have  no  antago- 
nistic pressure  to  supply  limits  from  without ;  our  one- 
ness must  come  from  a  universally  felt  attraction  towards 
something  within.  Men  think  in  our  day  that  this 
centre  can  be  found  in  the  ideal  of  Humanity.  They 
have  yet  to  learn  that  no  ideal  is  possible  if  that  which 
is  idealized  know  no  Beyond.  These  pages  have  been 
occupied  with  an  effort  to  illustrate  from  the  history  of 
moral  thought  the  belief  that  Man  can  strive  towards  no 
virtue  in  which  he  does  not  feel  the  sympathy  of  God. 
He  must  feel  himself  in  some  sense  a  fragment,  if  ever 
he  is  to  discover  his  true  oneness.  Virtue  must  be  a 
refracted  ray  from  something  above  Virtue  ;  duty  must 
be  the  aspect,  visible  in  our  dense  atmosphere,  of  a 
higher  excellence  extending  far  beyond  it.  And  they 
who  would  deny  this,  they  who  feel  that  Nature  ex- 
hausts God,  that  the  summits  of  human  virtue  arc  the 
summits  of  moral   excellence,  that  reverence  is  the  pro- 


394  THE  MORAL  IDEAL. 

vision  for  inferiority,  and  fades  away  before  Man  reaches 
those  heights  towards  which  he  is  alwa3^s  striving — they 
can  find  in  the  moral  thought  of  the  Past  Httle  but  a 
collection  of  errors.  Man,  if  we  judge  him  by  history, 
knows  himself  only  so  far  as  he  turns  towards  the  eternal 
Other  of  the  human  spirit ;  he  finds  his  true  Unity  only 
as  he  finds  a  larger  Unity  which  makes  him  one  with 
himself  and  with  his  brother  man. 


Note  to  page  i86. 

[It  has  been  pointed  out  to  me,  by  a  reader  of  the  first 
edition,  while  these  sheets  were  passing  through  the  press, 
that  the  true  analogue  for  the  Venus  of  Virgil,  as  a  type  of 
the  Divine  Mother,  must  be  sought  in  Thetis  rather  than  in 
Aphrodite.  I  think  any  one  who  will  compare  the  freakish 
whimsical  result  of  the  appeal  of  Thetis  to  Zeus — the  lying 
dream  sent  to  Agamemnon,  the  purposeless  pretence  at  a 
wish  for  a  return,  &c., — with  the  whole  action  of  the  /Eneid, 
wherever  Venus  appears  in  it,  will  allow  that  the  contrast 
between  Venus  and  Thetis  illustrates  the  remarks  in  the  text 
almost  as  well  as  the  contrast  between  Venus  and  Aphrodite, 
No  doubt  Venus  is  just  as  partial  as  Thetis  is,  (and  so  is 
the  Mediaeval  Virgin).  But  the  difference  in  their  dignity,  and 
their  connection  with  the  plan  of  the  world's  history,  seems  to 
me  immense.] 


INDEX. 


Abraham,  254,  267,  269 

Acvina,  13  n, 

Adam,  253,  279,  305,  312,  350,  366 

Aditya,  21  ?i. 

*^neid,  179,  186,  2C7 

.^schylus,  74,  89-94,  102,  283,  353 

Agamemnon,  299 

Agni,  5,  19,  21  71. 

Ahab,  78 

Ahriman,  19,  51-80,  322,  355 

Ahura,  18  n. 

Alexander,  149 

Alexandria,  251,  253,  268 

Amos,  79  n. 

Anderson  (Art  of  Gunnery),  377  n, 

Andra,  18  n. 

Anthony,  241  n. 

Antigone,  118,  283 

Antonines,  age  of,  215,  286,  287 

Anytus,  225 

Apollo,  89,  94 

Ardisheir,  321  n. 

Aristides,  103 

Aristotle,  85,  96  «. ,  106  «.,  142,  143  «. 

Arjuna,  41  n. 

Arnobius,  288  n. 

Athens,  102,  114-119,  137,  248,  339 

Athene,  87,  102 

Augustine,  326-383 

Augustus,  184 

Kacchus,  243 
Bacon,  277,  382 
Bardesanes,  319  n. 
Beaumont,  Rev.  Joseph,  275  n. 
Beausobre,  322  n. 
Bentley,  229  n. 
Bi-rni,  232  //. 
Bhagavadgita,  41  n, 
Blceck,  59  n. 

