§ 1

We have finished our historical survey, and the result—if for the moment we omit India from our consideration—is certainly impressive. In the darkness of a remote antiquity, almost three thousand years back, a clear light shines upon the ancient prophet Zarathustra, whom we find proclaiming substantially the same gospel of the good life and the kingdom of God, as we hear again later from the prophets of Israel. He is addressing his own Iranian tribe—an agricultural people exposed to the persecution of more powerful nomads. This to his imagination represents the world-wide struggle on behalf of the good life for man against the evil which would thwart and annihilate it. But he stands there conscious of divine appointment and divine enlightenment to assure his people that the good life of truth and peace and righteousness has behind it the will and power of the supreme God; and that, however strong the forces of evil—the Lie with its attendant violence and malice—seem to be, they are infallibly destined to utter overthrow. The good God is to come into His own in a world beyond this. The good life for man, then, leads to ultimate victory, but for the present it is a life of constant struggle. There is offered to every man the opportunity of co-operating with God and taking part in the struggle which is His and man’s. Every man has kinship with God, and may share His attributes and His spirit.

In Zarathustra’s teaching we discern the fundamental assumption of a conscience in man which can distinguish good from evil, and which can recognize the claim of the good life as self-evidencing and divine—as something different from the pursuit of the pleasure or profit of the individual. Goodness is correspondence with the divine will. It is co-operation with God. Zarathustra, like the Hebrew prophets, shows no interest in metaphysical speculation; moreover, he is no mystic occupied in the contemplation of the One, and no ascetic disparaging the body and its activities. He is the plain man set in the midst of the struggle of life, and fully prepared to enjoy it, but he recognizes in his conscience the clear call of the Good God, who is supreme, and must, because He is what He is, bring those who will accept His hard service to true and final blessedness, and doom the rebel spirits, and the men who do service to their evil cause, to eternal perdition.

This is just the same clear and vivid message as we find in Israel, though in Israel, throughout the “classical” period of prophecy, the vindication of God is expected only in this world, not in another “world to come,” and (what is much more important1) the message in Israel is not the message of a single individual, whose distinctive witness is speedily swallowed up in revived superstitions, as in the case of Zarathustra, but the continuous voice of a great succession of men whose authority, after long-continued rejection, wins a conspicuous victory and becomes ultimately enshrined in the whole literature and cultus of the people—a message, moreover, which, delivered “in many portions and many manners,” reaches a sublime culmination in Jesus the Christ.

From Muhammad we heard what is fundamentally only an echo of the message of Israel prophets and of a debased Christianity, but delivered with astonishing power in a new atmosphere; it is, however, on a much lower moral level than Christianity properly understood. Thus we shall lose nothing if we take Christianity, not only as the consummation of Israel’s religion, but as the best and fullest representative of all the distinctive types of ethical monotheism which have appeared in history.

In China we found, deep in its confused traditions, the idea of the supreme Heaven “all-intelligent and observing.” “The wise king must take it as his pattern.” So he becomes “the fellow of God.” And virtue passes down stage by stage to the whole of his people, whom “God loves.”2 Amidst a mass of non-moral superstitions, the idea of an ultimate divine sanction for morality appears in the teaching of the three Masters who are the boast of China—Lao-tse, Confucius and Mencius. In Lao-tse, although he took the Indian road of mysticism and abstraction from the world, yet the root idea is that of the tao, the “way” or “order” which, like the “nature” of the Stoics, is the divine principle of the universe to which all things must conform; and this same idea, in a much more practical and ethical form, underlies the moral teaching of Confucius and his disciple Mencius. Confucius found himself in a world utterly disorganized, abounding in “religions” which had no moral force. He set himself therefore simply to restore morality—the essence of which he found in obedience to parents and just rulers, in reciprocity, chastity, honesty and truth. He assumes the consciousness of this “good” as inherent in man and as self-evidencing; he is very shy of talking about spiritual beings and religious sanctions. Nevertheless, behind all human authority, he postulates a divine authority. Obedience and the other virtues have a divine sanction; and these same assumptions, accompanied by the same reticence about religion, we found in Mencius—morality belongs to the divine ordering of the universe.

