We were occupied in the last lecture with questions concerning the nature of God—His personality, His unity, His transcendence, His relation to the universe as creator. These are postulates of ethical monotheism which were not generally arrived at by any process of reasoning, but by a certain kind of prophetic intuition, the value of which we shall be considering later. But our contention has been that these postulates, however arrived at, are found to provide an interpretation of the data of experience, both ordinary and scientific, not less but more rational than the theories of pluralism or monism or emergent evolution. Now, we are to make our start from those postulates of ethical monotheism which concern the nature of man, that is, first of all from the assumption of his moral responsibility and absolute obligation to do what is right, the right being conceived of as the will of the Good God who made and governs all things, although, as a being endowed with freedom, man is capable of disobedience as fully as of obedience. First, then, we must carefully scrutinize this conception of moral responsibility and moral freedom with a view to its definition.

§ 1

There is, as Dr. Sorley has said, no logical road from the sense of what is to the sense of what ought to be, that is, what need not occur but what can occur, if I do my duty. But we cannot hesitate to say that this latter sense is characteristic of mankind. It belongs to its very essence. It exists equally under very varying conceptions of the content of duty—for instance, as between the traditional Indian and the traditional Christian conceptions of the rights and duties of a widow, or the Stoic and the Christian attitudes towards suicide. And this sense of responsibility for doing one’s duty is the correlative of another equally universal sense—that of rights—of what one can legitimately claim of others in their conduct towards oneself. The idea of rights and the idea of duty are inseparable; but the idea of duty, as Mazzini insisted, is the prior idea.

No doubt the sense of responsibility varies indefinitely in different persons, and is found to be very weak in a vast number of individuals. The same must be said of the sense of beauty or of the value of truth. But they exist probably in some measure in all. One who had no such senses would be called hardly human; and just as we look to the few among us who are artists or poets, if we wish to appreciate the sense of beauty, so we look to the pre-eminently “good” men if we are to understand the idea of duty; for there we see it dominant and luminously clear.

It is also, no doubt, the case that the emergence of the sense of duty in the development of life on our planet is buried in obscurity. We may argue, but it must be inconclusively, as to whether it is to be found at all in the sub-human world of animals. Such argument must be inconclusive, because we cannot put ourselves in the position of horses or monkeys so as to see things through their eyes, or to think their thoughts. Thus the stronghold of the sense of duty lies in the inner consciousness of man; and in the language of contingency and responsibility in which that inner consciousness inevitably expresses itself. It seems to me somewhat misleading to speak, as Mr. J. E. Turner speaks, of the increasing “autonomy”1 exhibited in the animal world as it advances to its higher development. Increasing complexity of organization and increasing centralization in the nervous system is not properly called autonomy; and Mr. Turner himself shows this when he speaks of the increasing “autonomy” of machines made by man. A machine may be made to “go of itself” with less and less of human interference; but it can go only in one way. The most elaborate machine is not really more “autonomous” than a spade or a flint knife. We blame the maker, not the machine, if it fails. Thus again we do not seriously blame a plant or an animal if it fails to correspond to our requirements, we only try to get one of a better breed. The fact remains that first in man do we clearly find the inner sense of moral obligation, and we can build no logical bridge between “I am” and “I ought.”

However certainly, then, we believe that the evolution of the world was gradual, we must recognize that when the sense of moral obligation dawned upon the world, there was a new stage reached in the development of life, even though we cannot fix the point of its emergence; and if we cannot but see in the process of world-evolution the realization of a divine purpose, we must say that God created a new thing when a being appeared conscious of obligation, and of the alternatives of “right” and “wrong” open to him. That is the real difference, or an important part of the real difference, between “he “and” it.”

