Title: The Peak in Darien, With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body: An Octave of Essays
Author: Cobbe, Frances Power
Language: English
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OTHER INQUIRIES TOUCHING CONCERNS OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY ***



[Illustration: FRANCES POWER COBBE.

_From “Life of Frances Power Cobbe.” By Herself._]



  THE PEAK IN DARIEN,

  WITH SOME OTHER INQUIRIES TOUCHING CONCERNS OF THE
  SOUL AND THE BODY.

  AN OCTAVE OF ESSAYS

  BY

  FRANCES POWER COBBE.

  “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht;
  Der Uebel grösstes aber ist die Schuld.”

  _Die Braut von Messina._

  BOSTON:
  GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET.

  LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATE.

  1882.



PREFACE.


My last little book, _Lectures on the Duties of Women_, was addressed
principally to the young of my own sex. The present volume is intended
for my contemporaries who are daily brought face to face with some of
the darker problems of the time, or are led by their advancing years to
ponder ever more earnestly on the mystery of the great transition. In
these various papers,--some new, some already published in different
periodicals,--I have striven to meet fairly the questions whether the
denial of God and immortality be indeed (as Agnostics and Comtists
are wont to boast) a “magnanimous” creed, whether life be truly (as
Leopardi and Schopenhauer and hundreds of their English disciples din
daily in our ears) a burden and a curse, and whether (as much recent
legislation and newspaper literature would seem to teach) bodily health
be after all the _summum bonum_ for which personal freedom, courage,
humanity, and purity ought all to be sacrificed?

To these discussions, I have added one on the “Fitness of Women for
the Ministry of Religion,”--a subject, I believe, destined soon to
acquire importance,--with two or three less serious papers on other
matters touching moral questions; and, in conclusion, I have returned
to a speculation concerning the immediate entry into the life after
death which I find has possessed interest for many readers. That “Peak
in Darien,” which we must all ascend in our turn,--the apex of two
worlds, whence the soul may possibly descry the horizonless Pacific of
eternity,--is the turning-point of human hope. And it appears to me
infinitely strange that so little attention has been paid to the cases
wherein indications seem to have been given of the perception by the
dying of blessed presences revealed to them even as the veil of flesh
has dropped away. Were I permitted to record with names and references
half the instances of this occurrence which have been narrated to me,
this short essay might have been swelled to a volume. It is my wish,
however, that it should serve to suggest observation and provoke the
interchange of experiences, rather than be considered as pretending to
decide affirmatively the question wherewith it deals.

Perhaps it may be as well to forestall any misapprehension by stating
plainly that I utterly disbelieve, and even regard with intense
dislike, all so-called “Spiritualist” manifestations and attempts to
recall the dead; and that I have never found any sufficient testimony
for stories of ghosts or apparitions of the departed beheld by men and
women still in the midst of life. Only at the very moment when we are
passing into their arms does it seem to me that the law of our being
may permit us to recognize once more the beloved ones who are “not
lost, but gone before.” The lines of W. J. Fox precisely express my
thought on this subject:--

  Call them from the dead!
  Vain the call must be;
  But the hand of death shall lay,
  Like that of Christ, its healing clay
  On eyes which then shall see
  That glorious company.

  FRANCES POWER COBBE.

 JULY, 1882.



  CONTENTS.

                                                         PAGE

  I. MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM,                                  11

  II. HYGEIOLATRY,                                         77

  III. PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS,               89

  IV. ZOOPHILY,                                           125

  V. SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE,                                151

  VI. THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION,  179

  VII. THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY,                235

  VIII. THE PEAK IN DARIEN: THE RIDDLE OF DEATH,          245



MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.


“Be of good cheer, brother!” said John Bradford to his fellow-martyr
while the fagots were kindling: “we shall have a brave supper in heaven
with the Lord to-night!” “Be of good cheer, everybody!” cry an army of
modern confessors, seated in library chairs: “there is no heaven and
no Lord, and when we die there will be an end of us all, _in saecula
saeculorum_; but the generations who come after us will be greatly
edified by our beautiful books and our instructive example.”

Perhaps the moral vitality of our age is in no way better exemplified
than by the fact that certain doubts, which seem to strike mortal
blows at the head and heart of human virtue, yet leave it breathing,
and even pulsating with aspirations after some yet loftier excellence
than saints and heroes have hitherto attained. To look back to the
“infidels” with whom Massillon and Jeremy Taylor had to do, and compare
them with the Agnostics of our time, is indeed more encouraging than
to compare the “faithful” of past centuries with those of the present
age. While the old Atheist sheltered his vice behind a rampart of
unbelief where no appeals could reach him, the new Agnostic honestly
maintains that his opinions are the very best foundations of virtue. No
one can for a moment say of him that he chooses darkness rather than
light _because_ his deeds are evil. If it be (as we think) darkness
which he has chosen, there can be no question that his deeds are good,
and that his conceptions of duty are truly elevated and far-reaching,
and enforced by every argument which he has left himself at liberty
to use. Renouncing faith in God and in the life hereafter,--that
is to say, in _Goodness Infinite_ and _Goodness Immortalized_,--he
retains the most fervent faith in goodness as developed in human
life,--that is to say, in _goodness finite_ in degree and in duration.
If we are to accept his own statement of the case, the Agnostic has
completely turned the front of the theological battle. It is now the
pagans who have seized and hold aloft the sacred labarum of duty and
self-sacrifice, and _in hoc signo_ are destined to victory.

The claim is one of the gravest which can be put forth between man
and man. It was not easy--it was, alas! often beyond our strength--to
combat our doubts or those of others, while yet we fought against them
as a sailor fights against enemies cutting his anchor cable on a stormy
night. We stand amazed and disarmed by the strange intelligence that,
when these doubts have done their work, and cast us adrift altogether
from allegiance to God and hope of another life, _then_, when all seems
lost, we shall suddenly discover that we have touched the Fortunate
Isles of virtue and peace. Only the thorough sceptic, we are assured,
can be the perfect saint. Nobody can disinterestedly serve his brother
on earth till he is entirely persuaded he has no Father in heaven. The
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (of course it is always assumed that
it _is_ a tree of genuine knowledge on which Atheism grows) is to be
desired, not only because it will make us “wise,” but because it will
make us _good_. Who will hesitate any more to pluck and eat?

To the consideration of this now common pretension of Agnosticism to be
the true FRIEND OF VIRTUE, in the room of the old delusion of religion,
the following pages will be devoted. For the purposes of our particular
argument and to avoid entangling ourselves with too many collateral
questions, I shall treat it here as the _Assumption of the Moral
Superiority of Atheism over Theism_. Is that assumption justifiable?
I, for one, am entirely ready to admit that, _if_ there be anything
in the faith in God and immortality which detracts from the highest
conceivable perfection of human virtue,--if, in short, Atheism have a
better morality to teach than Theism,--then the case of Theism must be
abandoned. The religion which is _not_ the holiest conceivable by the
man who holds it is condemned _ipso facto_.

For the present, I may assume that no important difference of opinion
exists as to the practical rules of morality. It is the proper
_motives_ to a virtuous and self-sacrificing life which Agnostics claim
to place on higher ground than that which has been hitherto given to
them. They propose to tell us to “do justice and love mercy” both
in a better and more disinterested way than while we added to those
unquestionable duties the mistaken attempt to walk humbly with our God.
The question lies in a nutshell,--Can they do it? Is there anything
in the true Theistic faith detracting from the disinterestedness
of virtue, or calculated to rob it of a single ray of purity and
glory? This must be our first contention, since religion now stands
on its defence as a basis of morality. When it is settled, it may
perhaps appear that religion may justly again assume the offensive,
and challenge Atheism to prove its capacity for serving equally
efficiently as a support for the virtue of humanity; and, if it appear
that to such a challenge no satisfactory reply can be given, then it
will be manifest that, in their expressions of satisfaction and joy at
the anticipated downfall of religion, Atheists display disregard of the
moral interests of their race.

Let the lists be cleared in the first place. I shall not be
expected to defend all the base and demoralizing things which, in
the misused name of Christianity, have been inculcated concerning
“Other-worldliness,”--the doing good for the sake of getting to
heaven, and avoiding evil from fear of hell. Since the day, recorded
by Joinville, when the mysterious old woman carried her waterpot and
torch before St. Louis, and told him she intended to put out the fires
of hell and burn up heaven, so that men might learn to love God for his
own sake, and not from fear or hope,--since that distant time, there
have not been wanting righteous souls who have girned and spurned at
the vile lessons current in the Churches, and asked with Kingsley,--

  “Is selfishness,--for time, a sin,--stretched out into eternity,
  Celestial prudence?”

Beyond a doubt, one of the heaviest charges against the popular
creed is that, while its ministers have raged against the smallest
theological error, and convulsed the world by their ridiculous
disputes concerning mysteries altogether beyond the reach of human
comprehension, they have complacently endured and even fostered moral
heresies which withered up the very roots of virtue. The whole tone of
ordinary Romish exhortation, _faire son salut_, is often base beyond
expression; and the teaching of the Church of England in the last
century was no better. Here are some specimens of it. Rutherford says
(_Nature and Obligations of Virtue_, 1744), “Every man’s happiness is
the ultimate end which reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant
and uniform practice of virtue becomes our duty _when_ revelation
has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after
this.” Paley is no better. He says:[1] “Virtue is the doing good
to mankind in obedience to the will of God and _for the sake of
everlasting happiness_. According to which definition, the good of
mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, and _everlasting
happiness the motive of virtue_.” Waterland, the great champion of
Trinitarianism, went even further. He says that “being just and
grateful without future prospects has as much of moral virtue in it
_as folly or indiscretion has_.” These are the kind of doctrines which
have been placidly admitted among the recognized teachings of the great
Christian Churches. Nor have some of the philosophers proved a whit
more conscious of the simple notion of duty. Bentham, for example,[2]
plainly lays it down that for a man to give up a larger pleasure of his
own for a smaller one of his neighbor’s is an act not of virtue, but of
_folly_.

Certainly, if the new Agnostics had no types of religion or morality
save these thoroughly debased ones wherewith to compare their system,
they might well claim to be the evangelists of a purer gospel. Better,
assuredly better, would it be to believe in no God than to pay homage
to the all-adorable Author of Good for the sake of the payment we
expect him to give us. Better, assuredly better, to expect no life
beyond the grave than to poison every act of courage, justice, or
beneficence by the vile notion of being rewarded for it in heaven; or
to refrain from treachery and cruelty and lies, merely, like a beaten
hound, from dread of the bloody scourge of hell.

But it would be an insult to the well-informed and widely-read
advocates of Agnosticism, if we were to assume for a moment that
they were ignorant that this base alloy of religion has been almost
universally repudiated by the higher class of English divines of
the present day, of every shade of Orthodoxy; while, outside of the
Churches, there is not a religious man who does not regard them with
unmitigated disgust. The question really is, not whether religion _may_
be made to corrupt morality with bribes and threats, but whether it
properly does so; whether a religious man _ought_, in accordance with
his theology, to be less disinterested than an Atheist. To reply to
this question, it seems only necessary to recall what a Theist believes
about God and immortality as concerned with his own virtue.

A Theist believes, then, that the goodness and justice, which the
Agnostic recognizes and loves so well in their human manifestations,
have existence beyond humanity, and are carried to ideal perfection in
a Being who is, in some sense, the Soul and Ruler of the universe.

_This_ belief, at all events (whether legitimately held or only
a dream), cannot, I presume, so far as it goes, be charged with
detracting from the purity of virtue. Goodness cannot be esteemed less
good, or justice less just, because there exists One who is supremely
good and just.

Further, as regards himself, the Theist believes that this supremely
good and just Being so constituted his nature and the world around him
as that the law of goodness and justice should be _known_ to him as the
sacred rule, whereby he is inwardly bound to determine his actions and
sentiments. In other words, he believes that he has acquired his moral
sense of God, and not from any undesigned, fortuitous order of things
which may have impressed it as an hereditary idea on his brain.

I am at a loss to guess how _this_ step further can be supposed to
be hostile to the disinterestedness of virtue. It is easy to see how
the opposite theory of the origin of conscience, as exhibited in
Mr. Darwin’s _Descent of Man_,--whereby the authority of the human
intuition, “Thou shalt do no murder,” is traced to the same origin as
the bees’ intuition of the duty of killing their brothers, the drones
(namely, the hereditary transmission of ideas found conducive to the
welfare of the tribe),--should dethrone Conscience from her assumed
supremacy, and place her among the crowd of other hereditary notions,
neither more nor less deserving of honor. And, on the other hand, the
attribution of our moral ideas, directly or indirectly, to the teaching
of a Being immeasurably above us,--a theory which represents conscience
as a ray shot downward from a sun, instead of a marsh-fire illumined
under special conditions of social existence, and liable to blaze up,
die down, or flit hither and thither as they may determine,--must
inevitably elevate and sanctify the laws of morals to our apprehension.
In truth, it is obvious that, had the first hypothesis (of the
hereditary transmission of useful ideas) been heard of in the days of
our ancestors, the “mystic extension” (as Mr. Mill calls it) of utility
into morality could never have been accomplished, and repentance and
remorse would have been unknown experiences. But all this refers to the
practical _authority_ of moral laws. It is with the _disinterestedness_
of the man who obeys them that we are at present concerned; and this
disinterestedness is not, that I perceive, influenced one way or the
other by the theory he may hold of how he comes by his knowledge of
them.

But now we reach the point where, it is to be presumed, the Atheist
finds ground for his claim to superior disinterestedness. The Theist
believes not only that goodness and justice are attributes of God,
and that God has taught him to be good and just, but that God further
holds what the old Schoolmen called the _Justitia Rectoria_ of the
universe,--that he so ordains things as that, sooner or later, good
will surely befall the good, and evil the evil. So much as this is
included in the simplest elements of Theism. In its fuller development,
Theism teaches more: namely, that God takes the interest of a Father
in the moral welfare of his children; that he has created every human
soul (and doubtless thousands of races of other intelligent beings)
for the express purpose that each should attain, through the teaching
and trials of existence, to virtue, and so enter into the supreme
bliss of sympathy and communion with himself. Theism thus understood
teaches that God is perpetually training each soul for that sublime
end, inspiring it with light, answering its prayers for spiritual aid,
punishing it for its errors, hedging up its way with thorns to prevent
its wanderings, and finally certainly conducting it, through this life
and perhaps many lives to come, to the holiness and blessedness for
which it was made.

The position of a Theist differs therefore essentially from that of
an Atheist as regards the practice of virtue, inasmuch as the Atheist
thinks he has no superhuman spectator or sympathizer; that the thoughts
and feelings which awaken his conscience and move his heart do not
originate in any mind out of his own; that the woes of his life bear
with them no moral meaning of retribution or expiation; and finally
that, whether he be a hero or a coward, a saint or a sinner, it will
be all one, so far as himself is concerned, when the hour of his death
has sounded. His actions may and will have important consequences to
other men, but as regards his own destiny they can have no consequences
at all; for the grave will receive everything that remains of him.
The virtues he may have acquired with unutterable struggles will die
away into nothingness, like the sound of a broken harp-string. He will
neither rejoin his dead friends nor come into any fresh consciousness
of God. Neither dead friends nor God have any existence; and a little
sooner or later, as he may chance to be a more or less important
person, he will be altogether forgotten, and no being in the universe
will ever more remember that he once _was_.

Now, I think it would be idle to deny that it must be _far harder_
to be virtuous under the shadow of this Atheism than in the sunshine
of Theism. The tax and strain upon the moral nature of a man who
holds the views just indicated of the emptiness of the universe of
any One absolutely good and just, of the low and haphazard origin of
conscience, and of the utter loneliness and unaided state wherewith
man pursues his weary course from the cradle to the inevitable,
eternal grave, must be simply enormous. All honor, sincere and hearty
honor, and full recognition of their noble disinterestedness, be to
those Atheists who, under such strain, yet struggle successfully
and incessantly to do good and not evil all their days, and to die
bravely and calmly, letting go their grasp of life and joy and love,
and sinking without a groan under the waters which are to cover them
for evermore. There is something in the self-sustained, Promethean
courage of such a man which commands our admiration; and we can well
imagine him looking round on his suffering fellows pitifully, as on
his orphaned and disinherited brothers and sisters, with infinite
compassion, deeming them destined like himself to perish with all their
aspirations and capacities disappointed and unfulfilled. For such a man
to devote himself to the labors of practical benevolence and the relief
of the woe which surrounds him, whence he usually draws his strongest
arguments for his desolate creed, would seem to be the fittest, if not
the only fit pursuit; and, when we behold him engaged in it (as in
instances I could readily name), our whole hearts recognize his virtue
as absolutely beautiful and disinterested. But because the Atheist’s
virtue, when he is virtuous, is without alloy, is there any just reason
to hold that it is _more_ pure than that of the Theist? His task is,
as I have readily admitted, the _harder_ of the two; _so_ hard indeed
is it that there seem the gravest reasons for fearing that, if a few
noble spirits perform it, the mass of tried and tempted men who can
scarcely lift themselves from their selfishness even with the two wings
of Faith and Hope will lie prone in the very mire of vice when those
wings are broken. But, because the Atheist’s duty is harder to do, is
it consequently better done? Is the music which he draws from that one
string of philanthropy sweeter than the full chord of all the religious
and social affections together?

Let us revert to the points of difference between the two creeds as
above enumerated. Is a man necessarily _self-interested_ in doing
the will of a Being whom he _loves_ and hopes by serving to approach
and resemble? Of course, if he is looking for payment,--for health,
wealth, happiness on earth or celestial glory,--for any adventitious
reward outside of the fact of becoming better and nearer to God,--then,
indeed, his service is self-interested. He is a mercenary in the army
of martyrs. In strict ethics, his conduct, however exactly legal, is
not virtuous; for virtue can only be absolutely without side-looks to
contingent profit, present or future. I presume that, when Agnostics
boast of the superior disinterestedness of the virtue they inculcate
over that of religious men, they think (and cannot divest themselves
of the early acquired habit of thinking) of religion as of this kind
of labor-and-wages system,--hard duty below, high glory above,--with
perhaps the additional complication of certain scholastic doctrines of
imputed righteousness. But it is time this confusion should cease.
Love of goodness _impersonated in God_ is not a less disinterested,
though naturally a more fervent, sentiment than love of goodness in
the abstract. The Theist, in his attempt to obey by good deeds the
will of the Being he loves, acts as simply as the Atheist, who loves
the good deed, thinking that no being higher in the scale of existence
than himself has any appreciation of the difference between good and
evil. The Theist, indeed, adds to his love of goodness _per se_ a
love of goodness impersonated in God, who desires good actions to be
done,[3] and possibly also a hope that, by doing good now, he may be
given the power to do it again and again for ever; but it is all the
same charmed circle of _doing good for goodness’ sake_, out of which he
never emerges into any such motive as doing good for the sake of honor,
prosperity, or heavenly bliss in a golden city. The sole thing which
the Theist asks of God as the reward of obedience is the power to obey
better in future, the privilege of obeying forever. The payment of his
virtue is to be virtuous now and throughout eternity. Whether it be in
this life or another, there is no difference; no new principle comes
into play; no bribe unsought for here is hoped for there. He says to
God: “It is a joy to serve Thee, but infinitely greater is the joy to
serve Thee with the assurance that the term of my service will never
expire. Precious is the privilege of calling Thee Father. How glad
then am I that I shall be a child at Thy feet forever! Lord, I seek no
heaven hereafter. I covet no abode of bliss, no outward reward above.
To be with Thee is my heaven and my salvation and the only reward I
seek. As I abide in Thee now, may I continue to live in Thee, O Father;
and to grow in wisdom and love and purity and joy in Thee, time without
end.”[4]

Surely, it is altogether absurd to speak of this religion as involving
any, even the very slightest shade of interestedness or detraction
from the highest conceivable type of human virtue. If it deserve such
a condemnation, then must likewise stand condemned the most pure and
exalted human love which friend has ever felt for friend,--for this
also, by its very nature, seeks to serve for love’s sake, to arrive at
perfect harmony, to dwell with the beloved in unbroken and everlasting
union.

Turn we now to the other side of the subject. Theism has been, I hope,
vindicated from the charge of interestedness. What shall we say to the
general ethical aspect of Agnosticism, which assumes to be the nobler
system? Admitting the blameless conduct and the high aspirations of
some of its professors, what value shall we attach to their claim to be
the heralds of a higher morality?

If I may, without offence, condense their lessons in a very obvious
parallel, they amount to this “symbol”: “Whosoever will be saved,
before all things it is necessary that he cease to believe either
in one God or in three; and that he be fully assured that those who
have done good and those who have done evil shall alike go into
everlasting nothingness.” This creed piously accepted, he will advance
to perfection and outrun in two ways any excellence which has been
hitherto attained.

1st. While recognizing that, so far as he himself is concerned, death
means the annihilation of consciousness, he will act throughout his
life with a deep and conscientious concern for the consequences of
his actions to those who come after him or, as Mr. Frederick Harrison
expresses it, to his own posthumous activity.

2d. By welcoming the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the
doctrine of the annihilation of consciousness at death, not as a
sorrowful truth, but as the latest and brightest gospel of good
tidings; and proclaiming, on all suitable occasions, that they afford
a better stand-point and outlook for humanity than any faith or hope
which has been hitherto entertained.

The first of these doctrines was set forth, a few years ago, in two
eloquent and affecting papers, by Mr. Frederick Harrison, in the
_Nineteenth Century_. How much sympathy I feel with a great deal which
is said in these papers,[5] how sincerely I respect Mr. Harrison’s
noble conception of the aim of life, even where I most completely
misdoubt the validity of the method he proposes for attaining it, there
is scarcely need to say. It is precisely because such Positivists as he
and Mr. Morley and the late George Eliot, and such Agnostics as many
I could name, assume such really high ground in their teaching, and
appeal (though, as I think, in a fallacious way) to our very noblest
sympathies and aspirations, that I feel urged to raise my feeble voice
and call in question their guidance. There, in truth, stand, as they
point to them, the snowy summits of purity and goodness. But by what
path would they guide us to ascend them? Even if their own strong souls
may climb those arid crags, can they be in any possible sense a better
way than that by which millions of believers in God and immortality
have gone up on high?