The great Greek moralists beginning with Socrates found themselves in the same position as the Chinese sages.3 In restoring the moral standard among the Greeks they also could look for no help from the popular religions; but they could appeal to the conscience of men as recognizing the absolute value of good—τὸ καλόν as distinct from τὸ αἴσχρὸν. The good life might turn out in experience to be the happiest and the most profitable life, but it was not to be reached by pursuing individual pleasure or profit. Wisdom, justice, self-control and courage have a self-evidencing claim on man’s allegiance, and their sanction lay in the divine background. This divine background is found in the Platonic doctrine of the eternal principles or “forms” centring in the dominant Principle of the Good, till Plato finally reaches a positive theism—an affirmation of the one God, the supreme creative soul, who is good, and who cares for men, and demands of them the practice of the good life in the fellowship and service of the city-state.

In Greece we find the speculative and scientific interest at its height. But not only in Socrates and the Stoics, but also in Plato the moral and social interest remains on the whole practically supreme, and the mystical or contemplative tendency is subordinated to the interest of ethical and social duty.4

Platonism, then, may be our type of the ethical philosophies which, without being so definitely based on the belief in a personal God as Zoro-astrianism or Islam or the religion of Israel or of Jesus Christ, yet postulate and insist upon the background of eternal principles or values upon which the good life for man depends, and which give it an absolute worth. I will call this the idealist doctrine as distinguished from that of the more definite monotheists.

One feature that must be noticed as common to all these ancient teachers is that, finding men degraded and discouraged by the haunting fear of hostile powers, seen and unseen, and piteously conscious of their own weakness, they sought to lift up their heads and inspire them with courage and a sense of their own dignity and worth by implanting in them a faith in the supremacy of goodness, and assuring them of the fellowship of the good man with what is invincible and divine. This gospel appears in its most appealing form, as based wholly upon belief in a personal living God, in Zarathustra and Muhammad, in the prophets of Israel and in Jesus Christ. It is the assurance that if men will fear God and keep His commandments they “have nothing else to fear.” It is an assurance which is indissolubly linked with another—that the man who ignores the moral law has everything to fear—even ultimate ruin—so that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which mankind in most ages has been degraded and paralysed by the sense of weakness in the presence of formidable adversaries, visible and invisible, and equally impossible to deny that what has shown most power to ennoble him and lift up his head is this prophetic message about the will of God.

All the teachers we are considering would have men overcome the paralysing fear of evil powers by entertaining a nobler sort of fear. Plato in this connection is sometimes content to find this nobler and emancipating fear in the dread of falling short of what the best of our contemporaries expect of us—as Festus says to Paracelsus, in Browning’s poem:

It should seem

Impossible for me to fail, so watched.

If danger daunted me, or ease seduced,

How calmly their sad eyes would gaze reproach.

But Plato at other times5 and Zarathustra and the prophets of Israel and Jesus Christ refuse to let us rely upon even the highest kind of human regard. Even the public opinion of the best circle is not trustworthy.6 Nothing avails to emancipate us from the fear of the world and of evil spirits except the fear of God—the sense of His almightiness and goodness combined, which can quiet our hearts in an immovable courage even under the worst assaults and in the most unsupported solitude.

The authority and influence of the teachers we have been considering (still omitting India) cover a vast area in the history of the world. I believe we may go so far as to say that all the world over, even among the most backward tribes, the appeal to the moral law, as having divine sanction—as a law laid on man by God—is responded to by the human conscience. Further, though the moral standards of tribes and periods have shown such startling differences as make it impossible to say absolutely that the conscience of man is the voice of God,7 yet in the great teachers I have named there is a marked tendency to agreement in their conception of the content—as well as the authority—of the moral law; and, if we may assume for the moment that the Christian conception of goodness is the completest and best, the general conscience of mankind seems to have welcomed it and responded to it wherever it has been proclaimed by evangelists who commanded respect.

At present, however, I only need to call attention to the impressive unity of witness among the ancient moral leaders and teachers of mankind, including those whose theism is not a distinct feature, to the doctrine that human life is a good and not an evil thing, though it involves an often fierce struggle; and that though the good life may be, and indeed is, in the long run the happiest and the most advantageous, yet it is not to be measured by considerations of pleasure and profit as they present themselves to the judgment of the individual at any moment, for that mankind is “under authority,” authority which is eternal and divine, but which, if men will open their hearts to it, they will find written also in their own consciences.