Blondcl,   L'Art  de  jetcr  les  bonibc?, 
377  «• 


Bournouf,  Emile,  10  «.,  11  «. ,  34  n., 

36  «. 
Brahmanism,  32-34 
Buddhism,  34-40 
Bulis,  105 

Bundahis,  56  n.,  73  «. 
Busyacta,  59 

C.^DMON,  356  71. 

Caesar,  Julius,  149,  296 
Cain,  284  //. 
Cakya-muni,  35,  36 
Callicratidas,  140;?.,  160 
Caligula,  192  «.,  269 
Canus,  Julius,  192  71. 
Carthaginians,  153 
Cato,  240 
Charmides,  141  ti. 

Cicero,  134, 1357/.,  137  «•-  i55.  156  «•. 
158  71.,  159  71.,  188  «.,  196-198,  203 

«.,   240,   241   71.,   341  71. 

Cicero,  Quintus,  197  «. 

Cincinnatus,  368 

Clemens  Alexandrinus,  306  «.,  310  «., 

312  71.,  342  It. 
Clementina,  335  «.,  342  n. 
Commodus,  237 
Comte,  240 
Corbulo,  192;/.,  196 
Corinthians,  loi 
Creon,  96,  98 
Creusa,  181 
Critias,  141  «. 
Croesus,  in,  121 
Cyrus,  58,  77,  93 

Dantk,  147,  180,  207,  240,  292,  319, 
381,  384 

Darius,  68 

Uarmesteter,   18  71.,  28  «.,  49  //. ,  51 

71.,  52  //.  ,  59  71.,  66  //. 

Darwin,  168  «.,  337,  382 


398 


INDEX. 


David,  79  "' 
Davies,  John,  41  n. 
Demosthenes,  102  n. 
Dido,  178,  179,  182 
Dillman,  A.,  356  n. 
Dio  Cassius,  260  ?i. 
Dion,  211 

Dhammapada,  35  n, 
Djemschid,  70 
Domitian,  194  n.,  195 
Druids,  207 

Eden,  279,  304,  362 
Elisha,  servant  of,  182,  183 
Empedocles,  299,  347  n. 
Enoch,  285  f?.,  355  n. 
Epicharis,  188  n. 
Epictetus,  220-237,  349 
Ephesians,  309  n. 
Erinnys,  94 
Eumenides,  89,  90 
Euripides,  283,  299  n, 
Eusebius,  288  «. 
Eve  ;  see  Adam. 
Exodus,  269  n. 

Faustina,  237 
F^n^lon,  45 
Feridun,  71 
Firdusi,  124 
Furies,  88,  90  n. 

Gaius,  155  n. 
Galatians,  309  n. 
Gahleo,  381 
Gaveh,  71 
Georgics,  178  «. 
Gfrorer,  286  n. 
Goethe,  187 
Gorgias,  299  ?!. 
Gough,  A.  E.,  19 
Grote,  61  n.,  69  ?i. 
Guyon,  45 

Hannah,  78 

Hannibal,  148,  149 

Haug,  Dr.  Martin,  12  n.,  18  n. 

Hector,  178 

Helen,  99,  186 

Heracleitus,  120,  253  n. 

Hercules,  84 

Herodotus,  61  n.,  68,  69  «.,  74,  75, 
105  «.,  108  n.,  109  «.,  no  n.,  HI 
n.,  113,  115  n.,  n6,  121  n.,  299 

Hesiod,  141,  306 

Holinshed,  275  n. 

Homer,  41  n.,  62,  87,  116,  124,  125, 
180,  186 

Hovelacque,  Abel,  52  n. ,  72  n. 


Iblis,  71 
Indra,  14,  18  n., 
Iranian  race,  64, 
Irenseus,  306  n., 
Iridj,  64,  65 
Isaac,  254  H, 
Isaiah,  77 


19.  51 
65 
310  w. 


Jacob  and  Joseph,  269 

Janet,  Paul,  21  n. 

Jeans,  Rev.  G.  E. ,  135  ». 

Jebb,  Prof.,  91  «.,  112  u. 

Job,  78  «.,  79«.,  89 

Jocasta,  99 

John  the  Baptist,  310  n. 

John,  St.,  309  n.,  340  n. 

Joseph,  269 

Josephus,  260  n. 

Jowett,  Dr.,  85  «.,  127  ti. 

Jove,  100 

Jude,  356  n. 

Julian  the  Pelagian,  350  n. 

Juvenal,  247  n.,  260  n. 

Kant,  45,  46 

Karsten,  editor  of  Xenophanes,  108  n, 

Khordah-Avesta,  59  fi. 

Kings,  78  n.,  183  n. 

Kingsley,  Chas.,  350  n. 

Kschatriyia,  41  «. 