Let us take Mr. Harrison’s doctrine of the “Posthumous Activities”
of the soul, and endeavor to estimate how far it is calculated to
act as an efficient motive of virtue on ordinarily constituted,
well-intentioned men and women. We must bear in mind that it is
formally proposed as a substitute for the old belief in the immortality
of the individual,--that is (according to the Theist creed), in the
immortality of the _virtue_ of the individual. While a Theist believes
that, having lighted that sacred torch, he shall be permitted to bear
it onward, burning more purely and brightly forever, the Comtist
thinks he must lay down his at the side of his grave, though other men
may ignite their own from it, and so carry on its light from age to age.

In the first place, I must remark that, like the promise on which such
stress is laid in Dr. Bridge’s _General View of Positivism_, that
attached husbands and wives may be solemnly interred side by side,
there is nothing _new_ in these anticipations. We have always known
that we might be buried in the same vault with our next friend, as
we have always known that our actions would continue to bear fruit
after our departure. We entertained the first hope (so far as such a
pitiful matter as the future position of our deaf and blind decaying
dust deserves to be considered a hope), and we were aware of the
responsibility,--_plus_ the belief that we ourselves should enjoy free
converse with the spirit of our friend, and afford to smile together
on our poor mouldering garments laid up side by side in the tomb,--and
_plus_ the belief that we might ourselves be cognizant of our
posthumous activities. There is nothing in the fact that both the hope
and the sense of responsibility must now stand by themselves for what
they are worth, to give them (so far as I can see) any fresh leverage
as motives of conduct. People who did not love each other better
while they expected to be at liberty to spend eternity in conscious
communion, as well as to be buried in the same grave, certainly will
not love each other better when their future prospects are limited to
the family vault. And people who have not regulated their conduct with
a view to their _post-mortem_ influence while they anticipated to be
living somewhere to know, or, at all events, to be obliged to think
about it, are very little likely to regulate it the better when they
are convinced that, if they leave the deluge behind them, they will
neither know nor care one iota. As to the good man, he will, under the
old creed and under the new alike (and neither more nor less, so far
as I can perceive), entertain a solemn sense of a responsibility to
do all the good and refrain from every evil in his power during his
threescore years and ten,--_not_ first, or chiefly, for the sake of
consequences near or remote to himself or other people in this world or
another, but because goodness, truth, courage, justice, and generosity
are good in themselves, lovable in his eyes and in the eyes of God, and
falsehood, impurity, cruelty, and treachery are bad and despicable,
hateful to him and to his Maker. Afterward, and as a reinforcement
of his choice of Scipio, he will reflect that every good act entails
good consequences in widening circles of loving-kindness, honor, and
honesty, and every bad one the reverse; and he will hope in dying to
reflect that the sum of the influence he leaves to work after him will
be wholly on the side of truth, justice, and love. It is monstrous for
Mr. Harrison to say that “the difference between our (Positivist) faith
and that of the orthodox is this. _We_ look to the permanence of the
activities which give others happiness. _They_ look to the permanence
of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness.” Why should looking to
the permanence of consciousness and happiness make a man care less for
the activities “which give others happiness”? Does A care less for B’s
welfare because he would like to be alive to see it, or even alive at
the antipodes at the same time?

Moralists and divines of all ages have not overlooked the remoter
consequences of our actions in rehearsing the motives in favor of
virtue. But it is idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of
mankind, more practical force than it possesses. In the first place,
when such an observer of things as Shakspere could say that

  “The evil which men do lives after them,
  The good is oft interred with their bones,”

it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the very noblest
achievements of human virtue have left any other mark than on the
virtuous souls themselves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now
in a higher existence their blessed inward consequences. The martyrs
who perished unseen and unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the
protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Reformation
they would have established was absolutely extinguished and left no
ray of light behind,--could these men cheer themselves under the awful
strain of their agonies by a motive of such tenuity as the prospect of
their “posthumous activities”?

But admitting, for argument’s sake, that the motive would serve always
to support the heroic order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still
more important ones of every-day conduct? His own illustrations ought
surely to have made Mr. Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks
of Newton as “no longer destroying his great name by feeble theology
or querulous pettiness,” of Shakspere as “the boon companion and
retired playwright of Stratford,” of Dante as the “querulous refugee
from Florence,” and of Milton as “the blind and stern old malignant of
Bunhill Fields.” Now these are his chosen exemplars of the enormous
“posthumous activity” which a man may exert, and certainly nobody now
living can hope that he shall ever exercise one-tenth as much. But
_their_ “pettiness” and “querulousness” and “boon companionship” and
“sternness” in their lifetimes did not hinder, or even essentially
detract from, their stupendous “posthumous activity.” Why, then, should
lesser people have any scruple in being petty, querulous, or stern, or
indulging in pot-companionship, or any other faults of temper or habit,
on account of their little posthumous activities, whatever they may
hope that these may prove?

Obviously, Mr. Harrison has a misgiving as to the force which his
argument can be expected to exert on ordinary mortals or for the daily
purposes of life. Though he says that the truth he teaches “is not
confined to the great,” and adds the beautiful remark that “in some
infinitesimal degree the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a
wave--no, more than a wave, a life--through the evergrowing harmony
of human society,” yet even while he alleges that a concern for such
posthumous activity is “no doubt now in England the great motive of
virtue and energy,” and asks, “Can we conceive a more potent stimulus
to daily and hourly striving after a true life?”[6] he says in the next
page that “it would be an endless inquiry to trace the means whereby
this sense of posthumous participation in the life of our fellows
_can be extended to_ _the mass_, as it certainly affects already the
thoughtful and refined.” Honestly, he admits that it is “impossible
it should become universal and capable of overcoming selfishness”
“without an education, a new social opinion without a religion; I
mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic.” “Make it,” he
cries, with almost the enthusiasm of a discoverer, “at once the basis
of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a
religion,” and then it may perhaps be achieved.

But, in sober truth, what “education” or “organized religion” (_i.e._,
of course, Comtism) can possibly transform this remote anticipation of
the results of our actions after we are dead into a practical lever
for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is the specialty of
all vice to be selfishly indifferent to the injurious consequences
of our actions, even to their immediate and visible consequences, to
those nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of exhorting
the drunkard who sees his wife and children starving round him to-day,
or the ill-conducted girl who is breaking her mother’s heart, or the
hard task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of the poor to
fill his pocket, to refrain from their misdoings on account of the evil
which they will cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let us try
to apply the principle to that sound mass of every-day English virtue
which is, after all, the very air we breathe,--the daily dutifulness,
the purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our homes, the
beautiful patience to be witnessed beside a thousand sick-beds.
Were we to ask the simple-hearted men and meek women who exemplify
these virtues whether they ever think of the excellent “posthumous
activities” which they will exert on their surviving acquaintances,
would they not be utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us have
the Comtist philosopher) who will go through a workhouse ward, or
round the cottages of a village, and offer such a suggestion as a
topic of encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small measure
of reformation. Nor do I think it is necessarily a low type of mind
which does not project itself much into the future, whether in this
world or the next; but which is vividly affected by the idea of a
_present_ righteous law claiming immediate obedience, and a _present_
adorable God watching whether that obedience be paid, but which takes
in even the idea of immortality more as adding an infinite dignity to
moral things and human souls than as a direct motive to moral action.
To such a person, the promise of “posthumous activities” is as remote
and inoperative a principle as it is possible to propose; and he
can scarcely help smiling at it, as he does at the observation of
Pliny, that the “happiest of all possible anticipations is the certain
expectation of an honorable and undying renown.” Posthumous activity
affords a far nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they both appeal
to sentiments which have little weight with the majority of minds, and
no weight at all with a great number not undeserving of respect.

The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists and Agnostics of the
day not only belong to an exceptional type of human nature, little
touched by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the most rarefied
order of influences, but are unable to descend from such altitude, and
realize what ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made of. As
Mr. Darwin unconsciously betrayed that he had never once had occasion
to repent an act of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance as
_beginning_ by a spontaneous reversion to sympathy and good-will to
the people we have injured (in bold contradiction to Tacitus’ too true
maxim, “_Humani generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris_”), so the
disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to perceive that they really
consider an exalted and far-reaching interest in the welfare of our
kind as the sort of motive which is already “now in England the great
motive of virtue and energy.”

Let me explain myself. I do not think there is any precept too high
to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher,
nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it
will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is the _moral_
excellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness
of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are
demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper
motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trained _intellect_ to
take it in and a vivid _imagination_ to realize it. Every argument for
virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn from considerations of
future consequences, labors under this irremediable defect: _that it
appeals least to those whom it is most necessary to influence_. When we
go further, and place our fulcrum of moral leverage in the period after
the death of the man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that he
will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may have effected, nor
suffer from the spectacle of the results of his wrong-doing, we have
reached (as it seems to me) the _ne plus ultra_ of impracticability.
Woe to human virtue when its advocates are driven to attach primary
importance to such an argument, and dream it can be made “the centre of
a religion”!

To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre and gifts, the
consideration of “posthumous activities” may act as a spur to doing
great actions, but scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life
and temper. He will, perhaps, under its influence reform the prisons
of Europe, and at the same time break his wife’s heart; write a
great epic poem, and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid
pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser; fight heroically his
country’s battles, and lead a life of persistent adultery; be at once a
disinterested statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard.

As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed neither with any superior
gifts to employ, nor vivid imagination to realize the results of their
actions hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in consideration
of their posthumous activities would draw forth some such reply as
this: “Our conduct can, at most, leave after our deaths only very small
results on a very few people whom we shall never know. We find it hard
enough to make sacrifices for those whom we do know and love, and whose
happiness or misery we actually witness. It is asking too much of us
that, for remote, contingent, and evanescent benefits to our survivors,
we should undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the pleasures
which in our poor short lives (so soon to end forever in darkness) may
fall within our grasp.”

Thus, in its capacity of the _Friend of Virtue_, it seems that Atheism
begins by depriving virtue of some of the strongest, if not the very
strongest, motives by which it has hitherto been supported, and offers
in their room, as the best substitute for them and the future “centre
of religion,” a consideration of Posthumous Activities, whose force
is of necessity both partial as to the virtues it inculcates, and
extremely limited as to the persons over whom it can exercise any
influence. And _that_ force, such as it is, appears to be in no way
specially connected with the Atheistic view of human destiny, but
belongs to every moral system in the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Finally, as if to complete the nullity of the motive of Posthumous
Activities, there comes a reflection which must take erelong a
prominent place in disquisitions of this kind. Comtists talk of the
“immortality,” the “eternity,” of a dead man’s influence. But, if each
individual human soul is destined to be extinguished at death, then
there is _nothing_ wherewith man is concerned which is immortal or
eternal. Our race is destined irretrievably to perish _as a race_, if
it perish piecemeal with every soul which drops into the grave. Miss
Martineau’s wild talk about “the special destination of my race” being
“infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine
moral government”[7] (an assertion in itself simply absurd, since
the believers in a scheme of divine government hold that whatever is
noblest is _by the hypothesis_ assuredly our destination), is rendered
doubly preposterous when we bear in mind what science teaches regarding
the inevitable lapse of this planet within a limited epoch into a
condition of uninhabitability. The following observations are made
on this subject in a little _jeu d’esprit_ which I may be pardoned
for quoting. It assumes to be an extract from a newspaper of the next
century, and the men of that period are supposed to look back upon the
doctrine of “Posthumous Activities” with very little respect:--

 It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some
 amiable but short--sighted philosophers of the last century to “labor
 for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they
 supposed would prove a substitute for the old historic religions) have
 been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of astronomers
 that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it
 escape any sidereal explosion), since the solar heat is undergoing
 such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes, as come it must, when the
 fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods
 petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy
 seas flow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen
 world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness,--what
 in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the works
 and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we
 shall have accumulated will be forever lost. Our discoveries, whereby
 we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of
 Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been
 perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed
 the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books,
 our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and
 busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent
 eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or
 remember that there ever existed such a being as man. _This_ is what
 SCIENCE teaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who shall
 talk to us of “laboring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm
 which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably
 to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognized as a dream,
 wherein no man in a scientific age can long indulge.[8]

The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic teachers is, as
above said, “to welcome the conclusions of Atheism, and especially
the doctrine of annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as
truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings.”

This lesson, though repeated more or less by nearly all Agnostic and
Comtist writers, has been perhaps most prominently brought to the front
in the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her observations and
example as the text for the remarks I wish to offer upon it, as I have
done the papers of Mr. Frederick Harrison for those just made on the
doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some of her utterances
which touch on the matter:--

 I soon found myself quite outside of my old world of thought and
 speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disembarrassed of
 a load of selfish cares and troubles.... Hence it followed that
 the conceptions of a God with any human attributes whatever, of
 a principle or practice of design, of an administration of the
 affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must be mere
 visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philosophically
 or permanently true.... The reality that philosophy founded upon
 science is the one thing needful, the source and the vital principle
 of all morality and all peace to individuals and good-will among men,
 had become the crown of my experience and the joy of my life.... My
 comrade (Mr. Atkinson) and I were both pioneers of truth. We both care
 for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered
 without imparting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found,
 as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude
 wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?... _Then_
 (in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who ordered my work and
 would sustain me under it; and, however I may now despise that sort
 of support, I had it then, and have none of that sort now. I have all
 that I want, ... and I would not exchange my present views, imperfect
 and doubtful as they are,--I had better say I would not exchange my
 freedom from old superstition,--if I were to be burned at the stake
 next month, for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I
 for my exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to
 thoughtful minds.... When I experienced the still new joy of feeling
 myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of
 its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the
 sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of my race is
 infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of “divine
 moral government,” how could it matter to me that the adherents of a
 decaying mythology were still clinging to their Man-God?... Under this
 close experience (of illness), I find death in prospect the simplest
 thing in the world,--a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get
 excited about in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of
 my views of death.... Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort. I
 see that the dying naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire
 and sink into death as into sleep.... I feel no solicitude about a
 parting which will bring no pain.... Under the eternal laws of the
 universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full
 that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus there is much in my
 life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood
 of contentment at its close. Besides that, I never dream of wishing
 that anything were otherwise than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied
 to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire
 no more. I neither wish to live longer here nor to find life again
 elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it.[9]

It is no part of the purpose of this article to discuss the _truth_
of the doctrine that there is no God, and that death terminates human
consciousness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of loyalty
to what is understood to be truth may not make it appear to any one
holding such doctrines that he is under the obligation to publish them
frankly to the world. Many a man who is an Atheist as regards God holds
(what many believers in Him lack) a noble faith in Truth _as_ Truth,
a firm conviction that nothing can be better than Truth, and that, as
Carlyle said, “To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous.” It is
not, then, the holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet
their frank publication and defence, wherewith we are now concerned;
but with the _tone of exultation_ with which they are announced, the
disregard and contempt which are manifested for the dearest hopes, the
purest aspirations, of the great mass of mankind.

Magnanimity has two phases. We may be magnanimous on our own
account,--brave, calm, and self-reliant in the face of things which
appall feebler souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this
remarkable woman has given a very fine example. Here are the words she
wrote twenty years after the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her
friend:

 I cannot think of any future as at all probable except the
 annihilation from which some people recoil with so much horror....
 For my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well
 remember the passion wherewith W. E. Forster said to me, “I had
 rather be damned than annihilated.”... I have no wish for any further
 experience, nor have I any fear of it.[10]...

These words have in them a calmness, simplicity, and courage which
demand our honor, written as they were by an aged woman (as she herself
describes them a few lines further) “under the clear knowledge of
death being so near at hand.” The old vulgar theory, so frequently
harped upon in the last generation, that the right place to judge
a man’s religious views is his death-bed, and that, while orthodox
believers alone can die bravely, sceptics must needs expire in anguish
and alarm, with “a certain fearful looking-for of judgment,” has
been thoroughly exploded by the now numberless instances of perfect
courage exhibited by dying men and women who had long before abandoned
the hopes of a happy futurity which revealed or natural religion has
to offer. Harriet Martineau’s serene self-resignation into eternal
nothingness ought, if any further evidence were wanting, to suffice
to set the matter finally at rest; and it may be cited very properly
by disbelievers in immortality, as exhibiting what they deem to be
the fitting and dignified tone of a philosophical mind drawing near
to the horizon beneath which it will presently disappear forever. No
one can help respecting courage, under whatever form or circumstances
it is manifested; and, if a man think that he is on the verge of
annihilation, it is truly dignified and praiseworthy to approach it
with unflinching eye and unblenched cheek. This is _so far as the
individual is concerned_. But is there not another and larger side of
the question, which the very noblest man _ought_ to feel as awful and
heart-rending,--nay, must feel to be so, in proportion to his nobleness
and his power to extend his view beyond his own petty personality?

True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far outside of a man’s
own lot, of his past share of life’s feast, and his readiness now
to rise from it satisfied, and must take a wide survey of the lives
(so far as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,--of the
poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant, the diseased, the enslaved,
the sin-degraded,--and attain the conclusion that for _these_ also, as
well as for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good, and none
other need be asked or desired before he can complacently speak of the
_joy_ of abandoning faith in God and immortality. “I have had a noble
share of life, and I desire no more,” is an expression of personal
sentiment which may or may not be right and fitting on the assumed
hypothesis. But to join to such expression of individual contentment no
word of regret for the closing in of all hope to the suffering millions
of our race who have _not_ had “noble” shares of life, and who do, with
yearning hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,--this
is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magnanimity. This is littleness
and selfishness almost as bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists
abhor, who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while leaving
thousands of their brethren to perdition. It might be pardonable in
one brought up to believe in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the
doctrine of annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried, “Let
us all perish together rather than that hideous doom overtake a single
creature!” Such a choice would be generous and worthy. But when a woman
who probably never, at any period of her life, believed in the eternal
perdition of a soul, proclaims herself enraptured at the joy of finding
out that there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor, finally, any
holiness or happiness beyond the grave,--then, I repeat, this is _not_
magnanimity, but gigantic selfishness.

Let us think a little what it would signify to mankind to give up God
and heaven,--that is, the _belief_ in God and heaven; for--God be
praised!--it rests with no philosophic school to put out the sun or
prevent the morning from breaking, but only to _blind our eyes to them_.

Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the startling remark that,
“if it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but
little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris.” The observation
was doubtless true; for, of _direct_ thought of God, the streets
of great cities are probably the emptiest of any places wherein
mortals may be found. But there is an enormous share of human ideas
and feelings not directly or consciously turned toward God, yet
nevertheless colored by the belief that such a Being exists. Perhaps it
would be more proper to say that in Christendom every idea and every
feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a
God. We see everything _with Him for a background_. Inanimate nature
and the lower animals, human history and society, poetry, literature,
science, and art,--every one of them has its religious aspect, which
can only be excluded by a mental _tour de force_. Take inanimate
nature, for example,--the region where it seems easiest to sever
the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution
(according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the
domain of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and our hearts
are moved to their depths by sympathy with it when we gaze round of
a summer morning upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in
the year, upon the “happy autumn fields” of ripened corn, or, on a
winter’s night, up into the solemn host of stars. But is it merely the
glittering “patines of bright gold,” or fields of yellow wheat, or the
block of wood and rock which form the forest or the mountain, which
awaken in us such mysterious emotion? Are we not dimly worshipping the
soul of nature through earth and sky,--the spirit wherewith our spirits
are in ineffable harmony, and of which all the loveliness we behold is
but the shadow?

Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at such an hour and tell us
that, though it takes a man of genius to depict worthily on canvas
a corner of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole great
original had no Painter, no Designer; that the mountains had no
Architect, the well-balanced stars no supreme Geometer, but that it
all came about as we behold it through the action of forces, unguided
by any mind, undirected by any Will,--and what revulsion shall we not
experience? Shall we not feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman
whom he has believed to be good and wise and tender, but, when he comes
at last to look close into her face, he finds her to be a soulless
idiot, from whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shuddering away?

Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of
truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.[11] In every
department of human thought, in short, something--and that something
the most beautiful in it--must be lost, some sacred spell must be
broken, if we are to think of it as divested from the deeper sense
which religion has (all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it,--the
thread of purpose running through; the understood promise of justice;
the sympathy of an unseen, all-beholding Spectator.

In the same way, all human relationships will be stripped of the
majestic mantle under which they have been sheltered. The idea of the
common Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days had begun
to teach, and which Christ’s lessons have made the familiar thought
of every European child, has put a meaning into the phrase of human
brotherhood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest “Enthusiasts
of Humanity” would, without such preliminary training, have been able
to give to it. The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized)
that the most degraded of mankind, those from whom we naturally turn in
disgust, have yet the same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves,
has, beyond question, an indirect influence of no small force over
all our sentiments concerning them. The same reflection has even at
last begun to exercise a perceptible influence over our conduct to the
brutes. Christians and Theists of every shade may be found impressed
with the sense that religion demands the humane treatment of all
sentient creatures; and this, whether they take the view of Cardinal
Manning, that, “if I owe no moral duties to the lower animals, I owe
all the moral duties that are conceivable to the Creator of those
animals,--humanity, mercy, and care for them,” or take the simple
Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so we naturally look with
sympathy and tenderness on everything He has made. Of course, this
motive of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in God; and,
accordingly, we find, with quite logical fitness, that, while the
opposition to brute torture is maintained by men of every varied shade
of religion, the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are
professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical outcome of Atheism
as regards the brutes; and M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most
candid examples of men who have carried it out.