There is in an ancient Latin collect (which in the English Prayer Book version8 is found sadly weakened in force), a prayer that “we who cannot exist without God, may have strength to live according to God,” which embodies this philosophy of human life. Man is prone to claim a false independence, as if he had the fashioning of his own destiny according to his own fancy. But this is a ridiculous claim to a sort of freedom which has no real existence. Man is dependent, whether he likes it or not, on the Power which encompasses and controls him. In it he lives and moves and has his being. And this Power is realized in the human conscience as holiness and goodness; and also as having given to man the perilous dignity of a conditioned freedom, whereby he must choose either to rebel against the moral law to his destruction, or to rejoice in its service to his salvation. This therefore is man’s proper prayer—that, as he cannot exist without God, so he may live in accordance with God. That is the sort of prayer which is enforced upon us by the consentient voice of these great teachers of antiquity. I will add another testimony, as to the real character of moral freedom, to which again I would claim their unanimous assent. “That man is free whose flesh is controlled by the law of his mind, and whose mind is directed by the government of God.”9 Man’s true freedom—that is his power to realize his true being—lies in the control of his passions by his reason or will; but this reason or will, if it claims for itself a false independence, becomes only a deeper source of disorder. It gains its legitimate mastery only in glad submission to the higher law, which it has the power to recognize with sufficient clearness as a guide for conduct.

It follows of course from what has just been said that these moral leaders of mankind, whose records are under our consideration, are unanimous in their utter refusal to put the moral question to the vote. They exhibit a contempt for majorities, and look to the faithful few to maintain the standard of the right with an assurance of final victory.

Lastly, it must not be left out of sight that the unanimity among the ancients is the unanimity of independent witnesses. That of course could not be said of Muhammad. He did undoubtedly learn his belief in the one God from the Jews and Christians, and Jesus Christ did of course take His stand upon the teaching of the Hebrew prophets; but it is in the fullest sense true that Zarathustra and the teachers of China and the teachers of Greece and the prophets of Israel were quite ignorant one of another; their teaching, with the practice which it inculcated, established itself in each case on its own basis without external assistance.10 At later stages of development Zoroastrianism may have influenced the religion of Israel and the religion of Christianity become fused with the philosophic tradition of Greece; but in their earliest development (and it is only that which we have been considering) they were wholly independent.

§ 2

In this review of the historical survey I have omitted India. For reasons which I have explained we can expect to find, neither in the philosophies nor in the religions of India, any consistent theory of moral obligation or any consistent doctrine of the good life. The highest religious level reached is in the idea of devotion (bhakti) to some personal incarnation of the Divine. In this a mystical rapture is attainable by the individual soul; but there is no ethical standard arrived at or proclaimed for the common life of man. There are immoral incarnations to be found as well as those that are edifying. In the teaching of the Buddha we do indeed get a moral way of the utmost severity proclaimed for those who seek enlightenment; but the secret which Gotama had discovered and imparted to his disciples was the secret that life itself is an evil, not a good; and that the way of wisdom is to seek escape from the wheel of life by the remorseless annihilation of desire—not merely of evil desires, but of desire as such—so that the individual soul may escape from the curse by extinction. Thus original Buddhism can supply us with no doctrine of the good life (properly so-called) for man and no idea of the redemption of human life, but only with a method of redemption from life. It turns its back on all the fundamental human interests and hopes. It is true that Gotama also preached a lower doctrine for the laymen—that is, those who had not the courage to embark on the true quest—by which they could hope to win a better state in some future life, and that this is all that the Buddhism of other lands than Buddha’s own has sought; and that, while it has merged itself, in defiance of its founder, in surrounding idolatries and forms of magic, and become a ritualistic religion, it has retained certain characteristics of quietism, mildness and gentleness due to his teaching.11 But its foundation in the teaching of Gotama disqualifies it from presenting human life as a good thing capable of redemption. We must then leave out India in our survey of the idea of the good life, as being disqualified by a fundamental pessimism or moral indifference.12