There is a sense in which no “ultimate of experience” can ever be explained, for explanation means the interpretation of the more complex or difficult by the more obvious and simple. Thus you cannot explain either the beautiful or the good. They both represent ultimate states of consciousness and ultimate elements of reality. The suggested explanations of them always turn out to be assuming the thing to be explained. Thus Henry Sidgwick was surely right when he finally refused to “reduce the notion of ought to terms of anything else” because it is an “irreducible datum of moral consciousness.”2 But we can make these elemental ideas more luminous to our minds by contrast with other ideas. Thus Mr. Turner helps us when he contrasts the idea of moral obligation with that of urgent desire, which presents itself as equally imperative. For “the imperiousness of desire,” he says, “seems to rise solely from ourselves, while moral commands appear to come to us from without, and to be as it were foreign to us. Still, we feel that the moral claim upon us is indefeasible, so that we are really ourselves only in recognizing and obeying it.”3 That is to say, that we recognize ourselves as belonging to some larger spiritual world in which a moral law is somehow necessarily inherent.

Again, the sense of duty sharply distinguishes itself from the appetite for pleasure (one special form of desire). It presents itself as something which has to be done irrespective of pleasure or pain consequent to the doer upon the performance of it—even though in the long run it may seem to us that the path of duty is the way to the truest and most enduring pleasure.

Once more, it helps us, passing from contrasts to resemblances, to observe that the sense of obligation attaches itself not only to what is commonly called moral conduct, but to all other values, believed to be part of the larger reality, the promotion of which lies equally within the sphere of our voluntary action; we thus recognize it as a duty to make our world beautiful, and a duty to submit ourselves to truth, as such, though these forms of duty are less widely acknowledged than the duty of right conduct. But all recognized “values” become alike imperatives upon the will.

§ 2

The idea and reality of moral obligation is essentially bound up with the idea and reality of freedom. There can be no meaning in penitence and the sense of shame on account of having done or omitted to do this or that; there can be no meaning in ascribing to a person responsibility for any particular occurrence, except on the assumption of contingency—that he need not have done what he did do—that its occurrence under the circumstances was not inevitable. If all occurrences are in truth equally and absolutely determined in the physical sequence of events, it cannot be denied that the whole language about responsibility and guilt, about penitence and shame, is the language of illusion.

I am of course conscious that even so clear-thinking a moral philosopher as Hastings Rash-dall was ultimately disposed to be a determinist4 while still maintaining not only practically but theoretically the principle of moral obligation. But I can only regard this as a conspicuous instance of the way in which an excessive regard for what is called logical consistency has led clear-thinking men to the denial of a patent element in experience. It is undeniable that if any man were genuinely convinced that his every action was absolutely predetermined, so that he was no more justly to be blamed for anything he might do than a cabbage or a sheep, and were to allow this conviction to dominate his conduct, he would cease to be a fit member of human society. Thus, Bishop Butler, in his famous chapter on the “Opinion of Necessity,” is content to leave the determinist theory out of discussion, though he calls it absurd, simply because no man can behave as if it were true without becoming less than a man and being treated as such.

Of course, ordinary observation and scientific enquiry severely limit the just idea of human freedom. The laws of nature, the latent forces of heredity, the strength of habit, and so on, limit the freedom of the individual. It may be that, as acts form habits and habits character and character stereotypes, it is possible for an individual actually to cease to be free, and not to have any longer the alternatives of good or bad open to him. This may be the truth latent in the phrase that we all have the making of our own heaven or our own hell—that actual freedom to become this or that belongs only to a temporary “state of probation.” We can leave these questions aside. We are now concerned only with the present condition of the normal man. Our argument also is not affected by the fact that a vast number of human beings have a ridiculous idea of freedom, as if it meant independence or “the right to do as we please.” This is ridiculous, because we must all strenuously seek to live “in accordance with nature,” as the Stoics phrased it, or “in accordance with God,” or else inevitably suffer disaster. The true nature of freedom lies in our action being contingent on our will, not on its wilfulness. But it does not matter to our argument how broad or how narrow are the limits within which freedom obtains, so long as, within its limits, freedom really exists, as the instrument alike of our moral development and moral probation. Nor does it destroy freedom to recognize that it never means independence of motives, but only the mysterious faculty for choosing the motive we will act upon, and thereby giving it preponderant strength.