But it is in the region of the personal virtues--purity, truth,
temperance, contentment--that the loss of the belief in God will be
most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion
wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind
left which _ought_ to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But
I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive
that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful
and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its
secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now
illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say,
like the author of _In Memoriam_,--

  “The _dead_ shall look me through and through.”

The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of
the mind,--the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the
memories of old shameful errors,--this is hard enough. But the belief
that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest
of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere
solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human
friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We
see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand
times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the
realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which
discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now,
though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in
its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it
at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten.
But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral
argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is
_filtered down_ through all grades of minds by books and intercourse.
The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is
partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of
high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very
poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who
has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world
around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place:
the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom
around.

Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only
the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief
in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal
uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have
experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly.
Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the
common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of
the practical level of personal virtue?

What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the personal virtues
of purity (of _thought_ as well as of act), of truth, temperance, and
contentment, the high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in the
history of the moral development of mankind, are always the last to
be recognized. In the earlier ages of morality, nobody asks for more
than negative merits,--_not_ to murder or rob or deal treacherously.
Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt
_not_ do to another what thou wouldest not he should do to thee,” is
exchanged for the positive Christian law, _Do_ to another what thou
wouldest he should do to thee. But only very slowly, above and beyond
all social duties, the principle, “Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven
is perfect,” has dawned on mankind as the aim of life; and how little
it is yet the practical rule of conduct there is no need to tell. Let
us but let slip our faith in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it
not sink again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a great deal,
doubtless (for a time, at all events), of the duty of “laboring for
the cause of humanity,” and be encouraged by promises of “posthumous
activity.” But where are the motives for personal and secret virtue
to come from,--that inward virtue without which even warm social
benevolence soon becomes tainted? It _must_, it would seem, fall more
and more into the background. There is, theoretically, no more reason
for placing it forward: there is no more any “end of creation” in
contemplation, to which the virtue of each soul, to be wrought out by
its own struggles, must contribute its quotum. _The intrinsic moral
character of each soul_ will no longer be deemed the concern of any
being except the man himself, but only what _each is able to achieve
in the way of contributing to the welfare of other people_. While the
lesson of the higher ethics has been, “It is more important to _be_
good than to _do_ good,” that of the new ethics must inevitably be,
“It is very important what you _do_: it is of the smallest possible
consequence what you _are_ except in so far as your neighbors may know
it and be affected thereby.”

In another way, also, I think morality would be affected enormously,
though still indirectly, by the downfall of religion. Many of my
readers will recall a very able article on Atheism in the _National
Review_ for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in which it was
maintained that “Atheism has no language by which it can express
the infinite nature of moral distinctions.... It is not, as has
been falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinction from
measures of duration, but that faith in infinite personal life, and in
communion with or separate from infinite good, is the only articulate
utterance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely
boundless significance it sees in every moral choice.” Take away this
_expression_ of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the
_sense_ of it will very rapidly dwindle away.

And, after all, can it be said in the same sense, under an Atheistic
as under a Theistic creed, that moral distinctions _are_ “infinitely”
significant? Is there any “infinite” left for us to talk about, when we
have abolished God and immortality? Some few thousands of years ago,
on the Atheistic hypothesis, when man was just emerging from apehood,
there was no Being anywhere who distinguished right from wrong;[12] and
some few thousand years to come, when the final glacial period sets
in, there will be nobody left to know anything about it. There is no
Being now in whom righteousness is impersonated, nor any world to come
wherein the injustices of this will be rectified. From the eternal and
immutable law of the universe, the ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, which
Sophocles held it to be, the moral law has sunk to a mere “Rule of
Thumb,” whereby certain ephemeral creatures on our small planet find
it most beneficial, on the whole, to regulate their behavior. Is it
in the nature of things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience
and reverence we have paid to the divine law? And if, with the very
highest sanctions which can be conceived, that law has but too often
failed to secure our obedience against the temptations of selfishness
and passion, does anybody expect that, when it is divested of all those
sanctions, it will prevail even so far as it has done hitherto?

These are some of the indirect ways in which mankind must lose beauty
and truth and goodness, as it loses faith in God and immortality. But
the direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible, graver still.

The course of the moral life, after it has been commenced in earnest,
probably passes through the same two great phases in almost every
man who lives long enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and _all_
effort. A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging him up a
toilsome road. Every evil tendency of his nature has to be separately
fought with and trampled down, every act of self-sacrifice for others
to be performed with exertion of his will. The man labors heroically
under his stern sense of duty, taking consolation in it _as_ duty, but
still looking rather to fulfil _his_ obligation than desirous that the
end of each task should be accomplished. If he die at this stage, it
is in some sense a release. He has discharged his duty as a soldier,
and is glad to lay down his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to
hear it said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou
into the joy of thy Lord.”

But if a man live many years, striving in earnest, however failingly,
to do his duty, there comes by degrees a change in his condition. Old
temptations lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him trouble,
the friction of the inner life diminishes so sensibly that he is apt to
be alarmed lest he be growing indifferent. As to his positive duties,
those which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt it laid upon
him to undertake them, by degrees they acquire interest for him for
their own sake. He is intensely anxious for the success of his labors,
and no longer measures his efforts by what may be considered his moral
obligations. He _wants_ such and such aged or suffering persons to
be relieved, such sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to
virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed, such useful laws
or reforms or discoveries introduced. There is no need now for him to
spur himself by reflections that it is his duty to work for these ends:
the difficulty with him now lies to moderate his work with a view to
the preservation of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell
him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the object of it has
failed. He would cry, “Let me be accounted a faithless servant, but let
the work be accomplished by another, and I shall be content.” If he die
_now_, he takes very little comfort from thinking he has discharged his
duty. The work is not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as
Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: “I am not afraid to die,
but I wish I might carry on my work. I have only half used the powers
God gave me.”

Now, in all this history of the moral life, it appears that no
ostensible difference need exist between the sentiments of an Atheist
and a Theist, _provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second
stage of progress_. Once there, it is evident that no change in his
opinions about God or loss of hope of heaven will practically affect
his conduct. The habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his
passions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in unselfish
objects will not dwindle. He will go on to the end, laboring for the
good of his kind, and regret his own death mainly because it will
stop those labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially elevated
moral fibre, to be carried up to that turning-point where Law is
superseded by love? I am far from thinking that men may not and do
not often begin their self-reformation when they are (so far as their
own consciousness goes) quite alienated from God or disbelieving his
existence. I know, on the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience
that this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of the soul, the
resolute effort to obey conscience after a very little time brings
with it a sense, first dim, then shining more to the perfect day,
that there _is_ (as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) “a Power not ourselves
which makes for righteousness”; or, in plainer revelation, that God
watches and helps the soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the
mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force of religion,
burning away the dross of sin in the fire of a divine Presence, and
making self-sacrifice sweet as an offering of love. But if this normal
process, whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes thereby
aided through all future effort, is to be rigidly prohibited by
reason, if we are to starve out the religious sentiment as a passion
not to be indulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many are the
men and women who, after their first good resolutions, will persist in
the course of arduous moral effort long enough to reach that stage when
duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the aids to come from to
keep them from self-indulgence? We have seen that the moral law itself
is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain;
that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any
strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing
them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of
earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. All these ideas are to
be resolutely dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, immeasurable
loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to be left save only the one
motive of the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which is to replace God and
conscience and heaven. Let me speak out concerning this much-boasted
modern sentiment.

I have heard a good man, one of the best men I know, preaching on
this subject, and saying: “Do you ask why should you love your
neighbor? _Because you cannot help it!_” Now, as I listened to that
genuine philanthropist’s utterance, my heart smote me, and I said to
myself: “But I _could_ help it, and only too easily! It comes to him
spontaneously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors; but I have been
trying to do it for many years, and have very imperfectly succeeded.
Instead of _beginning_ with love, and going on to duty toward them
as the result of love, I have had to begin with duty, and, only with
many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit, learned at last to feel
love--for some of them!”

I do not think my experience is exceptional. I think the people who
can and do love spontaneously that terribly large section of our
race who are commonplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are the
exceptions, and that, if we are to have no benevolence except from
born philanthropists like the good man I have named, we shall see very
little in future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.

No! It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving our brother
which comes from believing that we have a common Father and a common
home,--all the help which comes to the heart in answer to the prayer
that God would melt its stoniness, and make it blossom into tenderness
and sympathy,--to enable us to attain the love which is not the
_spring_ of social duty, but its _climax_,--the “fulfilling of the law.”

I honestly think that the process of making Atheists, _trained as
such_, into philanthropists, will be but rarely achieved. And I venture
to propound the question to those who point to admirable living
examples of Atheistic or Comtist philanthropy,--How many of these have
passed through the earlier stage of morality _as believers in God_,
and with all the aid which prayer and faith and hope could give them?
That they _remain_ actively benevolent, having advanced so far, is (as
I have shown above) readily to be anticipated. But will their children
stand where they stand now? We are yet obeying the great impetus of
religion, and running along the rails laid down by our forefathers.
Shall we continue in the same course when that impetus has stopped, and
we have left the rails altogether? I fear me not.

In brief, I think the outlook of Atheism, as a _moral educator_, as
black as need be. Viewed with the utmost candor, and admitting all the
excellence of many of its disciples, I think Atheism must deduct from
morality the priceless training to reverence afforded by religion;
the illuminating consciousness of an unseen Searcher of hearts; the
invigorating confidence in an Almighty Helper; the vivifying influence
of divine love; and, finally, the immeasurable, inestimable benefits
derivable from that practice of prayer which is God’s own education of
the soul.

But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training,
Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and
woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the
sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may _live_ in the
twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its
comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its
charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect
consolation and support, is lost forever. There are no words to tell
what that loss must be,--worst of all to those who are least conscious
of it, and who have therefore lost with their faith in God those
spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has his higher being,
and of which the pains are better worth than all the pleasures of earth.

Atheism involves a far _worse_ loss to humanity than the exclusion of
the belief in a Life after Death; but we can form no fair estimate of
the deduction which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to make from
the sum of human virtue and happiness, if we do not thoroughly realize
what it is they are talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to
abandon the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God, and that
they are quite satisfied to do both.

As far as each individual is personally concerned, such Hope is of
course a very variable sentiment. There are those who say (as Miss
Martineau mentions Mr. W. E. Forster saying to her), “I would rather
be damned than annihilated.” And there are others who say, as she does
herself, “I have had a very noble share of life, and I do not ask
any more.” With the latter feeling _per se_, no one has a right to
quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of feeble bodily health
or overstrained conscientiousness, the notion of final repose is more
grateful than that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our day,
as it would seem almost everybody did in more trying times, that it was
the “rest which remaineth for the people of God,” beyond the storms
of the world,--the “everlasting beds of rest” on which the weary may
lie,--rather than our more modern notion of a Heaven of Progress, to
which they aspire. There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to
whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind, existence itself seems
a burden; and they extend the _taedium vitae_ which they feel here by
anticipation to any future state to which they could be transferred.
With such persons as these, as I have just said, we have no claim
to contend, even though we may think, with Tennyson, that, if they
knew themselves better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost
lassitude,

  “’Tis _life_ of which our veins are scant;
  O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
  More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”

The dreams of men as to what they desire beyond the grave are
infinitely varied, from Nirvana to Valhalla; and nothing is to be said,
so far as he himself is concerned, respecting a man who wishes it to be
written on his tombstone that he

  “From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,
  Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died,”

except this,--that his choice of eternal sleep betrays the fact _that
there is no one in this world or the next whom he loves well enough
to wish to be awakened to meet him again_. Of course, a man may have
abundance of kindly and dutiful sentiments for his relatives and
friends, and yet (thinking they will do well enough without him) be
satisfied to quit them for ever. But I cannot believe that any one
who has ever lost the object of the higher and more absorbing human
affection, or who leaves behind him in dying one united to him by such
transcendent love, can fail passionately to desire immortality. He may
_resign_ himself through philosophy or religion (if his religion take
the strange and rare form of belief in God and disbelief in a life to
come) to see his beloved one no more. But not to _desire_ to meet,
at any cost of unwelcome ages of life, the being we profess to love
supremely, seems to be a contradiction in terms. Were there to loom
before us worlds to climb, and centuries of labor, we would surely
thankfully go through them all to reach the hour when we shall say,

  “Soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again!
  And with God be the rest.”

But because a loveless man may, without blame, be content to let death
drop a final curtain on his consciousness, it is quite another matter
for him to be equally placidly resigned to the extinction of the hopes
of others, who have had no such feast of life as he, or who yearn for
the renewal of affection hereafter. As I have elsewhere attempted to
show, in a little parable, such resignation _on behalf of other people_
is very much like that of Dives,[13] who, having fared sumptuously,
should be contented to let Lazarus starve.

Nor is it only the _comfort_ of expecting to see our beloved ones again
which we shall lose with the hope of a future life. I am persuaded
that a great deal of the higher part of love itself will fade out of
human existence altogether, if that hope be generally abandoned. Every
one knows how friendship and marriage are hallowed by the thought of
their perpetuity even in this world, and how a union is debased if
it be, consciously to those who make it, temporary and transitory.
Hitherto, we have loved one another _as immortal beings_, as creatures
whose affections belonged to the exalted order of eternal things. When
that ennobling and sanctifying element evaporates, when Love, like
everything else, is reduced to a question of days and months and years,
will it not undergo somewhat of the degradation which now belongs to
the brief contracts of passion? Even those who might still be able to
feel all the holiness of love would, when they learned it was destined
to end in the agony of eternal separation, check themselves from
indulging a sentiment leading up inevitably to such a termination, just
as a man would turn from a path ending in a precipice.

Thus, I believe, the affections must irretrievably suffer from the
loss of the hope of immortality. So must, in a measure, the intellect
and the imagination, driven from the wider expanse back on that poor
fleshly life which is to be the end-all of man, and which must be
destined to assume an importance it has never possessed since our
race emerged from its brute and barbarian origin. Nor would our moral
life fail to suffer also very grievously, though in another way from
that which has been alleged. I think we can scarcely now estimate the
_minifying_ consequences of closing all outlook beyond this world,
and shutting up morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. As I
have said in my _Hopes of the Human Race_, it is not possible we should
continue to attach to virtue and vice the same profound significance,
when we believe their scope to reach no further than our brief span,
and justice to be a dream of our puny race never to be realized
throughout the eternal ages. In theory, right and wrong must come to
be regarded as of comparatively trivial importance; and, practically,
the virtue destined shortly to be extinguished forever must seem to
the tempted soul scarcely deserving of an effort. Life, after we have
passed its meridian, must become in our eyes more and more like an
autumn garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of good which
can never bloom before the frosts of death, and useless to eradicate
weeds which must be killed erelong without our labor. Needless to add
that of that dismal spot it may soon be said,--

  “Between the time of the wind and the snow,
  All loathsome things began to grow”;

and, when the winter comes at last, none will regret the white shroud
it throws over corruption and decay.

But it is when we come to think of humanity _as a whole_ that the
prospect of final extinction appears so unutterably deplorable, so
lame and impotent a conclusion for all the struggles, the martyrdoms,
and the prayers of a hundred generations who have gone to the grave in
hope and faith, _and perished there_. We English men and women have
been wont to think proudly of the vast geographical extension of our
country’s dominion, the grandeur of the Empire on which the sun never
sets; and the remark has often been made that there is not a petty
corporation or board in the kingdom whose proceedings are not, in a
degree, dignified by the sense of England’s greatness. The politicians
who have expressed a readiness to give up our Colonies have been
taunted, and justly, with lack of the nobler patriotism which regards
not only financial and administrative details, but the larger interests
and glory of what we have delighted to call our Imperial Race. But
what would be the loss to the _prestige_ of England of the severance
of Australia and Canada and India, compared to the loss to mankind of
that glorious empery of Immortality in which it has prided itself since
the beginning of history? Everything we have achieved and thought--our
literature, art, laws, kingdoms, churches--has all been wrought and
built up in this faith, which has given value to the soul of the
humblest child, and added grandeur to the most splendid deeds of the
hero and the martyr. With that hope disappears not only the consolation
of all bereaved hearts, but the very crown upon the head of humanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is no argument for the truth of any opinion that the disclosure
of its falsehood may have disastrous consequences. Nothing that has
been advanced in this paper proves, or has been offered as proof, that
there is a God or a life to come. The foundations for those beliefs
belong to a different order of considerations. But I think thus much
may be presumed to have resulted from our inquiry; namely, that their
value to the virtue and the happiness of mankind is so incalculably
vast that the work of demolishing them ought to be carried on, by men
professing to love their kind, in a very different spirit from that
which is generally exhibited by Agnostics. Even if their position be
true, and if they be morally bound to make known to the world that such
is the case, and to put an end to the baseless dream which has deluded
our race for so many thousand years,--even granting this, I think it
remains clear that their task is one to be undertaken only under the
sternest sense of duty, and with immeasurable mournfulness and regret.
I think that, instead of rejoicing over the discovery of “a spring in
the desert,” it behooves them to weep tears, bitter as ever fell from
human eyes, over the grave wherein they bury the Divine Love and the
Immortal Hope of our miserable race.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Moral Philosophy_, B. I., chap. vii.

[2] _Deontology_, p. 191.

[3] Miss Martineau says: “I saw with the pain of disgust how much
lower a thing it is to lead even the loftiest life from a regard to
the will or mind of any other being than from a natural working out of
our own powers” (_Autobiography_, Vol. II.). I must humbly confess I
have not come yet to see anything of the kind. Provided that the Being
to whose will we have regard is Supreme Goodness itself, it seems to
me infinitely _higher_ to strive to assimilate our will to His than to
“work out our own powers.”

[4] _Alone to the Alone_, p. 110, third edition.

[5] _E.g._, the following passage, which deserves to be reprinted a
hundred times, _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1877, p. 832: “We entirely
agree with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous
danger of materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they
have found an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will
ultimately win them anatomical solutions of man’s moral and spiritual
mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to
beguile many minds in a country like this, where social and moral
problems are still in their natural ascendant. But there is a subtler
kind of materialism, of which the dangers are real. It does not,
indeed, put forth the bestial sophism that the apex of philosophy is
to be won by improved microscopes and new batteries. But then it has
nothing to say about the spiritual life of men. It fills the air with
pæans to science, but it always means physical, not moral science. It
shirks the question of questions,--To what human end is this knowledge?
How shall man thereby order his life as a whole? Where is he to find
the object of the yearnings of his spirit?”

I am not concerned to defend the orthodox ideal of heaven against Mr.
Harrison’s strictures; but I cannot help entering a protest against his
sneer at the “eternity of the tabor” as “so gross, so sensual a creed.”
It seems to me it errs by an excessive and unreal spirituality. It was,
certainly, not a “gross” or “sensual” order of mind which deemed the
act of _adoration_ to be one wherein man could spend an eternity of
ecstasy.

[6] Pages 838, 839.

[7] _Autobiography_, Vol. II., p. 356.

[8] _Age of Science_, p. 49.

[9] _Autobiography_, pp. 333, 438.

[10] Harriet Martineau’s last letter to Mr. Atkinson, Ambleside, May
19, 1876, _Autobiography_, Vol. III., p. 453.

[11] I have heard of two very great living philosophers who thought
they had pretty nearly got rid of Final Causes, but who, in talking
together, found it hard to avoid assuming their existence. One of them,
in fact, in detailing his own observations and discoveries concerning
animals and plants, used so often terms implying that there was a
_purpose_ visible in natural arrangements that his friend stopped him,
and said, “Mr. ----, you are getting strangely _teleological_!”

[12] Or at least _our_ right from wrong; for, on Mr. Darwin’s showing,
there may, it seems, be a different right and wrong for creatures
differently constituted in other worlds, whose interests, being
different, will cause different “sets” of their brains toward the lines
of action useful to their tribes accordingly.

[13] The following letter appeared in the _Spectator_:--

SIR,--Indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, I last
night perused with profound interest Mr. Greg’s letter in your current
number, your own remarks thereupon, and also Mr. Greg’s generous
defence of his old friend, Harriet Martineau, in the _Nineteenth
Century_. As my eyes closed on the last paragraph of this article, I
seemed to behold a vision, which I shall take leave to describe to you.

Dives had just eaten a particularly plentiful dinner, and was standing
at the door of a pretty cottage in Ambleside. Lazarus, looking up at
him, said pitifully, “I perish with hunger.” Thereupon, Dives observed,
with great serenity: “Lazarus, I have had an excellent dinner. There is
not a crumb left. But I am quite content, and you ought to be the same.”

Poor Lazarus, however, instead of seeming satisfied, wailed yet more
sadly: “But I hunger, Dives! I hunger for the bread of life! I hunger
for human love, of which I had only begun to taste, when it was
snatched away. I hunger for justice, of which such scant measure has
been dealt me, and to millions like me. I hunger for truth, I hunger
for beauty, I hunger for righteousness, I hunger for a love holy,
divine, and perfect, which alone can satisfy my soul. I hunger, Dives!
I hunger, and you tell me there is not a crumb left of the rich feast
of existence, and bid me be content. It is a cruel mockery.”

Then Dives answered yet more placidly: “I never dream of wishing
anything were otherwise than it is. I am frankly satisfied to have done
with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I
utterly disbelieve in a future life.”

At that moment, my respected friend Mr. Greg passed by, and heard what
Dives was saying; on which, to my great surprise, he made the following
observation: “This is, unquestionably, the harder--_may it not also be
the higher_?--form of pious resignation, the last achievement of the
ripened mind.”

As for Lazarus, on catching Mr. Greg’s remark, he turned himself
painfully on the ground, and groaned: “I never heard before of anybody
being ‘_piously resigned_’ to the woes and wants _of other people_. La
Rochefoucauld was right, I suppose, to say, ‘_Nous avons tous assez de
force pour supporter les maux d’autrui_’; but, for my part, I should
not precisely call Dives’ satisfaction in his ‘noble share’ of the
feast, while I am doomed to perish starving, by quite so fine a name
as ‘pious resignation.’ Pray, Mr. Greg, with your large humanity, take
_my_ case into consideration, before you credit Dives with anything
better than stupendous egotism.”