§ 3

Our review of the idea of the good life, as it presents itself in the history of mankind, leaves us face to face with a deeply significant fact—that mankind has over a very wide area and through long ages recognized the reality of an absolute moral obligation—has acknowledged not only what is but what ought to be, and not only desire and power but duty. Mankind appears, of course, most obviously and most universally, as striving for its own maintenance and enrichment out of the store-house of nature, in obedience to the vital appetite which lies at the root of his being. In this struggle with external nature the interest of the tribe or family appears to precede the interest of the individual considered apart. The old idea, so prevalent down to the eighteenth century, that the interest of the individual was the primal motive, and the interest of the group a later restriction, has been abandoned. It is recognized that the interest of the individual is a later differentiation. But the struggle for the welfare of the group does not demand any other explanation than the motive of self-preservation. The sacrifice of the individual to the group can be explained by the absence of any clear sense of individual personality. The group is, to start with, the unit of selfish regard.

But the more clearly the individual comes to be distinguished, or to distinguish himself, from the group, the more clearly comes into view the contrast and conflict between his own pleasure or profit and that of the group that he belongs to; and there accompanies this emergent contrast and conflict the sense of duty—that the individual ought to subordinate his own interest to the general welfare. Moreover, side by side with man’s relation to his tribe, there has been developing his crude religion—his sense of spirits or personal beings good or bad, beneficent or harmful, to whose power he is more or less accessible, whom he must propitiate, or against whom he must defend himself. In this direction also the sense of obligation—that he ought or ought not to do so and so—develops. It might be supposed that this sense of obligation is no more than a reflection of self-interest—that at bottom it is no more than the feeling that, if he neglects his recognized duty towards his tribe or towards his gods, he will suffer for it; and that as mankind grows in intelligence he will reinterpret this haunting feeling of obligation into its real constituents, and realize Epicurus’ ideal of the emancipated man—emancipated from all the fear of gods, or any other restrictive sense of obligation, except the restriction which his own common sense or perception of probable consequences imposes upon his clamorous appetites.

But this imaginary construction of human development, which has constantly reappeared in philosophical speculation, is destined to receive a decisive check. It is the history of this check that we have been considering. The upward development of man—which is apparent in history side by side with the experience of the deterioration of individuals and the collapse of civilizations—shows the idea of duty, as something of absolute value, establishing itself under the leadership of the prophets and sages of mankind. It establishes itself in two forms, as we have seen—in the form of a definite ethical monotheism, as duty to the one good God. This is the form in which it appears in the teaching of Zarathustra and of Muhammad and of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus Christ—whose teaching we are taking as the type of ethical monotheism. It establishes itself also in the form of what we have called ethical idealism, in which the law or principle of moral goodness is recognized as an absolute value, while the personal God is less definitely acknowledged, and of this ethical idealism we are taking Platonism as the type, in the vaguer use of this term. But both schools agree in the recognition of the absolute authority of the moral law and the absolute value of duty, and appeal to it (in spite of the heedlessness, selfishness and rebellion of the masses of mankind) as something sure to vindicate itself in the long run—for its authority lies in the very roots of being. This is the fact which confronts us as the conclusion of our survey.13

It is also to be noticed that the absolute valuation of goodness, as an end in itself, does not stand alone. Beside it is the absolute valuation of truth and beauty. Beside the prophets stand the philosophers and men of science, who seek truth for its own sake, and without regard to whatever advantage may accrue to mankind from their investigations, and also the artists who maintain the absolute value of beauty. It may be true that the desire for knowledge, wholly for its own sake, is secondary in time to the desire for knowledge in order that man’s life may be thereby better protected and furnished, but it is equally true that it rises high above the utilitarian bed in which it has grown as an end in itself, something sacred and eternal which man is unworthy of his destiny if he refuses to worship. Perhaps even more obviously is this true of beauty. That, too, may be secondary to use in the historical record of man’s quest, but it is secondary only in time. It has an absolute value. In this respect truth, beauty and goodness stand side by side, refusing to be analysed into anything other than themselves; and all ultimately making the same claim upon mankind. In a measure they exist as realized objects; in another sense they are unrealized ideals, but ideals demanding realization by our efforts. And this is pre-eminently true of goodness. Its claim is obviously, as things stand, an unrealized claim, both within us and without. If it be a claim inherent in the nature of things, then undoubtedly we must conceive of nature as the scene of an unrealized purpose, with which it is our duty to correspond, and which it is man’s supreme privilege to further.