For here we get to the root fact, which subsists and must be recognized in the centre of our rational being, that the various motives, which are relatively to be judged good or bad—pleasure, acquisitiveness, ambition, pride, the love of God, the love of man, the fear of hell, the hope of heaven—present themselves to our consciousness at crucial moments, and are estimated at their relative value by us, and that we can, by a deliberate act of choice, so attach ourselves to one or the other, as that our resultant action becomes decisively this or that, the other motives being ignored; indeed in cases of violent temptation, it may even happen that the consciousness of the strong pressure of some motive contrary to that which we actually choose only seems to increase the vigour we put into that which we have chosen. If freedom of choice in this sense is denied to be possible for all normal men and habitual in good and thoughtful men, it appears to me that such a denial is simply a refusal to face the facts, as revealed directly in human consciousness.

What takes place is something unique indeed, but unmistakable in quality. It is totally different from what takes place when distinct and opposing physical forces are acting simultaneously upon a physical body. The motion of the body is then the mixed resultant of the different forces. In the case of a variety of “motives” acting upon the will, the will surrenders to one and ignores the others, as has just been remarked. They are neutralized, or the very pressure of the rejected motive seems to add intensity to the one to which surrender is made—so that the man does the right all the more vigorously or the wrong all the more impulsively, because of the strong pressure he experienced to do the contrary.

Before considering the implications of this essentially human consciousness, there are certain considerations to be entertained.

(1) That in proportion as the physical sciences are coming to recognize the “abstractness” of their subject-matter—or in other words, since the dominance of a mechanical materialism has been relaxed—in that proportion science is ceasing to ban the idea of real freedom as the quality of spiritual beings. Thus Prof. Hobson, in his admirable Survey of the Domain of Natural Science, strongly condemns the attempt on the part of science to ban the idea of real freedom. “The assertion of this view in its absolute form is then merely a dogma resting on nothing but an illegitimate extension to the whole of what may have been shown to be true of some part. It is in direct contradiction to the immediate deliverance of our consciousness as to the real efficiency of the will.”5

Prof. Eddington similarly would restrain the dogmatism of physical science from the denial of free-will.6 “Meanwhile,” he writes, “we may note that science thereby withdraws its [moral] opposition to free-will. Those who maintain a deterministic theory of mental activity must do so as the outcome of the study of the mind itself, and not with the idea that they are thereby making it more conformable with an experimental knowledge of the laws of inorganic nature.” Prof. Eddington’s words imply a repudiation of determinism which is very far-reaching indeed. For he finds indeterminism in nature at its very basis. I am incapable of estimating his argument on this point. I simply note a widespread recognition on the part of distinguished men of science that it can legitimately claim no right to exclude the conception of free-will. This is a very important withdrawal. No one now can hesitate to accept the verdict of our own consciousness on the ground that science declares that it must be an illusion. But it should be noted that what the conception of human freedom requires is not that the action of our will results in any augmentation or reduction of the physical energy which passes into the human body and passes out of it in action. All that is required from the ethical point of view is a certain (confessedly restricted) control over its direction, as in this or that kind of activity.

I must dissent altogether from a statement quoted from Dr. Inge by Mr. Turner,7 that the claim of moral freedom involves that “the self that is free must be outside the flow of events and itself timeless.” On the contrary, it is within the flow of events, and as incarnate, that the moral personality emerges, essentially limited by the flow of events, but not so limited as that a new quality does not appear which sheds its light on the whole flow of events by revealing a new meaning and purpose in the universe.