Startled by the vehemence of poor Lazarus, I awoke.

  I am, Sir, etc.



HYGEIOLATRY.


The advance of physical science and the simultaneous retreat of
religious faith threaten, among their numerous consequences, to
introduce a new principle into morals. We may call it Doctor’s
Doctrine,--not because it is by any means the exclusive property of
the medical profession, or that all doctors can be supposed to hold
it, but because it is more rife among them and tells more directly on
their work than in the case of other men. It is indeed excusable for a
physician to attribute to bodily health, wherewith this new principle
is concerned, more importance than a poet, a preacher, or a soldier, is
likely to concede to it; and to this natural tendency is added, pretty
frequently perhaps, a tolerably defined materialism, which not merely
connects but identifies genius, happiness, and virtue with physical
soundness, and stupidity, misery, and crime with diseased organization.
With such views, and deprived of that vista of an eternal future
which alone gives to human things their true perspective, it is not
wonderful that many should come to regard bodily health as the _summum
bonum_, and thence to deduce the principle to which I desire to call
attention as an innovation in ethics. Reduced as nearly as possible to
a formula, that principle is as follows:

_That any practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily
health or tends to the cure of disease, becomes_, ipso facto, _morally
lawful and right._

I do not mean to imply that this principle has yet been clearly stated
by any of its adherents, or that they are even generally conscious that
they have adopted it. Possibly, many who have practically embodied
it in their conduct for years may repudiate it on seeing it defined
in words. Nevertheless, it may be traced as the substructure of
innumerable arguments on all manner of subjects of public and private
interest,--arguments which, if the principle were knocked from under
them, would instantly be seen to fall baseless to the ground. It is, in
short, the implied major term of a thousand syllogisms which we hear in
every debate and read in every magazine and newspaper.

Now, to measure the extent of the change which the adoption of this
Doctor’s Doctrine must introduce into ethics, it is only necessary to
cast a glance backward at the older view of the relation of duty to
health which has hitherto prevailed in the world, and been taught
pretty equally by moralists of every school, with the exception of
ascetics on one side, and pure hedonists on the other. That older
lesson--which we may for convenience call Divine’s Doctrine, since it
is the general teaching of every Protestant theologian and moralist,
may be summed up in the canon--

_Bodily health may not be lawfully sacrificed to our desire of pleasure
or fear of pain. It may and ought to be sacrificed to the health of our
souls, to the service of our fellowmen, or to fidelity to God._

In other words, it has been taught that the man who injures his health
by debauchery is guilty of a serious moral offence, and he who commits
suicide is guilty of a crime; but that, on the other hand, the man who
sacrifices his health in the performance of his duty as physician,
clergyman, or soldier, or in endeavoring to save a fellow-creature from
flood or fire, or who gives up life itself rather than forswear himself
or renounce his religious faith, or commit a base or unclean action,
is not only exonerated from any guilt, but is, in the highest degree,
virtuous.

On these lines, Christian civilization may be said to have been built
up. The natural selfishness of human nature has been counteracted by
the sense of duty; and if, now and then, needless and exaggerated
self-sacrifices without adequate reason have been made, and there was
room for brave Charles Kingsley to preach the claims of the natural
laws of life, a thousand times more often has the sense of duty enabled
men and women to perform alike the painful daily tasks whereby our
homes are made beautiful and sacred, and the occasional acts of heroism
wherewith human existence on earth is crowned and glorified.

It needs no words to prove to any one who reflects that two-thirds
of what we have been wont to reverence as homely virtue and all the
martyrdoms of history consist precisely in the voluntary sacrifice
of health, or of health and life together. To withhold from such
sacrifices the meed of moral admiration would be to reverse the
judgment of all the ages,--to prefer Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus to
Curtius and Regulus, and to treat as a deluded fanatic the apostle
who converted the Gentile world, but spent his years in perils by sea
and land amid prisons and scourgings. From the crucifixion of Christ
to the silent self-immolation of the poor consumptive girl who works
half-blinded through the winter’s night to support her aged mother, the
holiest and the sweetest things this earth has witnessed have been the
actions of those who counted not their lives dear to them, so long as
they could obey the law of truth, of righteousness, and of love.

But how is this recognition of the duty and glory of the sacrifice of
health and life at the call of every higher law to be reconciled with
the “Doctor’s Doctrine” that the interests of health are so supreme
that they themselves constitute the highest law, and render any
practice conducive to them _ipso facto_ lawful? Either we must admit,
according to the Divine’s Doctrine, that moral interests transcend
bodily interests, or we must hold, according to Doctor’s Doctrine,
that bodily interests transcend moral interests. There is no third
alternative. One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner or
later leaven society with its ennobling or else its debasing influence.
There are signs apparent that the Doctor’s Doctrine is already bearing
its proper fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience, absolved
by the authority of the priesthood of Science, men and women are
beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their
health is concerned, or where there may appear a chance of curing their
maladies in modes not hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of
the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation is exhibited.

Notably, it seems that the old courage of Englishmen is dwindling away.
Almost every month, cases come to light wherein men, even soldiers,
fail to stand by their comrades in danger; or wherein a crowd of fifty
people witness a child drowning in a shallow pond without an effort to
save it; or men who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot, leaving
the yet breathing victim dying unaided on the ground. There is even,
among young men, a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own
lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who remember the
joyous youthful fearlessness of their fathers, as something altogether
new and far indeed from pleasant to contemplate.

Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cowardice on a small scale
the only logical consequences of the new principle which are already
visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and systematic kind is another
result. The unanimous resolution passed by the great Medical Congress
in the year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection leads to
discoveries conducive to the cure of disease, and _therefore_ should
be sanctioned and left unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all
the fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and Schiff, and Goltz
and Bernard, and Paul Bert, should be freely permitted in England for
the sake of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science. Thus,
the whole medical profession in England stands committed to the demand
that the vice of cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately
unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated benefits to bodily
health.

So far indeed has Doctor’s Doctrine made its way that, whenever
any Bill concerning sanitary measures or public hygiene is before
Parliament, there is exhibited by the speakers in the House, and by the
journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to trample on personal
rights to an extent which would excite indignation, were any religious
or commercial interest in question. Men may spread the most deadly
_moral_ diseases, and teach doctrines which make virtue a mockery and
life a hopeless desolation, and scarcely an effort is made to stop
them. But let them threaten to spread bodily disease, and (unless they
be medical men, and thus authorized transmitters of infection) the most
stringent measures are adopted; and besides a Compulsory Vaccination
Act and the ever-infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, even while these
sheets are passing through the press, no less than three Bills are
before Parliament to make compulsory the notification of infectious
disease and segregation of infected persons. I am not now discussing
the merits of these Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the
spirit wherewith they are carried forward is quite an innovation in
English legislation. Health of body has been accorded the importance
which the--real or supposed--interests of the soul alone commanded two
centuries ago; and the tyranny of the priesthood of Hygeia threatens to
be as high-handed as ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.

Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden from the
knowledge of the majority of the laity, one remaining application
of the new principle of morals which more than all exhibits its
evil, its disastrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot write
plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe to be going on to a
frightful extent, both in this country and abroad. I can only quote
some observations made on it by an experienced minister of religion,
published in the _Modern Review_ for April, 1880:--

 Any one who will make a few casual inquiries will be amazed to
 discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute--men who
 are admitted to the friendship of good and unsuspecting women--offer
 counsel to young men, and even to boys, which strikes at the root
 of all morality, and indeed can proceed from nothing else than
 scepticism concerning the very possibility of morality itself. We
 speak what we know not of one, but of many, and what no medical man
 will deny, though many a medical man will revolt from the action of
 his fellow-practitioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of
 these purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will speak
 out on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn
 their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.

The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the
present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this
heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I
know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible
thing that is often said by doctors to young men,--that sin is good for
their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.”

But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There
have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men,
ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to
rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or
the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of
selfishness?”

It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did
evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace
to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with
selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor
of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with
sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice
did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s
orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to
health is _ipso facto_ morally right” is then, at one and the same
moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and
to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice.

Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can
be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health
of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such
means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for
which life was given.



PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.


The Rise and Progress of Buddhism in Europe may possibly form the
subject of a long chapter in the hands of a Mosheim of the twentieth
century. Hitherto, among all Western nations, not less than among
the Jews, there has been a tolerable unanimous consensus that life,
on the whole, is good, and that it is a pleasant thing for the eyes
to behold the sun. Happiness, like health, has been assumed to be
the normal condition of sentient beings; and misery, like disease,
to be exceptional and abnormal. The dead have been pitied, inasmuch
as they had passed away from so pleasant a world; more especially so
by those classic peoples who believed that the departed dwelt in an
insubstantial realm of shadows. No energetic Northern race, however,
contented itself with a twilight Hades, but built up in imagination
a Valhalla of feast and war for the worshipper of Odin; and, for the
disciple of the Druid, a glorious ascension from the darkness of
“Abred” to the light and felicity of “Gwynfyd.” Christianity, in its
perverted forms, Catholic ascetic and Calvinist, took away, indeed,
much of the joyfulness of the old heathen world, and made divines speak
of our earthly abode as a “city of wrath” or “vale of tears.” But they
were all the more urgent that men should fight the good fight, of which
the crown should be “_life_ everlasting” in the New Jerusalem; and, for
the majority of their flocks, even if this sinful planet remained, it
would appear at all times, a sufficiently desirable habitation to make
departure from it unwelcome.

Brought up in these common views, probably not one of us modern
Europeans has perused, for the first time, a philosophical statement
of the pessimist principles which underlie the vast religions of the
farther East, without a shock of astonishment. Individually, we may
have found our particular share of existence painful rather than
pleasurable. Disease, poverty, disappointment, bereavement, may have
embittered our years. But that any order of men, outside of lunatic
asylums, should lay down as a postulate, whereon to build religion and
morality, that Life is _per se_ an evil, and that, “whatever we have
been, ’tis something better not to be,” and proceed benevolently to
point out how we may, by much diligence, shake off not only this mortal
coil, but the entire burden of being, and arrive at the consummation
of nonentity,--this is an idea revolutionizing the order of our
conceptions, and as nearly incredible as any assertion dealing with
the vagaries of the human mind may be. Even yet, perhaps, some doubts
may legitimately linger as to whether the Buddhist creed, elsewhere
than in Nepaul (where it certainly does _not_ teach annihilation),
really intends by “Nirvana” to set forth the emptiness, rather than the
plenitude, of being. But that both Brahmin and Buddhist teachers have
systematically dealt with life as an evil rather than as a good, there
is, I apprehend, no question among competent inquirers. Here, then, are
two absolutely contrasted, fundamental conceptions of the totality of
human existence,--the Western, that life is a blessing; the Eastern,
that it is a curse. The European cries,--

  “’Tis life, not death, for which we pant,--
  More life, and fuller, that we want.”

He “shudders at destruction,” and better endures to face even the
tremendous threat of an eternal hell than to relax the tenacity of
his belief in an immortal consciousness. The Indian, on the contrary,
devoutly hopes that a life (or several lives) of self-abnegation, may
bring him to the bourne whence the traveller leaps into the gulf of
nothingness. Marvellous to add, as climax, there seems more likelihood
that a certain number of highly educated Germans, Frenchmen, and
Englishmen, may learn to sigh for Nirvana than that our missionaries
will induce an equal number of intelligent Singalese, Chinese, or
natives of Siam, to exchange their dreary anticipations for the hope of
heaven.

Not to exaggerate the importance of the “School” (if such it can be
accounted) of European Buddhists, we may, I think, properly afford to
its existence the attention due to a remarkable “fault” in the strata
of recent thought, and still more fitly ponder on the significant
tokens, scattered through current literature, of pessimist tendencies
quite other than the Western world has hitherto exhibited. Our modern
owls may be heard responding to each other in their turrets of the
_Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly Review_,--sometimes solemnly
and seriously, as when Mr. Morley wrote of “that droning, piteous
chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair which everlastingly saddens
the compassionating ear like the moaning of a midnight sea”; sometimes
with odious pretension and self-conceit when smaller men and foolish
women hoot and croak. In the brightest intellectual circles, many of
us have learned to listen with well-bred calmness to assertions from
smiling gentlemen and beautifully dressed ladies touching the general
wrongness of all things, and the particular wretchedness of human
nature, which, did we believe them, would cause us to rush from the
dinner-table and hang ourselves on the nearest lamp-post. In Germany,
matters have proceeded further; and Schopenhauer has been for some time
as much the fashionable Philosopher, as Wagner is the Musician, of the
age.

Of course there are various degrees and kinds of Pessimism everywhere
to be noted. There is the Philanthropic Pessimist who thinks his
fellow-creatures are merely wretched; and the Misanthropic Pessimist,
who thinks them both wretched and despicable. There is the Theistic
Pessimist, who still believes in God, but considers Him either to
be a “baffled Ormusd,” or else to look down from such heights on
human affairs as to regard them no more than we do the politics and
catastrophes of an ant-hill. And, finally, there is the Atheistic
Pessimist, who has abandoned the notion of an Intelligence at the helm
of the Universe, and believes only in a blind Force, irresponsible
for all the misery and crime of which He--or rather It--is the cause.
For all these varied kinds of Pessimism there seem to be two quite
distinct sources,--a good and noble, and a bad and base one. Each of
these sources leads to results having an outward apparent similarity,
and accordingly creates an illusory resemblance between the feelings
and expressions of persons whose characters and actions are wide as the
poles asunder. Let me endeavor to discriminate them.

It is, at the first glance, not a little remarkable that the
development of Pessimism to which I have referred should have taken
place in an age of almost unparalleled public prosperity. Probably
the sufferings caused by disease, by want, and by injustice, are now
at their minimum in the settled countries of Europe. And yet it is in
our time that men are now beginning formally to pronounce the evil of
the world to exceed the good, and to treat what their fathers deemed
the “beneficent order of Providence,” as too harsh and unjust a system
to be attributed to a benevolent Deity, or indeed to any intelligent
Being at all. It was not in the days of old oppression and tyranny,
of the great famines or the “Black Death,” that there was any such
revolt. When earth was much more like hell than it is at present, few
men entertained any doubt that there was a God in heaven. Now that
its worst wrongs are in course of alleviation or remedy, and that
there opens before our eyes a vista of almost illimitable progress for
our race in happiness and virtue, the whole stupendous scheme is not
unfrequently pronounced to be nothing better than a huge blunder.

The anomaly is certainly striking, and it may be carried further by
noting _who_ are those persons who find the world so bad a place.
As it is a prosperous age which has developed Pessimism, so it is
almost always prosperous people who are Pessimists. It is the rarest
thing possible to hear any expression of such ideas from the lips
of the suffering or the dying, or even from those who see their
beloved ones suffer and die. A hundred visits to sordid lodgings or
miserable hovels, to workhouses, jails, hospitals, asylums for the
blind or the incurably diseased, will scarcely afford us the chance
of catching a phrase indicating that the inmate of the dreary abode
thinks the world awry, and Providence to blame for it. We must pass to
pleasanter scenes,--to the haunts of the well-paid lecture-frequenting
artisan,--or the houses of the most cultivated and wealthy of the
middle and upper classes, palaces which calamity has never visited, and
where luxurious food, clothing, furniture, books, flowers, pictures,
music, are accepted as matters of course; and _there_ we may, not
improbably, be told that “none but bigots who voluntarily close their
eyes to the terrible realities of life can dream of calling the world
a happy place, or speak of its design as beneficent.” Sometimes there
occurs in the experience of a single day a contrast, almost ludicrous,
between the patience and gratitude manifested by some poor suffering
creature--perhaps dying of cancer on a pauper’s pallet--and the
expression of revolt and despair used by a cultivated gentleman who is
possessed of nearly every source of human enjoyment.

All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it at first appears.
There is a reason why our generation--the happiest and, we will hope,
perhaps, on the whole, the best the world has yet seen--should scan
the dread problem of Evil with other eyes than its predecessors; and
there are reasons, far from ignoble, why happy men and women should
find it harder to justify the ways of God to the miserable than those
miserable ones themselves to do so on their own account. In the first
place, our generation shrinks from the sight of physical anguish in
a way obviously unknown to our progenitors, who could ride gayly on
their daily errands under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening
weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated heads; and who could
feast and sleep in the chambers of feudal castles while under their
floors miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or perhaps expiring
amid the unutterable horrors of the _oubliette_. They could stand
by as unmoved spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles where
heretics and witches were burning, and shout applause when half-hanged
traitors were cut down from the rope to be drawn and quartered.
Oppressions and injustices done by the strong against the weak were
matters of every-day experience in every town, almost in every parish
and household. If such things seem to us calculated to provoke vehement
indignation and rebellion against every Power above or below which
sanctioned or permitted them, it must be asked _who_ was there in
those days likely to feel any similar indignation? The laws were not
more cruel than the men who made them, nor the legislators than the
mass of the nation. This being the case, how should those who thought
it right and just that their fellows should endure such tortures find
anything mysterious in the severest decrees of Providence? The order of
nature--harsh to the eyes of a John Stuart Mill or a Shelley--must have
been mild enough to those of the _habitués_ of autos-da-fé, or even let
us say to the nobles of France under that _ancien régime_ of which M.
Taine has given us the picture.

Another difference between our age and all preceding ones, which
specially touches this matter, is that in former times men thought
so little of the lower animals that their lot scarcely entered as an
item into calculation in the purview of the world. It was always the
enigmas presented by _human_ inequalities, sufferings, and wrongs,
which disturbed the doubter of old. His questions were, “Why do the
wicked flourish like a green bay-tree? Why do the righteous perish,
and none regardeth it? Why do the good and useful die in the flower of
their years, and the evil live long in the land? Why, in short, is not
that great _justice of heaven_ (in which man everywhere intuitively
believes, though his intuition has assuredly never been evolved by
experience), why is this not manifested in all the concerns of human
beings?” The Book of Job posed the solemn question of this earlier
doubt; and the Book of Revelation, by opening up to the gaze of men a
heaven where the poor and the persecuted will be forever blessed and
triumphant, afforded it a reply which, if far from complete, has yet
practically sufficed to stay the faith of Christendom. By the fresh
stress which Christianity laid on the doctrine of Immortality, and
the different relative importance which it assigned to the earthly
and to the heavenly life, it fulfilled, in a profounder sense, the
boast of the English statesman. It “called up a New World to redress
the balance of the Old.” The orthodox Catholic doctrine, that sin and
suffering are necessarily permitted by the Creator to allow scope for
moral freedom, may be made in a loose and general way to cover the
larger difficulties presented by the condition of all _moral_ beings,
for whose woes, if in any case unmerited, compensation is provided
hereafter. So long, then, as the destiny of our own human race alone
occupied any appreciable place in philosophy (and this was down to the
earlier part of this century) there was not much room for Pessimism
to find root among Western races. As to the brutes, few thought of
their sufferings at all; and those who did so dismissed them with the
doctrine that they shared the consequences of the Fall, which caused
“the whole creation” to groan and “travail together in pain.”

  “These emmets, how little they are in our eyes!
  We tread them to dust, and a troop of them dies,
        Without our regard or concern,”

as Dr. Watts cheerfully observed of the poor little insects, even
when he was calling us to remark their wondrous forethought and
industry. And larger animals more nearly akin to us were little more
“regarded” than the ants, till the widening circles of our sympathies
at last began to embrace the higher races of the brute creation; and
their sufferings then, as a necessary consequence, immediately took a
prominent place among the difficulties of theology. Geology first gave
a shock to the received explanation of their destiny by proving that
animals died painful deaths æons before “man’s first disobedience”
could have taken place, or man himself had existence on this planet;
and since those, now distant, days of Dean Buckland’s controversies,
the questions so opened out have pressed continually more upon the
thought of humane and religious men. The faith for which such men yearn
in our day is to be assured--

  “That not a moth with vain desire
  Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
  Or but subserves another’s gain.”

Not one of their grandsires, probably, ever entertained any similar
idea, but rather indulged a sublime contempt of the “poor Indian” whose
“untutored mind” permitted him to hope that his dog might share his
paradise.

These causes, then, I think,--namely, the growth of a finer sense of
pity for human woes, and the inclusion of the lower animals in the
scope of our sympathies,--suffice to explain in great measure the
reasons why some of the best of men in our generation feel the evil and
misery of the world, and display a leaning toward Pessimism unexampled
in harder times.

Nearly all religious men, looking back upon life, seem disposed to be
thankful _on their own account_, and to acknowledge that goodness
and mercy have followed them all the days of their lives. They have
not been “dealt with according to their sins,” but have many a time
been set free from nets of their own weaving, and helped out of the
mire and clay of vice and passion. Viewed from _within_, such appears
to be the common testimony concerning every good man’s career. It is
the inexplicable mysteries in the destinies of their neighbors, as
viewed _from outside_, and (as I have just said) the sufferings of
the harmless brutes, which causes such men now to doubt God and think
the world evil. Satan tempted the old Chaldæan by heaping afflictions
on his own person. He tries the modern Job more cunningly,--by giving
him, Asmodeus-fashion, a wide bird’s-eye view of the woes and wrongs of
other people.

       *       *       *       *       *

To descend from the general proclivities of our age to those of
individuals toward Pessimism, the same paradox may be observed. As
it is by no means altogether a bad sign of the times that there is
a keener consciousness afloat of the extent to which pain and wrong
prevail in the world, so neither is it by any means an indication of
a bad disposition when a man takes a dark view of human nature and of
life. Timon may be a noble fellow, or very much the reverse. We must
study him in both characters.