This gives mankind a unique position in the world. Alone among visible creatures he appears as a responsible being engaged in a struggle for divine principles or purposes, the realization of which appears as precarious and as dependent upon his efforts. Even in remote days the mind of a poet-prophet could be overwhelmed with the sense of contrast between man’s grand and divinely given destiny and his physical smallness or feebleness. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou regardest him?” And in a much later day the increased knowledge of the inconceivable vastness of the universe has smitten the soul of a Pascal, and of many other men of more ordinary mental stature, with a chill of terror. To-day it is frequently urged as a plea for refusing to entertain the prerogative place assigned to man in the religious or classical tradition. But this is really irrational. The vast spaces of the stellar universe are unknown to us. What unseen hosts of intelligent beings may people the stars we cannot conjecture. What we are bound to entertain are the considerations forced upon us by what we can know; and within the compass of our possible knowledge man remains the sole being who can be recognized as the conscious vice-gerent of God or responsible co-operator with a divine plan and purpose.

I may quote the conclusion of Prof. Eddington’s consideration of man’s place in the universe: “I do not think,” he says,14 “that the whole purpose of the Creation has been staked on the one planet where we live; and in the long run we cannot deem ourselves the only race which has been or will be gifted with the mystery of consciousness. But I feel inclined to claim that at the present time our race is supreme; and not one of the profusion of stars in their myriad clusters looks down on scenes comparable to those which are passing beneath the rays of the sun.”

§ 4

I shall, of course, be reminded that the teachers of the good life for man, whose doctrine has been under review, all belong to a more or less remote antiquity, and that the modern man and woman will not be content to look back to such antiquated standards and authorities. Now I should in this respect draw a distinction between the standards and authorities which have been under review.

But may I incidentally raise a protest against the habit which seems to me to prevail to a lamentable extent (even among that portion of the reading public of to-day which studies serious literature) of reading almost nothing but books of the day? (I am leaving poetry out of the question, in which I suppose there is still more attention paid to the ancients.) Science progresses, and fashions change—in some ages like our own with great rapidity. To read the books of the day ministers, no doubt, to the extension of knowledge, and to the intellectual curiosity which desires a succession of fresh excitements.15 But it does not commonly minister to the establishment of stable convictions for life. Yet behind all the changes in the human outlook and all the developments of knowledge, which produce such sharp contrasts between different epochs, is there not such a thing as the permanent manhood, the fundamental man, with his instincts, passions, appetites, reason, imagination, will—with his ideals, struggles, failures, realizations? Do not the pleasure and profit of reading the “classical” literature of other ages than our own lie just in this—that it forces upon us the recognition of this unchanging manhood—which was and is and is to be? We shake hands across the ages, as well as across differences of nationality, with brother man, and amongst brother men with the Great Man who stands for all time, not as infallible indeed, but as an ever-enduring witness to something essential, if the worth and progress of humanity is to be maintained.

The truly great

Have all one age, and from one visible sphere

Shed influence, and time is not with them

Save as it worketh through them, they in it.

Even so revolutionary a teacher as Nietzsche, in his deeply instructive essay on The Use and Abuse of History, bears witness to the need of what he calls “monumental history,” which presents to us the heroes of our race with their clear visions and great achievements. “The great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a high-road of humanity through the ages; and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men.”16 This is as true in the history of thought as of action.

To limit ourselves to our own island and to the epoch which began with the revolt of the individual reason against mediæval authority, let us consider the names of Richard Hooker,17 the Cambridge Platonists, Joseph Butler, Richard Price, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth; among men of the last generation James Martineau, Thomas Hill Green, James Ward, Hastings Rashdall, Friedrich von Hügel, and the man who (himself of Scottish descent) has been a predominant influence on English and Scottish philosophers—Emmanuel Kant. Let me name with these only one living man, W. R. Sorley, the author of that truly great book, The Moral Values and the Idea of God. I ask myself whether it is possible to pay careful attention to this great cloud of witnesses and to doubt that the various attempts to “account for” morality without the recognition of goodness, beauty and truth as eternal values which do not admit of further analysis must be judged to be defeated. I claim also a decisive intellectual victory for those who have condemned as wholly mistaken the notion that nothing new emerges in the process of evolution, so that chemical processes can be regarded as “accounting for” living organisms and animal instincts for rational processes, or that the later products can legitimately be interpreted as only forms of the earlier. If we are really to obey reason and to follow the argument whither it leads, we are bound to return to the old position of Aristotle, that it is only the developed product which can show us the real meaning of all that led up to it. We are bound to discern in nature a gradually emergent purpose which becomes evident only in rational man, and, within the circle of rationality, in the consciousness of “the values”—of truth and beauty and goodness—as having absolute worth, and laying men under an absolute obligation.