(2) I must also call attention to a similar withdrawal of antagonism on the part of theologians. Christianity, in the days of the Greek Fathers, distinguished itself by its enthusiastic insistence on the reality of free-will and moral responsibility. Under the influence of Augustine, however, in his extremest moment of antagonism to Pelagian-ism, the Western Church in part adopted an idea of divine predestination, the logical implication of which did no doubt cut at the roots of any real sense of moral responsibility. The late Master of Balliol—Benjamin Jowett—was right, I think, in calling attention to the fact that this doctrine of predestination was so deeply involved in the clouds and darkness of inscrutable mystery, that it was much less calculated to paralyse the sense of responsibility in fact, than the plainer form of scientific denial that any action of the human mind could interfere with the determined flow of physical events. But to-day the extremer Augustinianism, and its daughter Calvinism, are being frowned out of court by theologians from all quarters—even from Scotland. There is a much more general readiness to admit that the recognition of the creation of free beings does involve a conception of God as having thereby imposed a limit upon Himself, at least temporarily, in that while He solicits human beings through their moral consciences, He refuses to compel them. This also, to many minds, carries with it the implication that to know precisely what we are going to do cannot lie in the prevision even of God—that though He keeps control over the consequences of our actions He cannot foreknow them in particular. But this profound problem will recur for consideration later.

(3) We must recognize a permanent ambiguity in the use of the words “freedom of the will.” It expresses the idea that a choice lies open before the will, not only between good or bad, but more generally between this or that kind of action, within certain limits, whatever motive finally governs the choice. But it has always suggested to the wilfulness of mankind a kind of liberty to follow its fancies which is wholly unreal. The Stoic hymn of Cleanthes was quite right in warning mankind of the folly of wickedness, since, inasmuch as the moral life is the life according to nature, nature will revenge itself on immorality as surely as on the violation of any other of her laws. We used to hear the same peremptory warning from the lips of Thomas Huxley. It is expressed, in diverse religious traditions, in the idea of divine judgment on sin. Inside, and widely also outside, Christianity rebellious sinners are warned that, though they are “free” to ignore the will of God, such freedom does not deserve the name—so short-lived is it and so disastrous.

Mankind, in fact, is balanced between two worlds. If he yields himself to the flesh—the lower world—he changes his freedom into slavery, and a slavery which ends in destruction. But the only escape from such slavery is by surrender to the higher will of God. Man is bound to lose his balanced independence, in the one direction to his destruction, or in the other to his redemption and real self-realization. God’s service is the only real freedom. This doctrine is found widely in the moralists of many nations. For the same moral consciousness which assures us of freedom assures us also of responsibility to One Above. We are men “under authority.” Surely one of the most impressive elements in Butler’s moral philosophy is his insistence that to gain a true idea of human nature it is not enough to examine its constituent elements separately—their relation to one another is still more important; and that in “the economy and constitution of man” the principle of reflection or self-judgment, which we call conscience, has by inherent right a supreme authority. “This is a constituent part of the idea, that is, of the faculty itself… Had it strength as it has right, had it power as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.”8

§ 3

Taking it now for granted that we find in mankind generally, as history presents it to us, and especially in the men whom their fellows have venerated as the best, this consciousness of an absolute moral obligation to observe a law of conduct believed to be divine, and corresponding to this obligation a sense of freedom to obey the law, which is also a freedom to rebel, we have to ask ourselves what are the implications of this belief?

I do not say this twofold consciousness cannot exist without the belief in a personal God, but I would say that it strongly suggests it, and that nothing else satisfies it. For instance, the Stoics theoretically did not believe in a personal God, but only in an impersonal Nature. But their strong sense of personal moral obligation forced them to equate Nature with Zeus, and to use such strongly personal language about him and his judgments as we hear in the Hymn of Cleanthes,9 and forced upon them also a manner of conceiving the indwelling divine spirit, which, though it is based on a materialistic pantheism, suggests strongly a spiritual theism.10 Again, I would not say that this consciousness of moral responsibility cannot co-exist with polytheism or dualism. But I do maintain that the consciousness of a sovereign moral law does forcibly suggest the idea of the one and only personal and holy God; so it is that in Zarathustra we see this consciousness of moral obligation lifting him out of a traditional polytheism into a practical monotheism. Hardly anyone would, I suppose, deny that the moral consciousness is shown in its fullest assurance and highest development in the monotheism of the prophets of Israel and in the religion of Jesus Christ.