The noble Timon has started with an unusual share of generosity and
sympathy, and has become embittered because he has found other men
less good and true than himself. There is a certain average sincerity,
average unselfishness, average generosity and gratitude common among
men. He who has a little above the average of such fine qualities
meets on all sides disappointment. He finds people who display
selfishness, where, as a matter of course, he would have sacrificed
his own convenience or interest to theirs; people who are mean where
he would have been liberal, and suspicious where he was as open as the
day; and, finally, people who return his kindness with an ingratitude
inexplicable to his generous mind, rich in its own benevolence. What,
then, can happen to our Timon but to begin to mistrust those whom he
finds so unlike himself, to shut himself from them (and so, perhaps,
provoke their mistrust in turn), and very commonly to bestow much of
his disappointed affections on animals, on whose fidelity he finds
he can more surely depend, and whose wrongs at the hands of cruel
men still further deepen his disgust of his own kind? All this time,
another man, whose generosity and sincerity were, at starting, a little
below rather than above the average, has been passing through life
pleasantly astonished to find that his neighbors will show him more
kindness than (he is conscious) he would in their places display,
and rather more than less honest than he has reckoned to find them.
Thus, by a curious contradiction, the nobler-natured man is much
more liable than the baser to develop into the misanthrope; and it
is the lofty kind of scorn and bitterness properly belonging to him
which every Pessimist assumes, whether he truly feel it or not. It is
always _sous entendu_, in all tirades against human nature, that the
speaker is quite incapable of the weakness, folly, and wickedness he
condemns; and that, if he refers to the “dark side of Providence,”
_he_ would have managed the universe on better principles. But it is
extremely questionable whether we ought to give unlimited credit to
the genuineness of the indignation of those gentlemen who denounce the
evils of the world, but never stir a finger to remove them; and whose
personal enjoyment of the good things of life--fine houses, clothes,
dinners, pictures, bric-à-brac, pleasant conversation, and favorable
reviews of their books--has, manifestly, never been clouded by their
sombre sense of the dreadful destiny of mankind at large, nor their
appetite for applause been impaired by their profound conviction of the
folly and contemptibility of the people by whom it is offered.

A Timon, not at all of the nobler sort, seems to have been that great
light of recent German philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Schopenhauer
died childless, it will, I hope, hurt the feelings of no one if we
dissect his character candidly as that of the most prominent Pessimist
of the age. It will be instructive, I think, to learn the “notes” of
such a character,--to study, in short, of what kind of stuff (so to
speak) a Pessimist is occasionally made. In justice, we must carry in
mind that Schopenhauer accomplished a good deal in the philosophic
way, besides preaching Pessimism. He worked out a metaphysical system
of considerable depth and ingenuity,--one of the merits of which, at
all events, may be accounted that it is readily applicable to quite
other views than those of its author, respecting the nature and
destiny of mankind. With this formidable system, elaborated in his
great work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, we have, however
(happily for me, and probably for my reader), for our present purpose,
no concern whatever, but only with his actions and character, such as
Miss Zimmern, condensing the original German memoirs, sketched in a
life-like and transparently truthful manner in her Life of Schopenhauer.

The first “note” of Schopenhauer’s character, I should say, was his
HEARTLESSNESS. He seems scarcely to have loved anybody--in any sense
of the word worth considering--from his cradle to his grave. He made,
indeed, after his father’s death, much parade of respect for his
memory; but his filial piety, such as it was, stopped short at this
point. He disliked his sprightly, good-natured mother, and treated
her with singular insolence. As to friendship, he avowed his opinion
that “men of much intellectual worth, more especially if they have
genius, can have but few friends”; and he verified his own dictum
as a first-rate genius by having, so far as we may judge, no real
friends at all, though in later life, when he became celebrated, he had
numerous flatterers and disciples. Love was even less in Schopenhauer’s
way than friendship, unless we are to call by the title the passion
in its coarsest form. His opinion was that “the poetry of love is
mainly illusion, a glittering drapery meant to mantle the solemnity
of the thing as it really is” (p. 222); and his actions were quite in
accordance with this crass materialism. He led, his biographer states,
“no saintly ascetic life, nor did he pretend to this eminence.... He
despised women.... He was only different from ordinary men in that he
spoke of what others suppressed; and his over-zealous disciples, who
saw the god-like in all his acts, even dragged these to the light of
day.” His “careless dallying with beauty” (a euphemism, I presume, for
a loose life) but once brought him to wish for a permanent union. The
only woman whom he is recorded to have desired to marry was an actress,
who, at the time he was “enraptured with her,” was (fit position for
the wife of a great moral philosopher!) the recognized mistress of Duke
Carl August.

It has sometimes happened that men who have been lacking in those
family and friendly affections which are the most beautiful things in
human life have yet almost atoned for their deficiency by their fervent
“Enthusiasm of Humanity.” It is needless to say that Schopenhauer’s
character displayed an impartial negation of both orders of feeling.
He neither loved men nor women in particular, nor man in general. He
carefully defined himself to be not a misanthrope, only a despiser of
men (p. 83). The higher a man stood mentally, he thought, the lower
must his fellow-men appear. That it was the divine part of the greatest
to serve the least was the very last suggestion which would have
occurred to his mind. “I read,” he observed, “in the face of the Apollo
Belvidere, the just and deep displeasure felt by the god of the Muses
for the wretched obstinacy of the Philistines”; and, doubtless, Arthur
Schopenhauer figuratively drew himself up, and felt as like the Apollo
Belvidere as the corporeal circumstances of a German philosopher might
permit.

He was “penetrated with the conviction that he had been placed in a
world peopled with beings morally and intellectually contemptible, from
whom he must keep apart.” In his note-book (of rather a different cast
from that of Marcus Aurelius), he wrote this piece of self-counsel:
“Study to acquire an accurate and connected view of the utter
despicability of mankind in general, then of your contemporaries, and
of German scholars in particular.”

The second “note” in Schopenhauer’s character was his exceeding
COWARDICE. The modern Socrates would have deserted Athens at the
plague, and run away at Potidæa. With what poltroonery he would
have behaved, when required to drink the hemlock, it is impossible
to imagine. When his country was in the throes of war and political
crises, Schopenhauer always carefully moved out of the way. When there
was any kind of infectious disease prevalent, he fled to another city,
so that half his journeys were mere panic flights. He left Berlin for
fear of the cholera, Naples from alarm of the small-pox, and Verona
because he took it into his head that his snuff was poisoned. He
slept with loaded pistols close to his hand, and seized them at the
slightest noise. When the postman brought him a letter, he started.
He used a cup of his own to avoid the contagion which might lurk in
a glass at a public table. He labelled his valuables with deceptive
names, and wrote his business memoranda in Greek. As we have seen,
he was not bellicose. Only once in his life is it recorded that he
struck a blow, and that was at a woman. Finding an acquaintance of his
landlady presumptuous enough to hold a coffee-party in his anteroom,
Schopenhauer knocked her down with such violence that her right arm
was permanently disabled. Any other man, who had committed an act of
similar brutality in a moment of passion, would probably have hastened
to offer some compensation to his victim; but our philosopher, on the
contrary, hotly contested the poor woman’s suit for legal redress,
and quitted the town in disgust when he found himself compelled to
maintain her for life,--a period which (the non-sympathetic reader
will rejoice to learn) was extremely prolonged. The writer of an
exceedingly able and thoughtful review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in
the _Contemporary Review_, some years ago, observed that his unamiable
traits are best excused by his own candid avowal that he liked his
own mental physiognomy well enough, but his moral not at all. The
_unalterableness of the natural character_ was one of his favorite
dogmas. Certainly, the self-training by which many a naturally nervous
temperament has disciplined itself into courage, a selfish one into
generosity, and a morose or peevish temper into gentleness, was as
far as possible from Schopenhauer’s plan of life; and it opens to us
a rather alarming idea of the society of the future, if his followers
generally should resolve to adopt his facile principle, and assume that
their “natural characters,” whatever they may chance to be,--selfish,
false, dissolute, or cruel,--are “unalterable.” Such liberty, however,
is probably reserved for those who may claim to be “men of genius”
like their master, since he absolved himself from the ordinary duties
incumbent on meaner mortals by the help of a theory which we may call
the Philosopher’s Anti-nomianism. “He weighed his duties toward the
world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of
his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted
with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all
mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing
himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore
claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14]

But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of
Schopenhauer’s character. It was ARROGANCE. The philosophers whom the
world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite
quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness
above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless
ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as
the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers
who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to
the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and
conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood,
and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His
mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable
character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe,
the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet
engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of
things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you
utter _like oracles which none may presume to contradict_,--all this
depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world
and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This
little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge
what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his
arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect
with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and
a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of
scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy
at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct
the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity,
the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already
habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and
uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to
contradict.”

As he grew older, Schopenhauer learned to express his good opinion
of himself and his works with serenest equanimity. No more _naïf_
expressions of self-complacency have perhaps ever been penned than this
gentleman’s eulogiums on his own productions; as, for example, when he
writes to the publisher of his work that its “worth and importance are
so great that _I do not venture to express it_ even toward you, because
you could not believe me,” and proceeds to quote a review “which speaks
of me with the highest praise, and says that I am plainly the greatest
philosopher of the age, which is really _saying much less than the good
man thinks_.” “Sir,” he said to an unoffending stranger who watched him
across a _table d’hôte_ (where he habitually acted the part of local
“lion”), “sir, you are astonished at my appetite. True, I eat three
times as much as you, but, then, _I have three times as much mind_!”
(p. 159.) The reader who thinks that this speech could never have been
spoken except in jest and to produce a good-humored laugh has not yet
studied Schopenhauer’s saturnine temperament, to which a joke at his
own expense must have been quite inconceivable. To others, perhaps,
such barbarous intellectual insolence may seem a pardonable reaction
from the tone of self-depreciation (often exceedingly insincere)
which modern manners have enforced. But the old classic pride was
a very different thing from Schopenhauer’s aggressive arrogance,
wherewith he managed to blend gross and egregious vanity in quite a
novel combination. _On a les défauts de ses qualités_, but not usually
together two apparently contradictory defects. In our simplicity,
we should have anticipated that the man who considered himself the
greatest philosopher of his age, and talked about the “loneliness of
the heights” of intellectual grandeur, would have disdained to trouble
himself about such miserable things as common newspaper reviews. We
should have been, however, much mistaken in such a guess. “Schopenhauer
(we are told) began to read German newspapers, now that they wrote
about him. He caused the veriest trifle that contained his name to be
sent to him. He looked through all philosophical works for a mention of
himself. His intense contempt for women wavered, when he saw they could
feel interest in his works.” What would Aristotle’s “Magnanimous Man”
have said to this kind of littleness? “Honor, from any other person”
(than the good), “or on the score of trifles, he will utterly despise,
and likewise he will despise dishonor.”[16]

Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age.
For a _young_ author to be nervously excited about the reception of
his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the
confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of
ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot
apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation,
whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he
was yet a lad at college.

Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own
powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his
contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt
against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his
fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his
scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however
humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks _down_ on him, and thus
lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of
one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that
a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own
faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should
survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart
ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine
of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach
and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious
sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing.
The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,--the tender guidance of
human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion
and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and
goodness,--all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious
history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace
mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble
heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed
over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.

It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish,
vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he
paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the
perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality,
not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard
himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of
personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of
the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory
phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence;
and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy
selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction
between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows
as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his
own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings
as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole
world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so
irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own
use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We
gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the _Contemporary Review_,
“from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself
an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive
annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of
pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s
sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.

Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this, who, to do him
justice, made no pretence of practising what he taught, but said
openly, with cynical effrontery, “I preach sanctity, but I am no
saint,”[19] should have exercised any influence over his generation?
We read, however, that “his little band of disciples grew, and their
fanaticism reached a ludicrous point. One entreated him to found a
trust for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable of his works
should ever be altered; another had his portrait painted and placed in
a room like a chapel,”[20] etc.

This particular hero-worship is, to my thinking, so portentous that I
have been tempted thus to study it at some length. For thousands of
years, the human race has gone on adding one noble type to another in
its Pantheon,--the old heathen patriotism and heroism of a Theseus, a
Codrus, a Curtius, a Regulus, the modest wisdom of a Socrates, and the
stoic grandeur of a Marcus Aurelius. Christianity added yet saintlier
virtues to the ideal,--the charity, the purity, the religious fervor,
and martyr devotion of a whole army of saints. Yet all these “stars of
our mortal night” can, it seems, be obscured and forgotten; and men
who might have known and honored and followed them, like the Magi of
old, prefer to dance after such a flaring link-light as Schopenhauer
lifted over his own head! Observing this, and how his desolate
doctrine is gaining ground, and recognizing not a few of his personal
characteristics (more especially his arrogance) among other thinkers
nearer home, we are tempted to turn back fondly and regretfully to the
humblest old-fashioned goodness. Many of us had confidently trusted
that, when knowledge increased, wisdom and love would grow along with
it; that, without losing the sacred lessons of the past, mankind
would obtain still deeper insight into moral truth, and that phases
of character would appear more beautiful, more joyous, more perfectly
rounded in all the gifts and graces of humanity than the world yet has
seen,--the long-severed virtues of the hero and the saint combined at
last.

Alas! if Schopenhauers are to increase and multiply among us, these
hopes have been visionary, indeed! As his character emerges from
his biography, and stands clearly revealed to sight, memories of
many a man and woman of small account in the world rise up and range
themselves in our thoughts for comparison opposite to this great
philosopher. We remember those who, instead of flying from the terrors
of pestilence or war, have freely gone to meet them at the call of
benevolence or patriotism. We remember those who, instead of finding
their fellow-men “despicable,” have been lifelong loving friends,
faithful and tender husbands, devoted parents and children, ardent
philanthropists, sacrificing wealth and health and every enjoyment
that they might relieve and bless the most miserable of mankind,--the
criminal, the diseased, the vicious, and abandoned. We remember those
who, instead of resting self-satisfied with the “unalterableness” of
their own moral defects, have striven day and night, like the Pilgrim
fighting on his knees against Apollyon, to purify their hearts of every
stain, and, instead of arraigning Providence because their merits
were insufficiently rewarded, have blessed God most of all for their
afflictions. We remember all these, and also we remember the glory of
peace and patience on their pain-worn faces; and from the depths of our
souls comes the verdict that the dullest “Philistine” of them all was,
in the scale of true nobleness, worth a thousand pessimist philosophers.

Schopenhauer was, in truth, the best illustration which could be found
of the fallacy of the modern intellect-worship, the idolatry of mere
mental force, which is scarcely less stupid and ignoble than the
idolatry of the physical force of winds or waters. As baseness is more
contemptible in a king, and miserliness in a millionnaire, so are all
moral faults and littlenesses only more despicable when set on the
pedestal of genius. There are minds--and Schopenhauer’s was one of
them--whose brilliancy is that of a light-house. Its best use is to
disclose the cold and troubled sea, and the dreary rocks whereon the
unwary might make shipwreck.

       *       *       *       *       *

The question, “How far is Pessimism _true_, and how far does the
actual state of the world justify us in pronouncing life to be an
evil?” is far too vast and too solemn to be treated in this brief
paper. One remark only must be made in abatement of the wide-sweeping
denunciations of the present order of things in which Pessimists
habitually indulge. If we take count of their arguments, we shall find
that at least one-third are built on the assumption (which nothing in
genuine philosophy warrants) that the “hypothesis of a God” involves
the attribution to him not only of supreme but of _absolute_ power,
and generally of a power which includes self-contradictions. We
should sweep away no inconsiderable number of difficulties, if we
could get fairly out of reach of this ever-recurring fallacy, and
hear no more that God ought to make every creature absolutely happy,
and also absolutely virtuous; and illume the martyr’s glory, while
invariably extinguishing the martyr’s pile. And, again, another third
of the arguments of Pessimists rests on the yet more egregious and
fundamental mistake that suffering is always to be accounted an evil,
and may be lawfully weighed by them as such in holding the scales of
the world. The truth that it is “good to have been afflicted,” that
out of pain and grief and disappointment arise the purest virtues, the
tenderest sympathies, the loftiest courage, the divinest faith,--this
thrice-blessed truth, the very alphabet of spiritual experience, is,
as a rule, quite overlooked by great philosophers of the order of
Schopenhauer.

When all corrections and deductions are made, a residue of profound,
awful, inexplicable misery--misery of sinful man and misery of sinless
brutes--remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come, as in
the ages which are past, the dread “Riddle of the painful Earth.” We
must expect it to press upon us ever more and more in proportion as
our sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sympathies with
unmerited suffering grow more acute. Whether the shadow which that
mystery casts on religion will hereafter be in any degree relieved by
fresh lights obtained through sounder theories of Nature, it were
idle to guess. One thing seems clear enough; namely, that the spirit
wherewith some modern Pessimists approach the tremendous problem is one
which can never lead to its solution, and which in itself is calculated
to form no inconsiderable addition to the gloom of human existence.
The world, to all who enter it, is very much what their anticipations
make of it,--full of matter for joy and gratitude, or for repining and
discontent. It appears beautiful or dreary, according as they regard
it through the cloudless, childlike eyes of cheerful trust or through
the dim and distorting spectacles of doubt and despair. No generation
so miserable has yet seen the light as one which should be trained to
expect neither justice nor love from God, and to “cultivate a connected
view of the general despicability of mankind.”

After all, as Schopenhauer himself confessed (though he cared so
little to practise the lesson), character--or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold
would say, conduct--is the great matter to which all theories are
subordinate. “Moral goodness belongs to an order of things which is
above this life, and is incommensurable with any other perfection.”
There is a certain value in the old test whereby a tree is known
by its fruits. To such of us as have kept any foundations of faith
still standing, the presumption is surely enormous that the
intellectual system which naturally produces courage, trustfulness,
and loving-kindness, must be nearer to the Eternal Verities than
the blighting theory which brings forth such thorns and thistles as
deformed the character of the great Pessimist Philosopher of the
nineteenth century.


FOOTNOTES:

[14] _Life_, p. 80.

[15] _Life_, p. 32.

[16] _Ethics_, Book IV., chap. iii.

[17] _Life_, p. 208.

[18] _Contemporary Review_, February, 1873.

[19] _Life_, p. 108.

[20] _Life_, p. 240.



ZOOPHILY.


It is a comforting reflection in a world still “full of violence and
cruel habitations” that the behavior of men to domestic animals must
have been, on the whole, more kind than the reverse. Had it been
otherwise, the “set” of the brute’s brains, according to modern theory,
would have been that of shyness and dread of us, such as is actually
exhibited by the rabbit which we chase in the field and the rat we
pursue in the cupboard. In countries where cats are exceptionally
ill-treated (_e.g._, the south of France), poor puss is almost as timid
as a hare; while the devotion and trustfulness of the dog toward man in
every land peopled by an Aryan race seem to prove that, with all our
faults, he has not found us such bad masters after all. Dogs love us,
and could only love us, because we have bestowed on them some crumbs of
love and good-will, though their generous little hearts have repaid the
debt a thousand-fold. The “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” and “Grey Friar’s
Bobby” had probably received in their time only a few pats from the
horny hands of their masters, and a gruff word of approval when the
sheep had been particularly cleverly folded. But they recognized that
the superior being condescended to care for them, and their adoring
fidelity was the ready response.[21]

Two different motives of course have influenced men to such kindness to
domestic animals, one being obvious self-interest, and the necessity,
if they needed the creature’s services, to keep it in some degree
of health and comfort; and the other being the special affection of
individual men for favorite animals. Of the frequent manifestation of
this latter sentiment in all ages, literature and art bear repeated
testimony. We find it in the parable of Nathan; in the pictured tame
lion running beside the chariot of Rameses; in the story of Argus in
the _Odyssey_; in the episode in the _Mahabharata_, where the hero
refuses to ascend to heaven in the car of Indra without his dog; in the
exquisite passage in the _Zend-Avesta_, where the lord of good speaks
to Zoroaster, “For I have made the dog, I who am Ahura Mazda”; in the
history of Alexander’s hero, Bucephalus; in Pliny’s charming tales of
the boy and the pet dolphin, and of the poor slave thrown down the
Gemonian stairs, beside whose corpse his dog watched and wailed till
even the stern hearts of the Roman populace were melted to pity.

But neither the every-day self-interested care of animals by their
masters, nor the occasional genuine affection of special men to
favorite animals,--which have together produced the actual tameness
most of the domesticated tribes now exhibit,--seems to have led men to
the acknowledgment of moral obligation on their part toward the brutes.
As a lady will finger lovingly a bunch of flowers, and the next moment
drop it carelessly on the roadside or pluck the blossoms to pieces in
sheer thoughtlessness, so the great majority of mankind have always
treated animals.

  “We tread them to death, and a troop of them dies
  Without our regard or concern,”

cheerfully remarked Dr. Watts concerning ants; but he might have said
the same of our “unconcern” in the case of the cruel destruction of
thousands of harmless birds and beasts and the starvation of their
young, and of the all but universal recklessness of men in dealing with
creatures not representing value in money.

It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising that our forefathers
did not dream of such a thing as duty to animals. They learned very
slowly that they owed duties to _men_ of other races than their own.
Only on the generation which recognized thoroughly for the first time
(thanks in great measure to Wilberforce and Clarkson) that the negro
was “a man and a brother” did it dawn that, beyond the negro, there
were other still humbler claimants for benevolence and justice. Within
a few years passed both the emancipation of the West Indian slaves
and that first act for prevention of cruelty to animals of which Lord
Erskine so truly prophesied that it would prove, “not only an honor to
the Parliament of England, but an era in the civilization of the world.”