Ethical monotheism, as represented in Christianity and ethical idealism, which has no such definite embodiment, but which has been closely allied with Christianity, since its first promulgation in the days of the Roman Empire, are certainly still living forces, which no one has a right to call antiquated. It is true that the Christian Church, as an historical institution in East and West, both under Catholicism and under Protestantism, has at several periods of history and in many respects been tried at the bar of man’s free moral judgment, and been found wanting as a practical guide in social and individual morality; it is true that to-day, in consequence of this seeming failure of the Church, there is a strong feeling in our modern world against what is called “institutionalism”; but for the most part the consequent outcry has not been against Christianity but against certain presentations of Christianity regarded as corrupt, and the appeal has been, not forward to some new standard of living, but “back to Christ.”

The Church has been taken to task, not because the pattern set by its founder was shown to be at fault, but because it has misrepresented it or deserted it; and the indignant protest has been largely justified. Those who have been most scornful in their rejection of the dogmatic authority of the Church have, till quite recently, insisted that they were still zealous to maintain the Christian ethical standard. It would be easy to multiply quotations from John Stuart Mill and Huxley and John Morley18 and George Eliot to this effect. There has been, in fact, no great moral teacher since Christ who has propounded a new standard or moral law for human life which has entered into rivalry with His with any wide effectiveness. What has been effectively done is to convince a great body of deep-thinking people that modern civilization calling itself Christian is, in fact, by no means worthy of the name and needs very radical reconstruction if it is in the future to become worthy of it. But the appeal has been still to Christ.

There has, however, been a revolt, of which we feel the full force to-day, which is really a revolt alike against the authority of Christ, and against the authority of the whole idealist tradition, and which had its origin mainly in the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau. This is what we may call the philosophy of emotionalism, or self-expression. Rousseau revolted against all moral standards and conventions and all types of intellectual or religious authority. He believed in the fundamental goodness of unsophisticated man if he were only left to express his natural feelings without external restraint.19 Qualifications of this doctrine of unrestrained emotionalism appear in his writings (especially in his idea of “the general will” as a necessary restraint on individualism), but that the main drift of his philosophy is of this sort is undeniable. The great Goethe in Germany, in his earlier writings, shows the same tendency, but later it is checked by the demand for self-control and self-limitation, or “dying to live.”20

In effect Rousseau’s philosophy of life has allied itself with the otherwise utterly alien movement of modern industrialism—in the sense that the latter has also claimed the complete emancipation of its activities from theocratic control. It is in this sense that Rousseauism has found powerful expression in the thought of such men of wide influence as Nietzsche and Walt Whitman. It is still finding expression in manifold forms and on the widest scale in the post-war literature of almost all countries. It is fundamentally a rebellion against the whole intellectual and ethical tradition, both of Christianity and of Platonism. Both Christianity and Platonism meet it with what is substantially the same answer, in spite of marked difference both in emphasis and in intellectual presuppositions. The answer is in effect this. A man is born with no ready-made self or soul for which he is entitled to demand expression as it stands. He is born with a bundle of instincts, emotions, passions, with faculties of sensation, memory, reason, imagination, will, which are the materials of a self of infinite worth. But the free being is entrusted with the fashioning of his own self for good or evil out of these materials, both by industriously developing their capacities and also by bringing them under a unified control. For anyone to allow unrestrained freedom of expression to his emotions or passions, as he finds them, is disastrous alike to himself and to his fellow-men. It is to lose or destroy his own soul and to promote the ruin of society. On the other hand, in the process of self-realization by self-control a man becomes conscious that he is not his own master—he is under authority. This is in part the authority of human society, of parents or State or Church, which may be misguided. But there is a higher authority of which he becomes conscious, which is properly divine, and inheres in the nature of things and expresses itself (more or less perfectly) in the moral law—to repudiate which is to repudiate the noblest part of his human heritage. To lay the reins on the neck of his emotions will not lead any human being to true liberty. That man only saves his soul or becomes truly a free man who both seeks to bring all his faculties under the control of the rational will and also his own will under the control of the society, which has for its end the good life of man, and above all under the control of the divine law to which his own conscience and the social conscience bear witness.