Labdacus,  house  of,  93 

Lactantius,  335  n. 

Laodamia,  181 

Lassale,  Ferdinand,  120  «.,  121  n. 

Latinus,  178 

Leges,  Plato,  85  n. 

Lucan,  206,  207,  261  ;?. 

I..ucretius,  90  n.,  163-177,  215,  229 

Ludwig,  Alfred,  4-14 

Luke,  79,  80,  377 

Luther,  383 

Lycurgus,  144 

Lysander,  140  n. 

Mahabharata,  24  n,,  51 

Mani,  321  n. ,  325 

Mangey's  Philo,  253  «.,  269  n. 

Marathon,  62 

Marcus  Aurelius  Antoninus,  202  ;;., 

208-237 
Martial,  194  n.,  207  n. 
Matter,  J.,  308 
Matthew,  80  «.,  377  n. 
Maxwell,  Clarke,  226  n. 
Maximus  of  Tyre,  340  «. 
Megasthenes,  42  «. 
Meletus,  226 
Melians,  126 


INDEX. 


399 


Menu,    29,    33,    34   «.,    37,    39,    40, 

142  7/. 
Merivale"s  Romans  under  the  Empire, 

158;/. 
Methodius,  335  «. 
Mezentius,  179 
Mill,  James,  314 
Mill,  John,  62,  202,  296 
Milton,  312,  356  >/. 
Miltiades,  102,  103 
Mithra,  66-68,  87 
Mitra,  13  ?t. 

Mohl,  Jules,  62,  63  u.,  64  7/.,  71  n. 
Muir,  John,  2,  32 
Mure,  William,  128 
Miiller,  Max,  2  u.,  j  11.,  10  n.,  19  n., 

27  n. ,  30 

Nero,  191,  194  n.,  195,  196,  315 
Newman,  John  Henry,  345 
Nicias,  113 
Nirvana,  34-36 
Numbers,  269  n. 

OEDIPUS,  90-99,  112  ti.,  201  7/.,  366 
Orestes,  93,  95 
Origen,  35672.,  358  n. 
Ormazd  ;  see  Ahriman. 
Osiris,  243 

Pascal,  210,  216 

Pastor,  a  Roman  knight,  192  n. 

Paul,  St.,  47,  loi,  230,  234,  248,  259, 

315.  339 
Pausanias,  the  traveller,  90 
Pausanias,  the  general,  103 
Pelagians,  347  n.,  350  n. 
Pelagius,  348  n. 
Persius,  222,  223,  231  n. 
Peter,  St.,  335  7/, 
Pharsalia,  Lucan,  194,  195  ».,  207  n., 

261  n. 
Phsedrus,  136,  298  n. 
Phcebus,  90,  91 
Philo,  251-275,  310 
Pilate,  257 
Pilia,  197  n. 
Pindar,  122 
Piso,  155  n. 
Plataea,  battle  of,  60 
Plato,  85,  86  71.,   87,   104,  108,  128, 

132.  133.  139.  140,  141  «•.  142-144. 

ig6n.,  200,  211,  218  n.,  226,  241, 

249.    297-299,   322,  334.  347,   370, 

378 
Plolinus,  306  n. 
Plutarch,    149,    213,    242,    2^)3,    251, 

274  «..  367  n. 
Polilicus,  249,  299  n.,  334  n. 


Polybius,  148  7?. ,  150  77. ,  153 
Polycrates,  121 
Polyphemus,  180 
Pompey,  247  ?/. ,  24S 
Priam,  99,  178 
Prometheus,  304,  353,  356  n. 
Protagoras,  128  //. 
Proverbs,  307 
Ptolemy  Soter,  260 

QuiNET,  Edgar,  66  n. 

Rammohun  Roy,  30 
Rawlinson's  Herodotus,  74 
Renan,  209 
Rigveda,  2-43 
Romulus,  93,  368 
Rousseau,  382,  385 
Rubellius,  Plautus,  192  n, 
Rustem,  63 

Satan,  78.  80,  88,  89,  304,  323,  333 

Salvian,  368  n. 

Schiller,  194 

Schopenhauer,  19  n. 