But the noble law of England--which thus forestalled the moralists
and set an example which every civilized nation, with one solitary
exception, has followed--remains even to this day, after sixty years,
still in advance of the systematic teachers of human duty. Even while
every year sermons specially inculcating humanity to animals are
preached all over the kingdom, nobody (so far as the present writer is
aware) has attempted formally to include Duty to the Lower Animals in
any complete system of ethics as an organic part of the Whole Duty of
Man.[22]

Without pretending for a moment to fill up this gap in ethics, I would
fain offer to those who are interested in the subject a suggestion
which may possibly serve as a scaffolding till the solid edifice be
built by stronger hands. We must perchance yet wait to determine what
are the right _actions_ of man to brute; but I do not think we need
lose much time in deciding what must be the right _sentiment_, the
general feeling wherewith it is fit we should regard the lower animals.
If we can but clearly define that sentiment, it will indicate roughly
the actions which will be consonant therewith.

In the first place, it seems to me that a sense of serious
responsibility toward the brutes ought to replace our
“lady-and-the-nosegay” condition of _insouciance_. The “ages before
morality” are at an end at last, even in this remote province of human
freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have imposed on us in the
solemn phraseology of divines and moralists, none is more absurd than
the doctrine that our moral obligations stop short where the object of
them does not happen to know them, and assures us that, because the
brutes cannot call us to account for our transgressions, nothing that
we can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve us from paying
for a pair of boots because our bootmaker’s ledger had unluckily been
burned would be altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain
enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we assume) without a
conscience or moral arbitrament must always be exonerated from guilt,
no matter what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial proceedings
against, and executions of, oxen and pigs in the Middle Ages for
manslaughter were unspeakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the
other side, is it to exonerate men, who _have_ consciences and free
will, when they are guilty of cruelty to brutes, on the plea not that
_they_, but the brutes are immoral and irresponsible.[23]

A moral being is not moral on one side of him only, but moral _all
round_, and toward all who are above, beside, and beneath him: just as
a gentleman is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peasant;
and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend and stranger. Just in
the same way, the “merciful man is merciful to his beast,” as he is
merciful to the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble quality
is specially tested by its exhibition in those humbler directions
wherein there is nothing to be gained by showing it and nothing to be
lost by contrary behavior.

There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Mrs. Jamieson’s
_Commonplace Book_ and elsewhere, which will recur to many readers
at this point: “The day may come,” he says, “when the rest of the
animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been
withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day
to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin,
or the termination of the _os sacrum_, are reasons insufficient for
abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor.... The
question is not, Can they reason? or Can they speak? but, Can they
suffer?”

Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling along a nobler road
of philosophy, laid down the canon which resolves the whole question.
Bishop Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a creature
being SENTIENT--_i.e._, capable of pain and pleasure--that rests
our responsibility to save it pain and give it pleasure. There is
no evading this obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by
the plea that they are not moral beings. It is _our_ morality, not
_theirs_, which is in question. There are special considerations which
in different cases may modify our obligation, but it is on such special
reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of the brutes (as the
old divines taught), that our exoneration must be founded; and the onus
lies on us to show cause for each of them.

The distinction between our duties to animals and our duties to our
human fellow-creatures lies here. As regards them both, we are indeed
forbidden to inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient.
But, as regards the brutes, our duties _stop_ there: whereas, as
regards men, they being moral as well as sentient beings, our primary
obligations toward them must concern their higher natures, and include
the preservation of the lives which those higher natures invest with a
sanctity exclusively their own. Thus, we reach the important conclusion
that the infliction of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards
the lower animals, but _not_ the supreme offence as regards man. Sir
Henry Taylor’s noble lines go to the very root of the question:--

  “Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare
  Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.
  Are theirs less sad and real? _Pain in man
  Bears the high mission of the flail and fan;
  In brutes, ’tis purely piteous._”

Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an
evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to
death, a painless one--so far from being the supreme evil to them--is
often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain
physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to
save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’s
_moral_ welfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can
injure _it_ (such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the
practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it
should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present
Bishop of Winchester has put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he
said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which
we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his
body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for
considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”

Of course, the ground is cut from under us in this whole line of
argument by those ingenious thinkers who have recently disinterred
(with such ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate) Descartes’
supposed doctrine, that the appearance of pain and pleasure in the
brutes is a mere delusion, and that they are only automata,--“a
superior kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without
pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as
a bee simulates a mathematician.” If this conclusion, on which modern
science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it follows, of course,
that we should give no more consideration to the fatigue of a noble
hunter than to the creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the
emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more serious than those
we bestow on a dog who dies of grief on his master’s grave. Should it
appear to us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does to me),
that there is quite as good evidence that dogs and elephants reason
as that certain physiologists reason, and a great deal better evidence
that they--the animals--feel, we may perhaps dismiss the Cartesianism
of the nineteenth century, and proceed without further delay to
endeavor to define more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to
sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start with a distinct sense
of some degree of moral responsibility as regards them. What shape
should that sense assume?

We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves in all manner
of antipathies to special animals, some of them having, perhaps,
their source and _raison d’être_ in the days of our remote but not
illustrious ancestors,

  “When wild in woods the noble savage ran”;

or those of a still earlier date, who were, as Mr. Darwin says,
“arboreal in their habits,” ere yet we had deserved the reproach of
having “made ourselves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds
to our brain.” Other prejudices, again, are mere personal whims,
three-fourths of them being pure affectation. A man will decline to sit
in a room with an inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of
a mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at the _rencontre_ than
she. I have known an individual, otherwise distinguished for audacity,
“make tracks” across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating
cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly prejudices
are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not vulgarisms, and should be
treated like exhibitions of ignorance or childishness. For our remote
progenitors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling for
existence with the cave bear and the mammoth in the howling wilderness
of a yet uncultured world, there was no doubt justification for
regarding the terrible beasts around them with the hatred which comes
of fear. But the animal creation, at least throughout Europe, has been
subdued for ages; and all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance
in a vanquished province. Their position as regards us appeals to
every spark of generosity alight in our bosoms, and ought to make us
ashamed of our whims and antipathies toward beings so humble. Shall man
arrogate the title of “lord of creation,” and not show himself, at the
least, _bon prince_ to his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask
that, even toward wild animals, our feelings should be those of royal
clemency and indulgence,--of pleasure in the beauty and grace of such
of them as are beautiful; of admiration for their numberless wondrous
instincts; of sympathy with their delight in the joys of the forest and
the fields of air. Few, I suppose, of men with any impressionability
can watch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer’s morning without
some dim echo of the feelings which inspired Shelley’s Ode. This is,
however, only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which might be
almost universal, and which, so far as we learn to feel it, touches all
nature for us with a magic wand.

If we are compelled to fight with them, if they are our natural
enemies and can never be anything else, then let us wage war upon them
in loyal sort, as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava;
and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chivalrously or at
least mercifully. This, indeed (to do justice to sportsmen, much as
I dislike their pursuit), I have always observed to be the spirit of
the old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross slaughtering of
_battues_ and despicable pigeon-matches were heard of in the land.

As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did we read them aright,
are not so much those of petitioners for mercy as of rightful claimants
of justice. We have caused their existence, and are responsible that
they should be on the whole happy and not miserable. We take their
services to carry our burdens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard
our homes and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we accept the
fondest fidelity and an affection such as human beings scarcely give
once in a lifetime. They watch for us, work for us, bear often weary
imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not seldom mourn for us
with breaking hearts when we die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting
by and watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes’ toil and love,
can we suppose he would treat it as merely a piece of _generosity_ on
our part, which we were free to leave unfulfilled without blame, that
we should behave considerately to such an humble friend, supply him
with food, water, and shelter, forbear to overwork him, and end his
harmless life at last with the least possible pain? Would he not demand
it of us as the simplest matter of _justice_?[24]

For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and believe that the
relationship between man and the brutes is not only one of similarity,
but of actual kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural that
this new view should have brought forth a burst of fresh sympathy and
tenderness. If our physical frames, with all their quivering nerves and
susceptibilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only the four-footed
creature’s body a little modified by development; if our minds only
overlap and transcend theirs, but are grown out of those humbler
brains; if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and sense of
justice, be only their affection and fidelity and dim sense of wrong
extended into wider realms,--then we bear in ourselves the irresistible
testimony to their claims on our sympathy. And if, like so many of the
disciples of the same new philosophy, we are unhappy enough to believe
that both man and brute when laid in the grave awake no more, then,
above all, it would seem that this common lot of a few pleasures and
many pains, to be followed by annihilation, would move any heart to
compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe in which these souls
believe themselves to stand, how base does it seem to turn on the
weaker, unoffending beings around them, and spoil their little gleam of
life and joy under the sun!

Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that some of the leading
apostles of this philosophy, and even its respected author himself,
should in one and the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is
actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is right and proper to
treat apes after the fashion of Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier.
These gentlemen, as regards the poor _quadrumana_, are rather “more
than kin,” and rather “less than kind.”

For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold
faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons
for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian
religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and
Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes;
that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St. Francis, to
connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and
to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine
on the subject of duty toward them,--is a paradox which would need
much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever
name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional
tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures
which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent
truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who
“prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.”
Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our
own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to
creatures who _have never done wrong_ is always found inexpressibly
touching. To be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems
just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our
little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn.
Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The
only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is,
as the very word suggests, the feeling of _humanity_: or, as we may
interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate
fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so
far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so
far as it is in our power to make them happy.

There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us
to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards
animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them
all the better.[25] We assuredly need not, because we become humane,
sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist
parable so beautifully rendered in the _Light of Asia_, where “Lord
Buddha,” in one of his million lives, gives himself, out of pity, to
be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and

          “The great cat’s burning breath
  Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.”

We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made
the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:--

  “But all killing insects and gnawing worms,
  And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
  She bore in a basket of Indian woof
  Into the rough woods far aloof,--

  “In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
  The freshest her gentle hands could pull
  For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
  Although they did ill, was innocent.”

This is poetry not meant for practice, and yet even these hyperboles
carry a breath as of Eden along with them. Of Eden did I say? Nay,
rather of the later Paradise for which the soul of the greatest of the
prophets yearned, where “they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy
mountain.”

I will not attempt here to define how the sentiment of humanity to
the brutes, thoroughly ingrained into a man’s heart, would make him
decide the question of field sports. My own impression is that it would
lead him to abandon first, and with utter disgust, such wretched
amusements as pigeon-matches and _battues_ of half-tame pheasants;
and, later, those sports in which, as in fox-hunting and coursing
and duck-shooting, the sympathy of the sportsman with his hounds and
horse, or his greyhound or retriever, is uppermost in his mind, to the
exclusion of the wild and scarcely seen object of his pursuit. In nine
kinds of such sports, I believe, out of ten, it is rather a case of
ill-divided sympathy for animals than of lack of it which inspires the
sportsman; and not many would find enjoyment where neither horse nor
dog had part,--like poor Robertson, of Brighton, sitting for hours in a
tub in a marsh to shoot wild duck, and counting the period so spent as
“hours of delight!”

But there is one practice respecting which the influence of such a
sentiment of humanity as we have supposed must have an unmistakable
result. It must put an absolute stop to vivisection. To accustom
ourselves and our children to regard animals with sympathy; to beware
of giving them pain, and rejoice when it is possible for us to give
them pleasure; to study their marvellous instincts, and trace the
dawnings of reason in their sagacious acts; to accept their services
and their affection, and give them in return such pledges of protection
as our kind words and caresses,--to do this, and then calmly consent
to hand them over to be dissected alive, this is too monstrous to be
borne. _De deux choses l’une._ Either we must cherish animals--and
then we must abolish vivisection--or we must sanction vivisection;
and then, for very shame’s sake, and lest we poison the springs of
pity and sympathy in our breasts and the breasts of our children, we
must renounce the ghastly farce of petting or protecting animals, and
pretending to recognize their noble and lovable qualities. If love and
courage and fidelity, lodged in the heart of a dog, have no claim on us
to prevent us from dissecting that heart even while yet it beats with
affection; if the human-like intelligence working in a monkey’s brain
do not forbid (but rather invite) us to mutilate that brain, morsel
by morsel, till the last glimmering of mind and playfulness die out
in dulness and death,--if this be so, then, in Heaven’s name, let us
at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts
of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred
Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world.

The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand
advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception
of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable
for purposes of research,”--a mechanism, in short, of nerves and
muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a
pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which
thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its
followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the
opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal
in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We
cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower
must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no
question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture,
or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually
effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility;
or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over
a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called
“baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely
phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious,
sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless
matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It
is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely
taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into
a misfortune, which we denounce as a brutal misconception of the
relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter
anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred
years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no
claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing
them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries.
But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the
legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless
wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s
Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back
upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance
of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps
wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement
of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the
decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to
sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded
century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of
human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in
humanity” (pp. 195, 196). As I have said ere now, the battle of mercy,
like that of freedom

                        “Once begun,
  Though often lost, is always won.”

Even should all the scientific men in Europe unite in a resolution
that “vivisection is necessary,” just as all the Dominicans would
have united three hundred years ago to resolve that autos-da-fé were
“necessary,” or as all the lawyers and magistrates that the _peine
forte et dure_ was “necessary,” or as the statesmen of America
did thirty years ago that negro slavery was “necessary,” yet the
“necessity” will disappear in the case of the scientific torture of
animals as in all the rest. The days of vivisection are numbered.


FOOTNOTES:

[21] A touching story of such sheep-gathering was recently told me on
good authority. A shepherd lost his large flock on the Scotch mountains
in a fog. After fruitless search, he returned to his cottage, bidding
his collie find the sheep, if she could. The collie, who was near
giving birth to her young, understood his orders, and disappeared in
the mist, not returning for many hours. At last, she came home in
miserable plight, driving before her the last stray sheep, and carrying
in her mouth a puppy of her own! She had of necessity left the rest of
her litter to perish on the hills and in the intervals of their birth
the poor beast had performed her task and driven home the sheep. Her
last puppy only she had contrived to save.

[22] The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is
the charming and eloquent volume, _Rights of an Animal_, by E. B.
Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author
has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his
demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle
that cruelty to an animal is an offence _per se_, and that it is not
necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this
respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably
transcends the French _Loi Grammont_, which condemns only cruelty
exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson
justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely
painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that
delusion, _cadit quaestio_.

[23] As a recent example of this doctrine, see an article in the
_Fortnightly Review_ for Feb. 1, 1882. “Is it not,” the author says,
“the very basis of ethical doctrine(!) that the moral rights of any
being depend on its ethical nature?”

[24] I have endeavored elsewhere to work out this hypothesis of an
umpire between man and brute, as a method of helping us to a solution
of the problem of what are and what are not lawful actions on our parts
toward animals. The reader who may be interested in the inquiry may
obtain my pamphlet, _The Right of Tormenting_, price 2_d._, at the
office of the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1
Victoria Street, Westminster.

[25] In fact, many men who pursue such trades, notably butchers,
are genuinely humane, and do their best to get through their work
in the most merciful way. Several of them have recently expressed
warm satisfaction on obtaining Baxter’s mask, whereby oxen may be
instantaneously killed without the chance of a misdirected blow. The
mask is to be obtained from Mr. Baxter, Ealing Dean, W.



SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE.


The world has done wrong to laugh at the old lady who reproved her
sailor grandson for “telling her such a scandalous fib as that he
had seen a fish fly in the air,” but restored her confidence to the
hopeful youth when he proceeded to narrate how he had picked up a wheel
of Pharaoh’s chariot on the Red Sea shore. Practically, we all jump
easily at beliefs toward the level of which we have already climbed
by previous knowledge (or previous prejudice, as it may chance), and
refuse, donkey-wise, to budge an inch toward those which happen to be
on a plane above our preconceived notions of what either is or ought
to be. It is this propensity, of course, which makes the most baseless
calumny mischievous by paving the way for the next slander against its
object. And it is it, also, which grants interminable leases of life to
false systems of physics and religion by securing a welcome for every
fiction and fallacy which at any time may seem to favor them, and
closing the door in the face of truths which militate against and might
explode them.

A curious study of the “Grammar of Assent,” as used by the majority of
mankind in the matter which comes nearest to their own business and
bosoms, might, I think, be made by unearthing the preconceived notions
and preparatory ideas which must needs exist as regards the healing
art, and which can have enabled doctors confidently to prescribe, and
patients meekly to accept, the horrid and shocking remedies in use
from the earliest period,--remedies of which it is a mild criticism
to say that they were worse than the diseases they professed to cure.
Had the minds of men concerned with medical inquiries been really
free from antecedent convictions,--blank sheets of paper whereon
Nature could have written down her facts, which experience might have
read and collated,--it is clear enough that good diet, exercise,
and cleanliness, and the occasional use of simple preparations of
herbs, would early have constituted the primitive and sound rules of
medical science, to be supplemented, as time went on, by discoveries
of the therapeutic value of more rare vegetable substances and of a
few minerals. Never could practical observation, by any possibility,
have suggested that it would be beneficial to a sick man to make him
swallow potable gold or powdered skulls, or a bolus of decomposed old
toads and earth-worms. The _un-_“scientific use of the imagination” can
alone have dictated these and scores of no less absurd and obnoxious
prescriptions, prompted by some _a priori_ theory of what _ought_,
antecedently to experience, to be suitable for the cure of disease, and
“in accordance with the eternal fitness of things.”

What, then, were the notions in obedience to which these marvellous
remedies were ordained? If we exclude from present consideration
all the really useful therapeutic agents, discovered doubtless by
genuine experience and recorded by the ancient physicians, Galen and
Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Avicenna, and all the rest, and also set
aside those which, though not really useful, might have been readily
mistaken for being so by imperfect early observation, we find the
immense residue of absurd and monstrous recipes to fall into two
categories; namely, the remedies which were exceedingly costly and the
remedies which were either very painful or very disgusting. In other
words, a large part of the medical science of all past ages proves
that the doctors and their patients valued remedies _in proportion
to the price to be paid for them_, either in money or in suffering.
In short, they adopted freely the Doctrine of Sacrifice as applied
to medicine. Considering that Nature nearly always proceeds on
precisely the opposite track,--that she does not ask us “to do some
great thing,” but, like the true prophet, only bids us “wash and be
clean”; makes the cheapest and commonest things the most wholesome,
and affords us normally, by our instinctive desire or loathing, the
surest test of the fitness or unfitness of food for our use,--there
is something exceedingly curious in the all but universal assumption
of mankind that it was only necessary to find something particularly
rare and expensive, or else something extraordinarily revolting, to
obtain a panacea for all the woes of mortality. It was ridiculous (in
the estimation of our forefathers) to suppose that a great noble or
king should dissolve pearls in his drink or swallow liquid gold, and
yet, forsooth, be no better after all than a poor wretch who could
afford himself only a little milk or water. Still more incredible was
it that a man should submit to some agonizing scarification or actual
cautery, or should compel himself to bolt some inexpressibly disgusting
mess which his doctor had taken a year to concoct and distil through a
score of furnaces and retorts, and yet, when all was over, receive no
more benefit than if he had endured no hardship, or had only drunk some
cowslip julep or herb tea. Such tame and impotent conclusions could
not be received for a moment. If patients would only _pay_ enough or
_suffer_ enough, they _must_ be cured. This, it really seems, was the
underlying conviction of men of old, on which half the therapeutics of
past times were unconsciously based.

Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those
principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other
of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or
nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we
have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on
the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that
inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither
doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine.

The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind of
_haute médecine_ necessarily of limited application. With the exception
of the great search for the _Aurum Potabile_ in the Middle Ages, there
are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in
which the patient _payait de sa personne_. Everybody could be scarified
or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients
who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases
of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grains of
that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved
pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against
melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires
for starting eyes, or St. Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other
troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age.
Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number
of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use
for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone.
Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive
of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against
epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26]
Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe
than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of
ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed
universally, useful as gold. He who could discover how to make men
actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing
less than the secret of immortality. The _Aurum Potabile_, or noble
“Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and
“Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to
be used in most diseases, _especially in chronick_.” By itself alone,
indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,--a
conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real
value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for
the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus
attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to
idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.

In an earlier and truer-hearted age, Paradise was believed to be
a garden, and it was the Fruit of a Tree of Life which would make
men live forever. But when, as Gibbon satirically observes, in the
dissolution of the Roman world, men coveted only a place in the
Celestial City of gold and pearl, the secret of immortality was sought
(not inappropriately) at the bottom of a Rosicrucian crucible.

There was, it must be confessed, a profound _vulgarity_ in this whole
system of costly medicine, which it would be flattering to ourselves
to think we had in our day quite overpassed and discarded. But in
truth, though we are not wont to dissolve pearls or powder emeralds or
drink solar or even lunar “Oyl,” it may be fairly asked whether we do
not contrive to melt down a handful of sovereigns in every attack of
illness to very little better purpose than if we had simply given them
to an old alchemist to put in his furnace and make for us an elixir
of life? What are these long rows of items in our druggist’s bill for
draughts, embrocations, liniments, blisters, gargles, and what not,
represented, when the housemaid clears our room for convalescence, by a
whole regiment of quarter-emptied phials and pill-boxes on our table?
What are those considerable drafts recorded in our check-book, not only
for the attendance of our customary medical adviser (which might be
reasonable), but for the visits of the eminent consulting physician,
brought down, perchance, fifty or five hundred miles to look at us for
five minutes while we lay speechless in our fever? Did anybody ever
use one-half, or even one-third, of the expensive medicines ordered in
every illness from the pharmacy day after day? Or did anybody find a
medical man, in view of a patient’s straitened circumstances, telling
his anxious friends that the remains of the last bottle of his physic
would answer as well as a new one, or that they might readily change
it, by adding a few drops of some fresh ingredient, instead of ordering
another six ounces from the chemist, to be set aside in its turn, half
used, to-morrow? Or (what is still more to the purpose) did anybody
ever hear of a case wherein the physician summoned for consultation
(possibly at enormous cost) has given his honest opinion that the
regular medical attendant of the patient has mistaken his case, and
that the treatment ought to be altogether reversed?