§ 5

There are very few of us who can seriously contemplate the philosophy (if it ought so to be called) which has its roots in Rousseau’s emotionalism, either in its intellectual presupposition or its practical consequences, without revolting from it—without a strong conviction that no good life for man can be built upon it. But if so, there is abundant need that the intellectual presuppositions of the classical and the Christian traditions, both as allied to one another or distinguished from one another, should be investigated not only by the professed philosopher, but by the man of ordinary intelligence. We need to confront the world not only with good intentions, but with intellectual convictions. We need reassurance that the foundations of the traditional ethic are really rational. But it is impossible for me in the four lectures that remain to me to attempt to cover the whole field. I do not repent of having spent so large a proportion of the time allotted to me in the historical survey; but I must accept the consequences. I propose, then, to leave to others the vindication of ethical idealism in its general sense. It has been done with critical precision and sureness of grasp by Dr. Sorley, in his work which I have already referred to, which should be considered a classic. I should like to refer also to the recent works of J. E. Turner21; but I will not enlarge the list, though we have many vindicators of the authority of “the Values” to-day.

But it is obvious that while the presuppositions of ethical idealism are also the presuppositions of the Christian ethical tradition, the latter go farther than the former. Christianity is not content to name the name of God in the vague sense in which it was used of old by Stoics and Platonists or is used in contemporary idealism. It insists especially upon His personality and His transcendence as creator of all that is. It is specially to the question of the intellectual justification of these Christian presuppositions concerning God that I want to apply myself, and to ask your attention, in the next lecture; for contemporary idealism largely rejects them.

Again, Christianity has its own distinctive presuppositions about man, his freedom and his sin, which lead on to a conception of human nature which may be called pessimistic, because it presents the world as it stands as largely in revolt against God, and in result as something utterly different from the world as God would have it. But the pessimism passes into a glowing optimism through the conviction of a divine purpose of redemption which is finally to take full effect. To these Christian presuppositions about man and his relation to the universe, I shall ask your attention in the tenth lecture.

There is also always apparent in Christianity the assumption of a special divine self-disclosure or Revelation—an idea distinguishable though not separable from the idea of the world, as a whole, as the manifestation of God—and against this idea of a positive Revelation modern idealism has deeply rebelled; thus the rationality of this conception will demand candid enquiries. That will be the subject of the eleventh lecture.

Finally, we shall find ourselves with a certain conception of a reasonable faith as representing man’s proper attitude towards the world; an idea which differentiates itself on the one hand from the kind of intellectualism which will take no step forward without positive demonstration; and on the other from the sort of faith which can fairly be called uncritical credulity. In the last lecture, then, I shall seek to vindicate the position of reasonable faith, as against scepticism on the one side, and superstition or dogmatism on the other, and to define the contents of the Christian ethic and its implied theology as the expression of this reasonable faith.

I proceed, then, to discuss the intellectual validity of the specifically Christian presuppositions on the basis of an assumption that as against materialism, hedonism or positivism, idealism has already won an intellectual victory, which can be taken for granted.

APPENDED NOTE

ON MR. H. J. MASSINGHAM’S “GOLDEN AGE—THE STORY OF HUMAN NATURE”

Rousseau believed in the glory of primitive man before he had been sophisticated by civilization, and argued that, if man to-day were liberated from the shackles of authority, secular and religious, the primitive nature could again assert itself in its pristine beauty and freedom. This same conception of primitive man is being revived in the school of anthropology represented by Prof. Elliot Smith (op. cit., pp. 180 f., 199) and Mr. Massingham. I do not wish to argue as to whether there is evidence of this Golden Age of man in a præ-historic period, which has survived, among tribes which escaped the first rudiments of civilization, even to our time. But it appears that this beautiful and innocent original manhood could not endure the least tincture of civilization. The very beginnings of agriculture sufficed for its undoing. To-day we have to do with a humanity which has undergone the influences of civilization for many thousands of years, and it is of this humanity that we have direct and constant experience. To suggest, then, that man as we now know him can trust his undisciplined instincts to guide him aright is to suggest what is, I think, obviously false.