It has been argued above that the sense of absolute values inherent in the nature of things is for most of us not separable from the conception of God as personal; also that the sense which science develops in us of the close-knit unity of nature is incompatible with any ultimate pluralism or dualism; and once more that the sense of purpose in the whole process of nature, which we cannot get rid of, almost forces us to think of the priority of mind and purpose, that is of a God who knows and purposes, to the whole time-process of natural development. If this be so, the belief in the one, personal, Creator—God, does not depend wholly on moral considerations. But there is no doubt that it is there it has its strength. It is the teaching of the great moral prophets which has purged the traditional pantheons, and bade men feel themselves under the eye of the Holy God who wills the morally right. Certainly it is in the developed moral consciousness of man that we first get a glimpse of what the divine purpose in the development of Nature is. The universe is incredibly vast, and of what is going on in its infinite spaces we know little indeed; and in a large part of our own world, so far as we can trace its history, it is hard indeed to detect any indication of “what it is all for.” Is it not true, then, to say that it is first in the developed moral consciousness of man, when we find him conscious of himself as a willing co-operator with God for the realizing of a divine kingdom of holiness and love, that our hungry search for the nature of the purpose in creation first gets any real and sufficient, even if still partial, satisfaction?

It has been very well observed by Pringle-Pattison that Kant, who had so firmly refused to accept the argument from design in the physical universe to God the Creator, found that argument irresistible when he turned to contemplate the world of man’s moral consciousness. There at least he found himself unmistakably in a “realm of ends.”

But here we are confronted with an astonishing difficulty. The obvious suggestion of our moral consciousness is that God wills goodness and has brought rational man into being, endowed with a glorious freedom, so that he might cooperate with the divine purpose of goodness and build the kingdom of God in the world. But, in fact, the human world seems at first sight to offer us a spectacle in even startling contradiction to such an idea. Humanity, broadly considered, presents itself as very generally ignoring moral obligation, even when it is formally acknowledged. This pessimistic impression finds utterance in all languages at all times both in the confessions of individuals, such as “video meliora proboque—deteriora sequor,” and in judgments on mankind in general—“the whole world lieth in wickedness.” Granted that the dismal spectacle has sometimes overthrown sanity of judgment even in wise men, and produced exaggerated statements of human depravity, such as ignore the average good in mankind, yet the fact remains that the wisest and even the kindliest of men have expressed the severest judgments on mankind as they have known it in experience.

What can be more impressive than the evidence that is presented to us in the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare, if we seek to read them chronologically, that he passed from a genial acceptance of the spectacle of humanity, “good and bad together,” to a profound gloom as he gazed deeper and deeper into it, and found himself confronted with some fundamental incapacity in men to be the thing they would be—some fundamental victory of passion and circumstances over feeble good—a mystery of ruin baffling all power of speculation to extract a meaning out of it?11 Surely a light-hearted optimism about human nature is not wisdom.

There are two explanations of the tremendous problem of moral evil—the one ancient and the other modern—which can be set aside.

The first is the proposal to find the source of contamination to the pure spirit of man in the material body, viewed as the prison from which it hopes to be delivered. This was part of the Orphic tradition,12 whencesoever derived, but the earlier and nobler thought of Greece did not surrender to this pessimistic estimate of the body and of matter generally. It obtained, however, a great hold upon the later Hellenistic world, so that the popularity of the mysteries was largely bound up with the hope that the initiate could find in their sacred rites the promise of purification for the soul from the contamination of the body and its redemption at death. And it cannot be denied that there are phases of experience which seem to support such an indictment of the body; yet for all that it is fundamentally and normally false. The seat of sin lies in the will—“from within, out of the hearts of men,” as Jesus said,13 arises all that defiles human life. There is nothing fundamentally evil but the evil will, as Kant affirmed.