The same idea has been at the bottom of our proceedings and those of
our ancestors which we ridicule; namely, that if we do but spend money
enough, a cure _must_ follow.

But, as I remarked before, the notion that costliness of itself is a
test of medicinal virtue has been, necessarily, far less prolific of
results than the kindred idea that by the pain and disgust entailed
on a patient might be estimated the value of the remedy applied to
his disease. As to disgust, it would really appear as if some ancient
prophets of the healing art, some Phœbus Epicurios or Æsculapius, must
have laid down as a principle for the selection of health-restoring
compounds and concoctions, “By their nauseousness ye shall know them.”
Else were the recipes for all the hideous, abominable witch-broths,
wherewith the older books of medicine are replete, quite unaccountable
on any theory of human sanity. Many of them (which weak-souled patients
have swallowed by the ounce and the pound) were of a kind which it
is quite impossible to quote; nor can we wonder that, as Plato tells
us, the Athenian physicians were wont to engage the great rhetorician
Gorgias to accompany them and persuade their patients to take their
prescriptions. Let the following, however, be taken as moderate
examples:--

 “Take what Animal soever thy fancy best liketh, and thou thinkest
 most fit to prepare. Kill it and take it (but separate nothing of
 its impurities, as feathers, hoofs, hairs, or other heterogeneous
 substance), bruise all in a large and strong mortar to a fit
 consistency, put it then into a vessel for putrefaction, and put
 upon it of the blood of animals of the same kind so much as may well
 moisten it, or, which is better, cover it all over. Shut close the
 vessel and set it to putrifie, _in fimo equino_, for forty dayes that
 it may ferment.” (The result is to be distilled, calcined, rectified,
 and distilled over again and again, “seven times to separate its
 phlegme,” till finally) “thou hast a pleasant [!!], safe, and noble
 Animal Arcanum to fortifie the animal life, and restore health and
 vigor to its languishing spirit, till God doth call for its final
 dissolution and separation.”--_Aurora Chymica_, p. 6.

This was bad enough, but a great advance (in the line of sacrifice)
was made when to the mere odiousness, we may say beastliness, of the
dose _per se_ could be added the horror of eating what had once formed
part of a human body,--in short, of cannibalism. The _ordonnances_
which follow really seem to have a connection with ancient idol-rites
of human sacrifice, and possibly (had we means of tracing them) might
be fathered on the earliest worshippers of Hesus or of Odin. The
seasons of the year (spring and autumn) wherein the victim must die
(very carefully defined in these prescriptions) seem to give color
to this view. Down to the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, Helps
tells us, the Aztecs used yearly to slay a young man in spring that
the nobles might eat his heart as a sort of sacrament. Anyway, it is
rather startling to find that just two hundred years ago in London the
physician in ordinary to the King recommended cannibalism to Englishmen
without the smallest apology or hesitation.

 _A Mummiall Quintessence._

 Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about
 the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken
 from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and
 pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days.
 Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with
 spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no
 dust or other filth may fall upon it. Be sure you often turn it,
 and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for
 use.--_Aurora Chymica_, chap. iii.

A still more efficacious remedy, “producing wonderful effects both
in preserving and restoring health,” may be obtained by distilling,
filtering, calcining, and coagulating this “Mummiall” till it have
a “saccharine taste,” when the “matter may be left of the thickness
or consistency of honey, which must be kept in glass vessels closely
shut.” (_Ibid._, p. 8.)

If the “sound young man” should have been killed in the spring instead
of in “the middle of August,” the learned Dr. Bolnest is not without a
remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for a “Mummiall,” but
his blood may be made into a “very high balsam, exceeding much the
powers and virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in time of
pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all sorts.”

 “Take of such blood a large quantity. Gather in glass vessels. Let it
 settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish humor, which
 separate by wary inclination. Take now of this concrete blood five
 or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve pints of spirits of wine.
 Shake them well together, and let it digest six or eight days in warm
 ashes.” Distil. Add the fixed salt drawn out of the _caput mortuum_ of
 the blood by “calcination,” “solution,” “filtration,” “coagulation,”
 often repeated; “and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood”
 (p. 10).

When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy
is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us
devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is
necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when
Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini
or Virgo.”

After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick
Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried
fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint,
appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is
the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or
July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined,
and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or
treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers
and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.”

The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual
of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every
absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward
Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George
Duke of Buckingham, and described on the title-page as “Shewing a
Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for
a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and
pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of
Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall
Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal
“to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “_in some
measure_ in time of need trust to,” because, adds Dr. Bolnest candidly,
“I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain
effects I could have desired.”

These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions
in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro
Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really
admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions
for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and
saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as
a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers.
Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s
skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s
legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with
a poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For
the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended,
of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording
us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was
approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very
recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly
classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple
medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies,
of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the
cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!),
the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several
filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (_vide_
the curious little black-letter volume, _Le Grat Albert_, in the
British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby
they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of
the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of
each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a
repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a
human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing
plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasant receptacle.
On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt
near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially
efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a
cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper
application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva
are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of the _Natural History_.
“Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible
cure for ophthalmia,--a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy
scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck
in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears.
The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so
valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia
made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of
athletes, which, “compounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific,
and expletive nature.” If any lady desire to cultivate an interesting
and pallid appearance, she ought to imitate Drusus, who drank goats’
blood to make it appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him. For
melancholy (an affection which seems to have given great concern to
the old doctors), Dioscorides recommends black hellebore held in the
mouth,--certainly a recipe on homœopathic principles, since a mouthful
of hellebore would scarcely naturally serve, like the Psalmist’s wine
and oil, either to make glad the heart of man or to give him a cheerful
countenance. A better remedy for the same melancholy is “broth of old
cock,” our Scotch friend cockaleekie.

For some unexplained reason, two only among the ills to which flesh is
heir, and they among the most serious,--frenzy and inflammation of the
stomach,--seem to have escaped from the dread _régime_ of Sacrificial
Medicine, and indeed are treated with surprising lenity. Dioscorides
thinks that frenzy can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and
considers that the patient suffering from gastritis should have a
plaster of roses applied to the seat of his disease!

Besides the “exhibition” of nauseous and revolting draughts,
boluses, and pills, the system of Sacrificial Medicine has at all
times commanded many other ingenious resources for the creation of
unnecessary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons and their
friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked patient were unmanageable in
the matter of some particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be
induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-way diet, and potions
repeated at stated intervals, till faith or life succumbed in the
struggle. One old physician, Ætius, in this way prescribed for the gout
a separate dietary for every month of a whole year. Another, the great
Alexander of Tralles, ordained three hundred and sixty-five potions,
so arranged as to furnish out a course for two years; whereupon Dr.
Friend, the learned author of the _History of Physick_, remarks that
“his receipts were as good as any of those which our new pretenders to
physick make use of,” but adds the discouraging dictum, “After all,
gout is a distemper with which it were best not to tamper.”

Then there were fearful tortures in the way of excoriations, of which
St. John Long’s famous remedy was a notable example,--blisters,
cauteries, and setons, too unpleasant to dwell upon. Scarification was
a comparatively merciful form of these inflictions. It was practised,
according to Prosper Albinus (_Hist. Phys._, p. 17), in the following
agreeable manner: “First, make a strait [tight] ligature on the leg;
then rub the leg below it, put it into warm water, and beat _till it
swells_, and so scarify”! Something worse than this was practised
down to the present generation in the case of wounds. It is in the
writer’s recollection that an unhappy groom who had lost a piece of
flesh out of the calf of his leg sought assistance after his accident
from a motherly old cook, the medical adviser in ordinary of the whole
household. The good woman evidently held the doctrine of Sacrificial
Medicine deep in her soul, as well as a due estimate of the utility,
under all circumstances, of the art of cookery. Encouraging the poor
young man with suitable reflections on the purifying use of salt and
fire, she accordingly rubbed a handful from her salt-box into the
wound, and then held the miserable limb steadily to the kitchen fire!

A bath of blood has been frequently employed to resuscitate exhausted
patients. When Cæsar Borgia barely survived swallowing his share
of the bottles of poisoned wine which his respectable father, Pope
Alexander VI., had intended for the Cardinal, but took by mistake for
himself and his son, it is said that an ox was brought into Cæsar’s
apartments and disembowelled, to enable him to get into it and receive
such vitality as the warm, bleeding carcass might impart. We are here
at the point where Sacrificial Medicine assumes the vicarious form,
and the poor brutes are made to suffer instead of the human patients
for the benefit of the latter. In an account of the birth of the Duc
de Bourgogne, grandson of Louis XIV., in the _Curiosités Historiques_
(p. 48), amid the description of the raptures of the splendid court
assembled on the occasion, there is a casual mention of an incident
affording a wonderful contrast to all this royal joy and magnificence.
The attendant chief _accoucheur_, the celebrated Dr. Clement, to
prevent suffering on the part of the mother (the Dauphine), applied
to her person the skin of a sheep, newly flayed. To obtain this quite
fresh, a butcher was engaged to skin the animal alive in the adjoining
room; and, being anxious to offer the skin as quickly as possible to
the doctor, he carried it into the chamber of the Dauphine, leaving
the door open. The sheep, in its agony, followed him, and ran in,
bleeding and skinless, among the shrieking crowd of courtiers and
grandees. In modern times, worse things than these are done to animals,
professedly for the benefit of mankind; but they are now performed
quietly in physiological laboratories, not paraded in public, else it
is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold!
we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such
horrible price.”

Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit
consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply
to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy
Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the
multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach
them. More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of
scrofula from being touched by a king,--a privilege, it may be safely
guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly
not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses
of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion
would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine,
in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till
Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal
touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century
did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part
of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves
to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition.
Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name
of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the
“King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known
in remote parts of the country.

Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained
the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess
some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease.
The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow
suggested to the sufferers the desirability of having recourse to some
special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either
themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors
had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in
Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the
mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.

Finally, there is a large heterogeneous class of prescriptions,
obviously owing their origin to the principle of Sacrificial Medicine,
of which the simple rule has been to prevent the miserable patient
from adopting any mode of relief for his sufferings which Nature might
point out, and adding to them fresh pain by any ingenious device which
may occur to his physician. Of this kind was the treatment of fever
in vogue till quite recently, when the patient was carefully shut up
in a close room, with well-curtained bed and warm bedclothes, and
was prohibited from relieving his thirst with any cold drink. Truly,
if Marcellus Sidetes, who is said to have written forty-two books
in “heroic” verse “concerning distempers,” had given us a picture
of all the misery which must have been occasioned in the world by
the really _insolent_ disregard of Nature and common sense shown in
these matters,--how many thousands of lives have been thrown away,
and through what maddening misery the survivors must have struggled
back to life,--those poems, instead of being forgotten by the world,
might have done us precious service by reminding us that there is some
counterweight to be placed in the scale wherein we are wont to measure
our debts of gratitude to medical science.

Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician,
John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the
small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in
scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only
on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to
his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not
appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report,
“_et est bona cura_.” In those days, however, doors and windows were
not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable
portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a
later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and
intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the
registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer
to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a
Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his own treatment
as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His
life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate
parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the
services of _two fat women_, who were established permanently in bed
on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What
stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this
awful service has escaped from the record.

Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing
exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the
period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn,
filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing
beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the
awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet
cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared
with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory.
We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons
present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and
the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially
valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected
precisely at the right season,--_videlicet_ midsummer. Of course, in
each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity
to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science
as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past
and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new
systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the
old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one
should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons,
half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one
season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly
appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or
the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make
a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in the
_Sangrado_ style to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes
the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine
lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat
earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil,
as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm
nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may
be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.

Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and more easily
recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on the wane, though a good deal
of its spirit may still be traced in our behavior to the sick. To
homœopathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we probably owe
somewhat of the mitigation of orthodoxy; and children, noticing the
busts of Hahnemann in the shop windows, may be properly taught to bless
that great deliverer who banished from the nursery those huge and
hateful mugs of misery,--black founts of so many infantine tears,--mugs
of sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable, from one of
which Madame Roland drew the first inspiration of that martyr spirit
which led her onward to the guillotine, when she suffered herself to be
whipped six times running, sooner than swallow the abominable contents.


FOOTNOTES:

[26] As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in
which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal
economy, the following extract from the _Family Dictionary_ of Dr.
Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “CORAL, to prepare,--Take
such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by
grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a
little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner,
Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared
to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials
for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent
diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by
rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.



THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION.


Among the anomalies of our social state may be counted the fact that,
while it is generally admitted that women are more religious than men,
it is to men that in our age and country the Ministry of Religion is
(with infinitesimal exceptions) exclusively committed. While nine
persons out of ten are conscious that their earliest sentiments of
piety have been derived from a mother, and that a sister or a wife
has alone enabled the troubled faith of their latter years to survive
the shocks of worldliness and doubt, there is yet not one recognized
channel by which these waters of life, stored in the fountain of
women’s hearts, can flow beyond the narrowest borders; while, on the
contrary, it is not too much to surmise that to a very large number
of clergymen, well-meaning, learned, and conscientious, the sense of
dryness of soul in all that concerns the more spiritual part of their
office is a perpetual self-reproach. _Habitans in Sicco_ writes every
autumn in the newspapers to complain he can obtain no refreshment from
his weekly sermon at any church in his neighborhood, while around him
all the time are private wells and underground rivers of the purest
element of feeling for which he thirsts. It is a case of

  “Water, water, everywhere,
  But not a drop to drink.”

What we want first and above all things in our ministers of religion is
_that they should be intensely religious_; and knowing this, and that
all other gifts and acquirements are comparatively of small avail for
the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the sacred office that moiety
of the community among whom this special and most precious grace is, at
all events, least rare.[27]

The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply sufficient to
account, historically, for the anomaly. They are of two kinds, which
I shall take leave to characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is
a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the ascetics of early
Christianity, whereby the idea of womanhood is connected with very
base associations. It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review
of the religious position of the sex; and it is therefore better to say
bluntly that, from this point of view, a woman is looked upon rather as
an emissary from the pit than a “daughter of the Lord Almighty,” rather
a temptation to earthly passion than a helpmate to heavenly purity.
Springing up when the old classical world had sunk into a corruption
and foulness which we can now probably little realize in imagination,
the frenzy of asceticism which was nourished among the deserts of the
Thebaid and attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece and
Italy,--the origin of all the legends of which the “Temptation of
St. Anthony” is the type,[28]--has left almost ineffaceable traces
throughout the nations of Europe; of course much more sharply marked in
the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canonized these poor fanatics,
and still set apotheosized virginity on one of the thrones of heaven,
than among Protestant communities, wherein marriage has been always
placed on a moral level with celibacy, and Martin Luther has been
thoroughly absolved for his conjugal affection for the singularly plain
old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach we beheld some years ago in
the Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House.[29] Nevertheless,
even among Protestant Christians, a certain impression has remained,
the reverse of the faith of their old Teuton forefathers, that women
were nearer to the mind of the Divinity than men. The highest religious
_status_ a woman could attain in Milton’s opinion was a sort of deputy
piety,--

  “He for God only, she for God in him”;

a type which, considering the kind of representatives of the Deity
which some of Adam’s descendants have proved to their wives, is
scarcely to be ranked as elevated. The paramount influence of St.
Paul’s mind in generating (as Rowland Williams expresses it) the
religious atmosphere which Protestants breathe, and the great
celibate Apostle’s semi-ascetic feelings about women, have seemingly
counteracted the hereditary predisposition of Saxondom to reverence
them. His treatment of Marriage (reproduced in the exordium of the
Solemnization of Holy Matrimony in the English Book of Common Prayer,
and apparently intended to show how _un_holy are the sentiments
assumed to form the usual basis of that alliance) has certainly tended
to preserve the prestige of Scriptural dignity and authority for
sentiments on such subjects derived from Southern races and coarser
times, and which might else have died out ere now in Teutonized Europe.
That, considering the hysterical behavior of his male converts, when
“every one hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a
revelation, hath an interpretation,”[30] prudence justified St. Paul in
prohibiting female locutions in public worship may be fully conceded.
But the unhappy petrifaction of his current directions, whereby (like
so many other Biblical utterances) they have become laws for all time
and every divergency of circumstance, has been attended with lamentable
consequences. No Jewish law-giver ever bade the Miriams and Deborahs,
the Esthers and Judiths, of his race, “keep silence,” and hide their
diminished heads from regard, to “the angels,” or to anybody else
in or out of temple or camp; and the consequence has been (as a very
remarkable paper by a Jewish lady has pointed out)[31] that female
patriots, judges, and prophetesses have played a noble and conspicuous
part through the whole history of Judaism. But (not to speak profanely)
St. Paul has been supposed to act like Louis XIV., when he forbade that
any more healing wonders should be done at the tomb of the Abbé Paris:--

  “De par le Roi--Défense a Dieu,
  De faire miracle en ce lieu.”

If it were to please Providence to inspire a woman with any of the
gifts of the prophetic or ministerial offices, if ever the promise
should be fulfilled to the letter that “your sons and _your daughters_
shall prophesy,” and that the impulse to speak holy words were to
seize her in the most natural and appropriate place, to wit, in
church, St. Paul is quoted as authority to check any such irregular
and unsuitable proceeding: “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.”
The result has been that, except among the Quakers (who have coolly
set the prohibition aside, and seemingly profited not a little by so
doing), Christian rivals to the heroines of Judaism are not producible.
During these last eighteen centuries, among all the millions of women
in whose hearts the precepts of Christ have been sown and borne rich
fruit, there may well have been a few whose eloquence and fervor of
piety would have influenced the heart of men as much as a St. Bernard
or a Peter the Hermit, and whose words, like those of a Tauler, a
Fénelon, or an à Kempis, would have remained a spiritual treasure for
all time. But if such have lived and felt and thought, and longed
perhaps to speak to their fellow-men out of the abundance of their
hearts, their mouths have been effectually stopped. Order has reigned
in the Churches so far as they were concerned, and whatever light they
might perchance have borne into the dark places of the earth, instead
of being set on a candlestick, has been carefully covered up under a
bushel.

Such are, I venture to think, the bad reasons for the exclusion of
women from the ministry. Good ones, however, are certainly forthcoming,
if perchance, when weighed in the scale against the arguments in favor
of such an innovation, they prove less heavy. They are drawn from
circumstances, some of which pertain to the order of nature, and can
never be altered; while others might be, or are already in process of
change.

The functions of a minister of religion, as understood in modern times
(apart from priestly claims to administer sacraments by special divine
commission, with which we need not concern ourselves here), are,
roughly speaking, twofold: 1st, public prayer and preaching; and, 2d,
pastoral ministrations in the homes of the members of the congregation.
Regarding the first, women labor under several disadvantages, sometimes
amounting to disabilities. Though women’s voices, _when good_, reach
farther than those of men, a considerable number are deficient in the
physical vocal power indispensable to make themselves heard in an
assembly numbering above one or two hundred persons. Nothing would be
more pitiable and ridiculous than for one of these ladies, whatever
might be her mental gifts, to mount a pulpit and, with feeble voice
rising only to crack in an occasional screech, to attempt to pour forth
exhortations which three-fourths of her audience could not hear, and
under which the remainder would writhe in an auditorial purgatory.
Secondly, there can be no question that the average female intellect is
below the average male intellect, and consequently that there are fewer
women than men up to the mark of intellectual competence, below which
preaching, however well intended, and even inspired by genuine and true
feeling, is apt rather to “give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme”
than to tend to edifying. If the foolish things of the world often
confound the wise, the foolish people in it provoke and distract them;
and, even to their humblest hearers, many such well-meaning silly ones
would be little else than the blind leading the blind into a ditch.
Lamentable as it would be to hear a shrill feminine squeak delivering
from the desk the majestic periods of Job and Isaiah, it would be
doubly deplorable to listen to a thin and only too distinctly audible
soprano enouncing alternately from the pulpit platitudes, ineptitudes,
and blunders, such as memory recalls only too keenly to many of us as
among the severest trials of the domestic circle. A special peril in
this matter also lies in the ill-omened circumstance that the greater
the folly of the woman, so much greater, alas! is generally to be found
her propensity to preach in private, and therefore, it may presumably
be dreaded, her proclivity to extend to a larger sphere the benefit of
her exhortations. It has been the observation of the present writer,
through a long experience, that masculine and feminine folly usually
differ in this essential particular. A man fool dimly perceives he is
a fool, and holds his tongue accordingly; or (if the vanity of his
sex prevent him from arriving consciously at any such conviction or
conclusion) he deems that as prudence is the better part of valor, so
is silence the proper garb of wisdom, and that the less he wastes on
an ungrateful world the precious jewels of his ideas, the more credit
shall he have for those supposed to remain in the casket of his mind.
A man who talks much is nine times out of ten a clever and brilliant
person, and may possibly be the most profound of thinkers, who brings
out of the inexhaustible treasury of his imagination things new and
old. A woman fool, on the contrary, usually does not find out, till
she is old and ugly and the habit of silly chatter is irretrievably
settled, that she is a fool at all: probably for the simple reason
that the more folly she talks, the more delighted her male admirers
generally show themselves with her discourse. Even if she does not
happen to think herself particularly clever or well-informed, she has
been taught to believe that ability in a woman is rather a defect to
be concealed than a gift to be exhibited, and that, as the sagacious
Chinese proverb has it, “The glory of a man is knowledge, but the
glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge.” Accordingly, without the
slightest reticence or dread of exposure, she tumbles out of her untidy
brain notions as trivial and _mesquin_ as the contents of her own
disorderly work-basket,--here a button and there a spangle, a thimble,
a bit of crochet, a string of beads, a tangled skein of silk, and a
little ribbon marked with inches wherewith to measure the universe.
The result of this difference in the display of folly is naturally to
lend color to a somewhat exaggerated estimate of that surplusage of
feebleness and frivolity in the feminine scale, of the existence of
which, alas! there can be no doubt, but which is perhaps less than is
supposed out of proportion with the correlative dulness and stupidity
in the masculine balance. As the immortal Mrs. Poyser sums up the
matter, “Women _are_ fools. God Almighty made them so to match the men.”