• 1.

  More important because the prophetic message in Israel also culminated in the same belief about the world to come.

• 2.

  Shu King, iv, 8. 2 and 5. 3; S.B.E., vol. iii, pp. 99 and 115.

• 3.

  And at approximately the same period of time. Both the Hebrew prophets and the Chinese sages, and the Greek moralists and the Buddha belong to (about) the middle of the first millennium, B.C.

• 4.

  Aristotle more definitely exalts the speculative over the practical life; and in Plotinus and Neo-Platonism this tendency triumphs.

• 5.

  See Laws, x, 904-6, addressed to young men who attribute moral indifference to the gods.

• 6.

  See John v. 44, addressed to the Pharisees, amongst whom a very high and intense form of public opinion was the basis of their moral blindness: “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and the honour which cometh from the only God ye seek not?”

• 7.

  The Jewish term Bath-Qol, “the Daughter of the Voice” (of God), is, as Wordsworth perceived, a better description of conscience—which man has the power to stifle or sophisticate till “the light that is in him” becomes “darkness.”

• 8.

  Ninth Sunday after Trinity.

• 9.

  St. Leo the Great.

• 10.

  See De Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World (an admirable survey), pp. 24 and 40. This for Israel and Greece. No one would doubt the independence of Iran and China as represented in Zarathustra and Confucius.

• 11.

  “Wherever Buddhism is [in any measure] true to the spirit of its founder, it promotes the difficult art of meditation, and the kindly and compassionate spirit”—Kenneth Saunders, Buddhism (Benn). I have introduced the words in brackets because it would seem that Buddhism is nowhere true to the fundamental motive of its founder.

• 12.

  I cannot resist the impression that if India is to find the principle of moral renewal, it must look for help to something outside its own tradition, whether of religion or philosophy. On the other hand, China presents a different picture. In the Classical doctrine of Heaven, in the idea of the tao, and even in ancestor-worship, there is a tradition, though at this moment of her history it may be sorely imperilled, on which moral redemption, individual and social, may be built. To phrase this as a Christian believer would phrase it, there is, in the Chinese tradition, as there was in the Græco-Roman tradition, a “tutor to bring men to Christ.”

• 13.

  Prof. Elliot Smith is surely right in forcing upon our attention the enormous influence upon human development of individual men. “The great events in Human History were provoked by individual human beings exercising their wills to change the directions of human thought and action, or by natural catastrophes forcing men of insight to embark on new enterprises” (Hist. of Man, p. 60; cf. p. 100).

• 14.

  The Nature of the Physical World, p. 178

• 15.

  There is an admirable passage at the beginning of the Preface to Butler’s Sermons (dated 1729) which is certainly as applicable to-day as it could ever have been two hundred years ago.

• 16.

  I may refer to my Christ and Society (Allen & Unwin), pp. 26-28.

• 17.

  I am referring especially to Book I of the Ecclesiastical Polity.

• 18.

  I would refer especially to his Voltaire (1872), pp. 149 ff. and cap. v.: “The worst church that has ever prostituted the name and the idea of religion cannot be so disastrous to society as can a gospel that systematically relaxes self-control.”

• 19.

  See App. Note, p. 226.

• 20.

  The reaction in Goethe’s mind is to be seen in the poem Selige Sehnsucht (see Gedichte in Zeitlicher Folge, Bd. ii, p. 56):
  
  Und so lang du das nicht hast,
  Dieses—Stirb und werde!
  Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
  Auf der dunkeln Erde.
  (In prose, “So long as the maxim You must die to live has not got hold of you, you are but a sad stranger upon the gloomy earth.”)
  There is another verse, cited in Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 363:
  In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
  Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.
  But I cannot run it to earth; nor the following: “Anything which emancipates the spirit without a corresponding growth in self-mastery is pernicious.” But I have no doubt they are genuine Goethe.

• 21.

  See the Basis of Moral Obligation and Personality and Reality. In Walter Lippmann’s Preface to Morals we have from a definitely non-theistic standpoint a powerful presentation of actual moral tendencies in America and (more or less) in Europe, and an attempted reconstruction of the moral standard.