I am speaking now of moral not physical evil—of sin, not pain. But it is good to recognize how deeply true it is that of the mass of evil which we call physical—which has depressed and does depress mankind—by far the greater part is the result of the wilful refusal of mankind to obey the moral law. It is good to reflect how easy would be the redemption of man, economically, socially and politically, if only mankind in the mass would set itself to be unselfish and self-controlled, honest and just. It is, in fact, the doctrine that sin lies ultimately only in the will—whether its apathy or its rebellion—that is the secret of the hope of human progress in this world. If sin lay in the material body, there would be no legitimate hope. We cannot become disembodied except by death. But if sin lies in the will—so that when once the will is right, all the whole nature can be restored to order also (at least in normal man)—there is boundless hope for the individual and so for the society.

There is another explanation of moral evil which has been popular in modern times—that evil is only good in the making—a defect which is to be, and is being, progressively overcome. But surely it does not in the least correspond with the facts. Progressive moral deterioration in individuals is certainly a fact of experience as widespread as moral improvement. Men’s characters tend to become fixed for evil as surely as for good. And if we consider man corporately and not individually, while there is clear evidence of a real tendency in mankind to advance in civilization, in spite of catastrophes and collapses, there is no evidence of any general tendency among men to become morally better as they become more civilized. The sins of civilized man are different from the sins of barbarous man, but it is really wilful to say that the roots of sin—selfishness, or lust, or acquisitiveness, or pride—show any tendency to be outgrown.

Thus we come back to face the problem presented by the fact of the immense prevalence of moral evil in humanity. The awakened moral sense cannot reconcile itself to the idea of making God responsible for the creation of bad man or for the world as it stands. What, then, is the theory which ethical monotheism propounds? It is simple, and intelligible enough, and conceived in the boldest outline—viz. that God was not satisfied with the creation of a merely mechanical or unintelligent world. He chose to create a world or worlds of free spirits whose destiny was glad co-operation with His good and gracious purpose. But the creation of free beings capable of voluntary correspondence, by a necessity lying in the nature of things, from which God Himself could not be exempt, involved the possibility of a refusal of service. Mankind could not be capable of free service without being capable of rebellion. Nevertheless, God, if we may so say, ran the great risk. He preferred that there should be free beings, even though that involved the awful liability to a dominion of sin as a result of human perversity. A little steady consideration will show us (as has been said already) how vast a proportion of the misery of the world, physical as well as moral and social, is due to human perversity. It is amazing to think how gloriously transformed a world would come into being, even in a short time, if mankind in the mass would steadily set itself to cease to do evil and learn to do well. The mystery lies in the fact that mankind in the mass does seem steadily to refuse to learn this lesson, and for this reason lies under the adverse judgment of God. The responsibility lies not with God but with man.

At this point passionate human reason rises up in its wrath—at least in the more pessimistic moods of the human spirit—and exclaims, that if such were to be the consequences of the creation of free spirits, it were better for God not to have created any such, or indeed not to have created anything at all. But, in fact, such challenges addressed to the supreme wisdom are not wise. The human reason cannot hope to put itself at the point of view of God or generally to answer the question why things are as they are. Let me quote Robert Bridges’ Testament of Beauty,14 which was his own last will and testament to his contemporaries.

Wisdom will repudiate thee, if thou think to enquire

why things are as they are or whence they came: thy task

is first to learn what is, and in pursuant knowledge

pure intellect will find pure pleasure and the only ground

for a philosophy conformable to truth.

We come back, then, to the facts of the moral conscience and its postulates, as they are presented to us by Christianity, which is being taken as the type of ethical monotheism.

It cannot of course be denied that, in fact, these postulates were not arrived at by speculation, but were believed in as the outcome of God’s own disclosure of Himself to man. But with that we are not yet concerned. We are taking these postulates of ethical monotheism, and we are asking about their rationality. Face to face, then, with moral evil—that awful world-wide spectacle—we listen to this bold and simple theory.