Scott,  122,  203 

Sejanus,  daughter  of,  350 

Seneca,  159,  192  ?:.,  194  77.,  203,  220, 

236,  363 
Servius  Sulpicius,  205  n.,  341  n. 
Septuagint,  253 
Se.\tus  of  Chaeronea,  213  77. 
Shah-rameh,  62-65,  7°'  124 
Shakespeare,  113,  123,  275,  356,  366 
Sicinnus,  69  77. 
Simon  Magus,  335 
Smerdis,  68,  69 
Socrates,  132,  136,  140,  142  77.,  143, 

144,  196,  217,  218,  225,  298 
Sohrab ;  see  Rustem. 
Solon,  121 
Soma,  9 

Sophocles,  90,  93-112,  122,  262,  283 
Spencer,  Herbert,  20  77. 
Sperthias  ;  see  Bulis. 
Spiegel's    translation    of    Khordah- 

Avesta,  59  77. 
St.  Hilaire,  30 
Strabo,  42  77.,  247  n. 
Sudra,  32-34 


.  15s  «• 
192  77., 


158  n. 
206  n.. 


Tacitus,  90  n. 
188  77.,  191  7/., 
Tchandala,  36  77 
TcrtuUian,  306  n. 
'I'hemistoclcs,  102,  103 
Thucydidcs,  113  117,  125-128 
Tiberius,  155,  210 


.  159. 
247 


400 


INDEX. 


TirriDeus,  286  «.,  298  n.,  310  «. 
Tiro,  158  n. 
Tullia,  198,  205  n. 
Tur,  64,  65 
Turnus,  179 

Ulysses,  105 

Upanishads,    19   «. ,    25-27,    31,    32, 

44 
Ushas,  5,  6,  19 

Valentinus,  335  n. 
Varuna,  8,  10,  11,  13,  14,  56 
Vendidad,  53  «. 


Virgil,  176-187,  193,  200  n.,  207,  215 
Vritra,  51 

West,  E.  W.  ,  12,  56 
Wordsworth,  175,  176,  181 

Xenophanes,  108,  140  «. 

Xenophon,  58 

Xerxes,  60,  62,  69,  74,  75, 109,  no,  in 

Zendavesta,  49«.,  52,  59,  67,  68,  70 
Zervanites,  57  «. 
Zoiiak,  64,  71,  124 
Zoroaster,  52,  54 


THE    END. 


PRINTED  BY  BALLANTYNE,  HANSON  ANU  CO. 
EDINBURGH  AND  LONDON. 


THE    MORAL    IDEAL. 

A  HISTORIC  STUDY. 
By    JULIA    WEDGWOOD. 


Opinions  of  the  Press  on  the  First  Edition. 

"Miss  Wedgwood's  subject  is  much  more  than  'the  Moral 
Ideal,'  and  she  treats  it  in  a  masculine  fashion  which  shows  us 
the  large  intellectual  background  without  which  moral  ideals  could 
never  have  grown  to  any  fulness  of  maturity.  .  .  .  Masterly  essays 
.  .  .  shot  through  and  through  with  fine  criticisms." — Spectator. 

"The  work  is  worthy  of  study,  being  gracefully,  sometimes 
eloquently,  written,  and  containing  much  earnest  thought." — 
Morning  Post. 

"The  attentive  reader  will  not  fail  to  find  in  it  the  choice  fruit 
not  only  of  much  reading,  but  of  much  acute  and  original  thought 
on  the  great  questions  of  morals  and  religion.  ...  It  describes, 
often  with  deep  insight  and  great  delicacy  of  touch,  not  a  few  of 
'those  throljs  and  pulsations  which  make  up  the  true  life  of  man.' 
.  .  .  Woman  has  undoubtedly  played  a  noble  part  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  moral  ideal,  and  the  sympathetic  reader  of  Miss  Julia 
Wedgwood's  latest  work  will  be  thankful  to  come  into  contact 
with  a  fresh  and  charming  proof  of  this  great  fact." — Manchester 
Guardian. 

"The  book  displays  immense  reading,  ...  it  is  very  definite 

in  its  aim,  and  is  saturated  with  deep  and   earnest    thought." — 

Birmingham  Daily  Post. 

2  C 


"  In  the  investigation  of  the  moral  ideal  the  author  seeks  the 
aspirations  of  man  in  successive  ages,  and  compares  them  with 
human  progress  as  indicated  in  history,  which  shows  that  aspira- 
tion is  'the  clue  to  all  history.'  The  work  is  evidently  the  outcome 
of  much  thoughtful  reading  and  examination  of  the  characters 
of  men  in  different  ages  of  the  world's  existence." — Lwefpool 
Courier. 

"  By  an  examination  and  analysis  of  history  and  of  human  nature 
the  accomplished  lady  whose  name  appears  on  the  title-page  of 
'The  Moral  Ideal'  seeks  to  trace  the  development  of  thought 
and  the  e^'olution  of  the  moral  life  of  humanity.  .  .  .  One  of  the 
great  objects  of  the  author  is  to  inquire  into  what  have  been 
the  aspirations  of  mankind  in  successive  ages,  and  then  to  place 
those  feelings,  those  aspirations,  beside  the  picture  of  human 
action  as  it  has  developed  itself  throughout  history.  .  .  .  Careful 
perusal  will  reveal  a  plan  at  once  thoughtful  and  philosophic,  and 
every  page  bears  testimony  to  the  vastness  of  the  store  of  historic 
and  literaiy  acquirement  from  which  the  author  has  drawn  her 
facts  and  illustrations." — Scotsman. 

"In  these  pages  we  have  the  thoughts  and  endeavours  of  more 
than  twenty  years  of  historic  study,  and  the  result  is  a  singularly 
fascinating  review  of  the  development  of  the  moral  sense  of  man- 
kind as  manifested  in  a  series  of  nationalities  from  the  remote 
Aryan  days  downwards.  .  .  .  The  book  is  one  which  vividly  illu- 
mines the  reader  as  to  the  real  significance  of  all  history.  .  .  . 
Manifestly  one  can  do  little  more  in  a  work  of  such  scope  and  of 
such  profound  and  subtle  thought  than  merely  indicate  the  outline 
of  the  subject.  .  .  .  No  one  can  peruse  these  chapters  without 
acquiring  a  clear  and  wide-ranging  vision  of  the  meaning  and 
value  of  the  story  of  a  people,  and  without  understanding  more 
pregnantly  than  before  the  scope  of  the  philosophy  and  morality  of 
histoiy.  .  .  .  We  had  noted  numerous  passages  for  special  refer- 
ence in  this  brief  survey,  but  already  too  much  has  been  written  to 
no  purpose  if  sufficient  has  not  been  said  to  awaken  in  the  reader 
a  desire  to  read  a  work  which  is  as  fascinating  in  its  views  of 
antiquity  as  it  is  exceptional  in  the  poetic  beauty  of  its  diction." — 
Glasgow  Herald, 


"  In  the  '  Moral  Ideal,'  by  Julia  Wedgwood,  we  have  a  work  of 
rare  excellence.  The  writer  in  her  modest  preface  tells  us  that 
what  she  now  publishes  represents  the  thoughts  and  endeavours 
of  more  than  twenty  years.  We  can  well  believe  it.  The  ground 
covered  is  very  wide,  and  the  observations  and  criticisms  are  not 
culled  from  other  writers,  but  are  original.  The  book  is  in  no 
respect  a  compilation,  but  bears  marks  in  every  page  of  indepen- 
dent research  and  independent  criticism.  .  .  .  The  present  volume 
justifies  its  own  existence  by  its  originality,  by  its  earnestness,  by 
the  imagination  which  vivifies  the  past,  and  the  learned  criticism 
which  shows  unsuspected  connections  and  enables  us  to  grasp 
ethical  histoiy  as  a  whole.  E\en  those  persons  who  are  interested 
rather  in  ancient  literature  than  in  ancient  philosophy  will  find  in 
the  volume  much  they  can  enjoy.  .  .  .  Few  recent  books  are  so 
full  of  matter  deserving  consideration." — British  Weekly. 

"The  secondary  title  which  the  authoress  had  thought  of  giving 
to  her  book,  'The  History  of  Human  Aspiration,'  may,  perhaps, 
convey  more  indication  of  the  character  of  the  work  than  its  actual 
name.  .  .  .  It  is  closely  thought  out,  and  requires  pretty  close 
reading.  Nevertheless,  those  who  will  take  the  trouble  to  attack 
the  volume  will  be  amply  rewarded  for  their  pains." — Bookseller. 

"  Miss  Wedgwood's  book  is  the  outcome  of  twenty  years'  study. 
It  is  a  history  of  human  aspiration  after  a  moral  ideal  that  changes 
continually  in  the  evolution  of  time  and  thought,  the  highest  truth 
discovered  by  one  age  being  often  found  by  a  revolt  against  the 
errors  circling  round  the  belief  that  was  the  life  of  a  former  age." 
— Literary  World. 

"  Though  the  book  is  the  outcome  of  a  profound  study  of  the 
classical  literature  of  all  ages,  it  contains  little  which  the  reader 
of  average  culture  may  not  readily  follow.  But  it  must  be  read 
with  care  ;  those  who  attempt  to  skim  it  will  waste  their  time." — 
Light. 


LONDON:  TRUBNER  &  CO.,  LUDGATE  HILL. 


University  of  California 

SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

405  Hilgard  Avenue,  Los  Angeles,  CA  90024-1388 

Return  this  material  to  the  library 

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