God is good, and the author only of good. His purpose in His whole creative activity—so far as we can judge it within the narrow limits of our observation—is first clearly seen to have been good when we observe its culmination in man—that is, in man as he was capable of being and was intended to be. The culmination of nature was to be a world of free but embodied spirits capable of the intellectual appreciation of goodness, beauty and truth, capable of sonship with God and glad co-operation in the fashioning of the kingdom of God which is the fellowship of love. What this kingdom would have been we can observe and hold in clear conception if we fix our attention on that portion of mankind who are “the men of goodwill.” But the world as it is is not the world of God’s intention. For the freedom given to man involved the opportunity not only for glad service but also for rebellion, and, generation after generation, man in the mass has rebelled against God through pride and lust and selfishness, and reduced the world of our experience to a mere parody of the divine purpose. Clear thinking will show us how vast a proportion of all human disease, misery and degradation is due to the way men have treated themselves and one another. God still abides in the world and sustains it in being; but over the human world He stands also as its accuser and its judge.

As its accuser and its judge—but Christianity, which we are taking as the best type of ethical monotheism, will not suffer us to think of God as the just judge without also recognizing in Him the saviour. As He sees His work marred under His eyes, the creator becomes the recreator and the redeemer; and this work of redemption pursues a course as gradual as the work of creation, and has its culmination in Christ, and His divine society of the redeemed. Moreover, we see but a beginning of His work, for He has eternity to work in. What is to be the final issue does not fall under our observation. It may well be—it must be if God is really good—that the lives which seem to us merely neglected or crushed by circumstances or needlessly tormented in this world would, could we see them in their full extent beyond the veil of death, appear in a quite different light. Our first judgment upon them would be wholly reversed. The most crushing affliction would be seen as no more than a necessary stage of education.

But here we are in a region of belief which depends directly upon the idea of divine self-disclosure or positive revelation, to the consideration of which we have still to address ourselves. What we have done is to work out the implications of the direct consciousness which belongs to man of his moral responsibility and His freedom. We have analysed its postulates both as to the character and purpose of God, and as to the way in which it compels us to regard the world as it exists—as we can observe it in human experience. What I desire to represent to you is that this theory or general view of the world, which the postulates of ethical monotheism lead you to form, is a view of the world which embraces the whole of experience better than any other view, and has therefore a better right to call itself rational.

Men, according to their dispositions, are apt to become optimists or pessimists; in either case, they tend to become irrational and one-sided, through refusing to do full justice to the facts which conflict with the feeling to which their disposition and their circumstances incline them. But the optimism of the genuine Christian, based on the conviction that God is at last to come into His own in His whole universe, is the most truly rational optimism, because he has been forced by his religion to face so steadily and take into such full account all that ministers to pessimism, and to base his emergent optimism only on the solid ground of the ultimate purpose of God—solid ground, that is, if the Christian faith in a divine self-disclosure is justified.

§ 4

Leaving aside for the present this question of Revelation, to which we are to proceed in the next lecture, and leaving aside also the consideration of the limits of human knowledge, which remain even if divine revelation is recognized as a reality, which will be the subject of my last lecture, there is only one other point on which I wish to touch, which is a subject of constant discussion—that is, the actual variety of ethical standards which we find among men in different countries and ages; for the actual variation is so great that it appears to dispose of any idea of an identical moral law, ascertainable by all men, a “law of nature” such as the Stoics spoke of, and indeed taught the Christian Church to speak of also.

Certainly the moral standards current in different nations, and in the same nation at different ages, are greatly unlike one another; and it must be admitted that the conscience of the average man in all countries and ages is mainly determined by this public opinion round about him. We have also to take into account the unevenness or partiality in the moral standard of individuals and classes at all stages of history. For you find in history conspicuous individuals who, while they are content with the prevailing moral standard in general, rise high above it at some specific point. Thus in semi-civilized kings, such as King David, according to the remarkably frank picture of him given in the Old Testament, or Baber, the first Moghul Emperor of India,15 we find a remarkable spiritual sensibility coupled with a remorseless brutality in his treatment of his enemies. Again, among people for whom the highest moral illumination is at any rate available, you find an extraordinary deadening of the conscience in some particular direction. The deadening of conscience in Christian communities over a long period as to religious persecution, or the iniquities of the slave trade, or the gross injustices of the industrial system, or the administration of the criminal law are obvious instances. And constant experience, internal to ourselves and external, warns us of the lamentable possibility of sophisticating conscience till the light that is in us becomes darkness indeed. Certainly we cannot speak of the individual or social conscience absolutely as “the voice of God” or of a specific moral law sounding in the spiritual ear of mankind.

But when all this variability in the conceptions of the good, which may be found among men, has been recognized, it must be noticed that there is a very noticeable tendency to unanimity in the utterances of the great moral leaders of mankind whose records we have reviewed. To a great extent they all inculcate the same virtues, and agree in their conceptions of right and wrong. It is also noticeable that their high standards are appreciated and recognized by their contemporaries, even if the homage given to the ideal is largely lip-service, and has little effect upon the average level of conduct. There is, moreover, noticeable evidence of progress in many nations towards a similar ideal. It is remarkable how widely—for instance in India—the Christian moral standard is hailed as the best by public opinion, even where the specific Christian doctrines are rejected and ridiculed. The evidence as to the unity of the moral idea, among men is plainly of a complicated naturel but on the whole it indicates a tendency towards unity.

There is a remarkable notion in later Jewish literature of the Bath-Qol—“the daughter of the Voice” [of God]—which is intended to express something in which some divine quality can be recognized, but which falls short of directly divine authority. Consciously or unconsciously Words-worth repeated this notion when he called conscience the “stern daughter of the voice of God.” This is a good description, as has been already suggested, of what the conscience in man may be if it is allowed to speak freely.

We must grant that the Stoic account of the law of nature, such as is given in the passage from the De Republica of Cicero which I read to you in an earlier lecture, is an exaggeration. There is no such explicit law, constant and universal, to be found in history. Nor among the Jews can the Ten Commandments be properly spoken of as its republication. Growth in moral perception is recognizable both in Israel and in the world at large, and men and nations may also lose what they have gained, and may deteriorate as well as advance. Such is certainly the verdict of history. Nevertheless, a tendency towards unity in the moral ideal is recognizable, even if it be a broken tendency. And the great moral prophets of humanity, though they have spoken independently, have spoken with a certain approach to unanimity. Moreover, it is the moral prophets who have had the supreme influence in human history, not only in elevating but in fixing the standard of the good life, so that, as Aristotle said, for the settlement of disputes, we must look to “the decision of the good man.”16 And here certainly Christianity has a supreme advantage. In spite of all the moral failures of its chequered history, even in the judgment of most of those who have rejected its doctrines, the moral ideal embodied in the character of its Master, Jesus Christ, stands out as the best expression of what all races and generations of men can recognize as the good life.

• 1.

  See, e.g., Personality and Reality, p. 123.

• 2.

  ¹. J. E. Turner, Philosophical Basis of Moral Obligation, p. 251, referring to Albee’s History of English Utilitarianism, p. 14.

• 3.

  Turner, op. cit., p. 222.

• 4.

  The same appears to be true of Mr. Shebbeare, in Problems of Providence (Longmans).

• 5.

  Op. cit., pp. 355, 367.

• 6.

  See in Science and Religion (The Sheldon Press)—a composite volume—pp. 208, 214-216, and more recently in the Nature of the Physical World, p. 295. In my quotation I have bracketed the word “moral,” which I do not understand.

• 7.

  Turner, Basis of Moral Obligation, p. 95.

• 8.

  See Sermon II, and Preface to Sermons.

• 9.

  See above, p. 137, where it is quoted at length.

• 10.

  See below, p. 286.

• 11.

  The last “romantic” plays may seem to contradict this interpretation of Shakespeare’s mental development. But it is truer to say that in these last plays he “invents a new mythology” expressly to rescue his characters from tragic issues (see Walter Raleigh’s Shakespeare, pp. 210-214 (English Men of Letters)).

• 12.

  Burnet, Essays and Addresses, p. 147.

• 13.

  Mark vii. 21.

• 14.

  P. 7.

• 15.

  See in Theology, Sept. 1929, “David and Baber.”

• 16.

  ὥς ἄν ὁ φρόνιμος ὀρίσειεν.