Thus, then, two arguments at least against admitting women to the
ministry rest on natural and inevitable grounds: some women are
physically, some other women mentally, incapable of adequately
fulfilling its duties. And to these adverse reasons others are added
by the actual though not inevitable conditions of society. Women, up
to the present time, have been almost indefinitely less well educated
than men, and only their superior quickness and tact prevented this
inequality from telling disastrously in common life; while nothing
could hinder it from doing so, were they to undertake the office of
public teachers. By hook or crook, with little teaching (and that
teaching generally fourth or fifth rate of its kind), women have
managed pretty generally to scrape together and store up in their
memories in a happy-go-lucky way a certain quantity of knowledge,
useful and ornamental enough to pass muster. Women’s culture, when
women are cultivated, sometimes (perhaps we may say often) possesses
rather more breadth than that of men, and includes a good many topics
rarely included in the masculine curriculum. It is therefore well
suited to furnish pleasure to the possessor and entertainment to
her acquaintance and readers; but the accuracy and definiteness of
knowledge which men obtain, thanks to their much abused classical and
mathematical training, are what every ordinarily educated woman with
a grain of sense sighed for, till the day when the great movement for
the Higher Education of Women reared a more fortunate generation. Now,
it is clearly highly desirable, if not absolutely indispensable, that
a person who may be called upon to treat publicly and didactically,
if not controversially--and let us hope and pray that women will not
generally take to controversy!--almost every subject in the range of
the higher interests of man, who at least ought not to regard any
such interest as foreign ground, should possess not merely wide, but
accurate information, and be as far as possible above the liability to
commit any gross blunders. This is of course viewing the subject apart
from any special theological training such as the older Churches have
deemed almost the first qualification for the ministerial office. Even
the poor Capuccini preaching friars, whose astounding ignorance of
profane history and science affords inexhaustible tales of merriment
in Italy, who talk of “the great St. Augustine of Hippo, who crowned
King Alfred, who signed Magna Charta,” and are wont to indulge in such
figures of rhetoric as imaginary sniffs round the pulpit at the smell
of the roasting flesh of St. Lawrence on his gridiron,--even these
poor old fellows have received adequate instruction in the doctrines,
the legends, and the moral and penitential systems of their Church.
Proverbially ignorant as are the Greek Popes and the Nestorian, Coptic,
and Maronite priests, they, too, are perfectly well “up” in all those
recondite dogmas which are supposed to be their peculiar concern, and
can tell with unerring certainty whether the Second Divine Person
had two natures or two wills, or only one of each, or whether the
Third positively proceeded from the First only, according to Greek
orthodoxy, or from the First and Second, according to that of Rome and
Canterbury. Nearer home, of course, theological education is a wider
and more serious matter. If young priests at Maynooth are taught the
astronomical system which makes the sun go round the earth, and the
moral system of Peter Dens, which is nearly as completely the reverse
of truth, they still receive an enormous amount of something which goes
by the name of instruction, and in the matters of scholastic theology
and casuistry are probably qualified to beat a great many eminent
D.D.’s of Oxford and Cambridge. Here in England, and in Scotland
also, every Church, Established and Dissenting, has its college or
colleges for training its clergy, either apart from or together with
students intended for lay professions; and, without the degree or
certificate afforded by such institution, the entry into the ministry
is barred. Christendom, in short, has, like Judaism, its “Schools of
the Prophets”; and nobody is invited to prophesy, even if he be pious
and gifted as John Bunyan, who has not passed through them and learned
his lesson.

The necessity for this theological training, so far as it concerns
the insurance of orthodox doctrine from the acolyte when he becomes a
preacher, of course falls to the ground when we contemplate an order of
things quite outside the orthodox churches, and such as it is not to
be anticipated they will sanction for many a day. Our female preacher
is by the hypothesis, for the present at all events, either quite
irregularly connected with the orthodox sects, a Minister Unattached
or Amateur Pastor (and some such there are at this moment doing a
vast deal of good work, _e.g._, Miss Catherine Marsh and the sister of
Mr. Spurgeon); or if ever officially recognized, and a professional
minister, then as belonging to some heterodox communion, such as the
Salvation Army; or those in America, which profit by the services of
the Rev. Phœbe Hanaford, the Rev. Antoinette Brown, and the late Rev.
Celia Burleigh; and the Unitarian congregation at Melbourne, which
honored itself by choosing for their pastor Martha Turner, a lady whose
great abilities and noble spiritual feeling seem to me to hold out the
very example we seek of what a woman in the pulpit may and ought to
be.[32] No necessity exists compelling a female preacher who enlists
under the banner of religious freedom to undergo the particular mental
drill which qualifies the Romanist or Anglo-Catholic clergyman for
the performance of all the peculiar intellectual labors and combats
necessary to his office, and included in the duty of honestly believing
exactly all which his Church believes, and being equipped to do battle
with anybody who believes anything less or anything more. But is there
on this account less reason that the candidate for another kind of
ministry should undertake less severe studies and go through a less
complete mental training than the embryo priest, Latin or Anglican?
The reverse has been most wisely maintained by the Unitarian body in
this country, whose scheme of theological culture (if the present
writer may presume to estimate it) is wider and deeper than that which
is demanded to qualify the possessor for the See of Canterbury. The
teacher of religion who is to be something more than the expounder of
a ready-prepared catechism,--who is to lead his flock not merely into
one particular paddock, and to water them exclusively at one particular
pond, but into every field of sweet and wholesome herbage, and beside
every stream of living waters,--whose duty it will be to pluck up
the cruel brambles, and clear away the piles of stones of doubts and
difficulties which grow and are flung by careless hands along the path
of faith and life,--such a teacher ought to be furnished with every aid
which learning can offer. Above all, I should hold that a woman who
should venture to assume this high and arduous task specially needs
such equipment, since, for a long time to come, she must expect to
be more than others the mark of question and criticism; and the very
eagerness of her own mind may (unless weighted by solid erudition)
carry her more quickly and more remotely astray. Every one must have
noticed how there are some persons full of originality and mother-wit,
who continually fancy they are making fresh observations and theories,
while their next neighbor, who has never had an idea properly his own,
can tell them off on his fingers what ancient sage first made their
observation, and when and by whom in the Middle Ages their theory
was broached, and how it was refuted and abandoned by all thinking
people several centuries ago. The merely original man makes himself
ridiculous for want of learning, and is, in fact, always beginning _de
novo_ at the bottom of the ladder of human thought. The mere scholar
is nothing better than a Conversations-Lexicon, and never exercises
any influence except that of a useful drag on the ideas of his friends
when they are going down-hill. The true teacher must indispensably
combine both the gift of originality and the acquirement of such stores
of knowledge as shall enable him to trace doctrines and hypotheses to
their sources,--to know what has been said for and against them by the
greater thinkers of the world who have dealt with them,--and, in a
word, to know exactly how far he is or is not a heretic, and not be (as
is the commonest of cases) a heinous heretic while he believes himself
strictly orthodox, and strictly orthodox and even commonplace when he
enunciates what he fondly conceives to be a bold and startling heresy.
All this applies (for reasons too obvious to need animadversion)
pre-eminently to teachers of the more impulsive sex. Accordingly, we
must admit that the argument against female ministers of religion,
founded on the lower educational _status_ of women at present, is, so
far as it goes, perfectly valid.

Lastly, there is an argument which I imagine would half-consciously
influence many serious-minded people against the admission of women to
such an office. Women are (thanks to all sorts of causes, historical,
political, personal, with which we need not concern ourselves)
actually much _deconsidered_ by men. Would not their deconsideration
be reflected on Religion itself, were they to become its authorized
ministers? With enormous labor, the Broad Church school has been trying
to efface the stamp of effeminacy from their order, to cultivate
“muscular Christianity,” and make laymen of the order of the author
of _Sword and Gown_ remember that a priest is not necessarily an old
woman. If many women, old or young, enter the ministry, will not
this effort to redeem the character of the order be entirely thrown
away, and the impression become quite ineffaceable that Manliness
and Godliness are two orbs always seen in opposition, and never in
conjunction? I confess I should feel such a fear as this to form a
very cogent argument, were it altogether well founded.

Let us now, before attempting to discuss the possible advantages to be
set against all these objections to the religious ministry of women,
briefly run back over the heads we have passed, and see if there be not
some answer to each objection, or at least some hope that its force
might with time and care be neutralized.

First, there was noticed the ascetic feeling, inherited from the old
monks, of the essential _unholiness_ of women, and their consequent
unworthiness to meddle with sacred things. This idea has probably
occurred for the first time to many an English lady when she has
penetrated by chance into some hallowed precinct, some tempting and
shadowy cloister, of a monastery in Italy or Syria, and has been
driven out tumultuously by a whole flock of cowled and sandalled
brethren, cackling like so many geese at the intrusion of a cat
into a hen-house. Perhaps, as at Vallombrosa among the Apennines,
or St. Saba in the desert, she has seen the gentlemen of her party
courteously received and comfortably lodged within the noble walls of
the convent, while she has been left to such nocturnal repose as might
be found in a flea-haunted pavilion outside, or in her tent pitched
in a valley of centipedes. She has been accustomed to think of women
generally as of the types common in decent English society, a little
strait-laced, or perhaps a little “gushing,” as the case may be; and
she has very honestly taken it for granted that, if there be any
serious harm in the world, it is the opposite sex who are principally
to blame. Suddenly, it is revealed to her that, by a large number of
her fellow-creatures, she herself and all her female belongings,--her
eminently respectable governesses, the Misses Prunes and Prism; her
dear old grandmother, Mrs. Goody-Good; and her majestic aunt, Lady
Bountiful,--all are looked upon as little better than so many Succubi
of Satan, sent to lure the souls of those ridiculous old monks to
destruction. The shock has not rarely produced a peal of ungovernable
laughter such as those hoary cloisters had never echoed ere profane
Saxon Balmorals trod their pavement; but, when _la pazza Signorina
Inglese_ has retired to her hotel or her tent, she finds that a new
and very unpleasant light has been thrown on matters whereon she had
never reflected before. Modern English Ritualism and Monasticism are
doing their best, in more ways than need now be specified, to introduce
into English life these Oriental and gross ideas about women, that
pseudo-purity which is most impure. In so far as they prevail, they
will do us an injury quite incalculable. Needless to say that, to
people trained in such a school, a female minister of religion would
be a monstrous thing. _Almost_ as well might the creature trill out
the melodies of _La Traviata_ or _La Grande Duchesse_, or perform her
part in a ballet in the costume of a sylph! The view of womanhood
taken by these ultra-sanctified persons and by the most cynical and
profligate old _roués_ is practically the same. Surely, it is to be
hoped that all this worse than folly will be swept away in the blast
of public impatience and indignation which sooner or later must burst,
like a breath of wholesome autumn storm, through the incense-laden
atmosphere of Ritualism, and consign to the four winds all its trumpery
of millinery, chandlery, and upholstery, and the thoroughly base and
materialistic ideas which have come in along with them!

Secondly, among the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the
pulpit, we have referred to St. Paul’s dictum, “I suffer not a woman
to speak in church.” Whatever high degree of human wisdom we must all
attribute to the greatest of the apostles, or even divine authority, as
the orthodox hypothesis of inspiration would give to his words, there
is absolutely no ground at all for the assumption that, _because_ he
forbade women to affront public opprobrium by preaching when women
lived habitually shut up, each in her _gynaeceum_, he would, likewise
have forbidden them to offer religious exhortations in a sacred place,
when public sentiment has become reconciled to their appearance in the
streets, on the stage, in the lecture-room, and even on the platform.
The coolness, indeed, wherewith the most orthodox persons always _do_
practically take for granted that Scriptural precepts, however rigid in
form and seemingly intended by their authors for perpetual observance,
are to be set aside without scruple, as applying to a bygone state of
things, when they do _not_ chime in with their own inclinations and
prejudices, is only to be paralleled by the tenacity wherewith they
maintain their authority under every vicissitude, when they happen to
coincide with them. Let any one who quotes St. Paul’s incidental remark
about women speaking in church be called on to avow how far he has
taken to heart the solemn decree issued in the Encyclical Letter of the
one great Council of the assembled apostles, in the awfully mysterious
words, “It seemed good unto the Holy Ghost _and to us_” (as if these
were two separate opinions) “to lay upon you (the Gentile world) no
greater burden than these necessary things,--to abstain from meats
offered to idols, ... and from things strangled, and from blood.” Lives
there a modern Christian whose conscience would in the smallest degree
be troubled by taking the rice and ghee from a Hindu temple, eating
a rabbit strangled in a snare, or partaking of a black-pudding or a
Bologna sausage?

Passing now to the more reasonable reasons against admitting women to
the ministry,--the natural and incurable disabilities, physical and
mental, under which not a few of them labor,--the answer comes at once
to hand. Those among them who are unfitted for the office must not
undertake it, any more than dumb or stuttering or imbecile men. There
is no more difficulty in exclusion in one case than in the other,
though there may be a few more persons necessarily excluded.

As to education, the case is much more serious. Certainly, unless women
can receive the same solid and extensive training as male theological
students (rather more strict and rigid than less so), to make up for
what may have been wanting of exactness in their girlish school-room
education, the appearance in our pulpits of a number of female heads
lightly stored with learning or logic would be to the last degree
ill-omened. But is there the smallest necessity why this should be?
If the desire of a woman to devote herself to religious work were of
any depth or worth consideration, she would not only be willing, but
_crave_, to pass through the severest studies, to fit herself to the
utmost of her abilities for so high and sacred a task; and it is no
longer an hypothesis, but a demonstrated fact, that if women choose to
study and have the fair opportunity of doing so, there are not a few of
them capable at all events of attaining to those levels whereon men of
the learned professions habitually take their stand. If a few fickle or
weak-minded women were to enter as students such an institution, let
us say, as Manchester New College, they would be very speedily “choked
off,” and no more harm would be done than by the scores of youths
“plucked” at Oxford and Cambridge, and led to change their programme
of life. Those women, on the contrary, who should pass successfully
through such an intellectual and moral sieve, might thenceforth be very
safely trusted.

Again: the fear that Religion itself might come to be deconsidered, as
a result of the deconsideration of the sex of its ministers, must prove
groundless, if, instead of bringing a fresh element of weakness into
preaching and prayer, it should prove that (as I shall hope presently
to show) women are likely to pour a new stream of life into what has
so often become dry and unprofitable. After all, the inner heart of
humanity honors in its very core spiritual graces, over the physical,
the intellectual, and even the moral. Not the conquerors, not the
philosophers, not even those who have displayed most _virtue_ apart
from religion, have been adored and deified among men, but the prophets
and saints who have ascended the mountain-peaks of Prayer and thrown
open the windows of Heaven.

Now, as we look back over the Christian centuries during which the
spiritual, God-loving, anti-carnal impulse sent forth from Judæa
has passed on, transmitted in waves of emotion from age to age and
land to land, does it not seem probable that among those who have
received it most fully, and might have helped its transmission most
effectually, there have been thousands of women? In effect, history
notoriously shows that, in the apostolic time and at the period of the
conversion of Europe, at least half the work achieved was due to the
ardor wherewith noble ladies not a few took up the task of introducing
and disseminating Christian ideas through courts and camps. But, when
the age for this kind of female patronage was over, the powers of
women to aid the cause which so many of them have had next to their
innermost hearts have been narrowed within the walls of the home or
even of the cloister. I do not doubt that this home influence of
women has indeed been incalculably great and beneficent. It is hard
to conceive what would be the sort of religion remaining in an island
colonized by men only, and with a population recruited only by boys
too young to remember a mother’s care. The chances might lie between a
society of Trappists, or a herd such as the gold-diggers of a “Roaring
Camp” in a Californian gulch. But, because the religious influence of
women in their homes has been inestimably beneficial, is it, I ask,
any reason for resting satisfied that they should exercise no such
influence outside their doors? Surely there might have been prevision
of just such a state of things as has existed now for more than a
thousand years in Christendom, in the warning of the great Founder of
Christianity that a light (when we are so happy as to possess a light)
should be set on a candlestick and not under a bushel. If ever the
time comes when the spiritual home influence of women is allowed to
radiate into the outer circle of public life, there is every reason to
believe that the inestimable element of spirituality will make itself
felt, touching the hearts of men with new softness, awakening their
consciences with the power of mother-like gentleness, and inspiring
quite a new reverence, alike for women and for religion.

“Ah!” it will be said, “this is all very well, if women should, by
some happy chance, succeed well as preachers and ministers. If, on the
contrary, they fail, and make a miserable _fiasco_ of their attempt,
what ridicule will they not draw on the most sacred things! Is it wise,
is it allowable, to incur such a risk?”

Feeling a good deal of sympathy with such an alarm as this, having a
terror (possibly exaggerated) of some day undergoing the frightful
experience of listening, in a place of worship from which I could
not decently escape, to the ignorant, shallow, dogmatic folly which
it has been my occasional penance to hear from women elsewhere, and
which has, undoubtedly, a character of its own still more ignorant,
more shallow, and more dogmatic than any folly commonly to be heard
from men, I here humbly confess that for many years such a possibility
has with me almost outweighed the actual probability that women would
in general fulfil the duties of the ministry exceptionally well.
But longer reflection has tended much to remove my fears, while it
has strengthened my hopes. In the first place, I look with extreme
confidence to such a sifting process as a good theological college
course would inevitably effect, to exclude from concurrence all the
frivolous, the half-hearted, the weak-minded,--all those women, in
short, who should not prove capable of strong and steady mental labor,
and willing to undergo it for several consecutive years. From such
as should pass triumphantly through an ordeal of this kind, nothing
very outrageous in the way of folly or contemptible in the way of
feminine “twaddle” would need to be apprehended. And, again, there
is a second and very satisfactory ground for reassurance. Female
ministers will certainly not (at all events for a very long time to
come) be appointed to lecture us by any despotic authority. They
cannot, indeed, be ministers at all, unless some of us distinctly
desire them to minister for our particular benefit. By a happy decree
of fate, it takes at least two or three persons at any time to form a
congregation. There must be the hearers of the discourse as well as the
speaker; and, as even the sternest sticklers for the rights of women
are not likely to proceed so far as to demand compulsory attendance at
female preachments, there will always remain open a door of hope and
refuge whereby the oppressed may go free. The same argument applies
in this case as to the everlastingly reproduced fallacy about the
franchise; namely, that, if their political disabilities be removed,
women will invade the benches of St. Stephen’s. As nobody can ever be
elected an M.P., unless he or she find a majority of some constituency
to choose him or her as the best candidate, so neither can anybody
become a minister in one of the free churches, unless he or she find a
congregation ready to “sit under” him or her, as a tolerable preacher.
In either case, the woman who could so singularly impress the majority
of electors[33] or of parishioners with the conviction of her supreme
fitness as to induce them to choose her for the political or religious
office would be, undoubtedly, so very remarkable a person that it would
be ten thousand pities the world should be deprived of her services.

Let us now turn to the other side of the shield. Having discussed
the validity of the arguments against the admission of women to the
ministry, let us see what is to be said directly in favor of such an
innovation.

In the first place, it is obvious that women have certain special
aptitudes and qualifications (as well as the above-named inaptitudes)
for such an office. We have been hitherto speaking as if the work of a
minister lay almost exclusively in the pulpit and reading-desk; but we
must remember that a very large and very important part of it lies also
in the homes of the members of the congregation, in the hour of their
sorrows and difficulties, their sicknesses, doubts, repentances, death.
Can any one doubt that the tender and ready sympathies of women,
and their superior tact and discernment of character, their natural
tendency to soothe and exhort rather than to upbraid or threaten, are
qualities more valuable for such service than any which men, however
pious, well-meaning, and learned in casuistry, usually bring to such
tasks? As a matter of fact, women do, instinctively, perform the
office of ministering angels on these occasions all over the land,
without waiting for any license or consecration; while many of the
best of the clergy either suffer all their days from unconquerable
shyness and the sense of their own want of tact, or run speedily into
the ruts of professional consolations and exhortations in formal
phraseology, meaning little or nothing to speaker or hearer. Of all
the irritating--I might say maddening--things in human life, there
is nothing worse than to be addressed in the hour of mortal agony
and despair, when our hearts, riven to the core, could scarcely bear
an angel’s touch, by a smug, self-satisfied personage, who inflicts
on us his cut-and-dried consolations and exhortations to perfect
quiescence and cheerful resignation; all the time revealing, by every
word and gesture, how utterly incapable he is of comprehending even
the shadow of our grief. It would be difficult to estimate how many
people (especially the intelligent men of the humbler classes, who
are the principal victims of these tormentors),--men who would have
suffered themselves to be led with childlike submission by any wise and
loving hand, even through the wicket-gate of prayer and repentance,
to the heavenly way,--have been, on the contrary, goaded by tactless
parsons into hardness and rebellion. It is real, genuine, spontaneous
_sympathy_ which alone can authorize any one to approach the sacred
borders of a great sorrow. Can any one doubt that women would, as a
general rule, feel this more tenderly, more genuinely than men? The
fear would be that the strain on the heart of a good woman, minister of
a large congregation, would be so great as very sensibly to tell upon
health and life.

Further, outside the region of sentiment, and even in the intellectual
way, so far as it concerns social influence, a woman has special
facilities. If she have extensive knowledge (and I am presuming she
will have acquired a good deal before entering the ministry), it will
generally be more _ready to hand_ than that of a man. Her humor, if
she possesses a grain of that precious quality, will have the great
advantage, in all wordy skirmishing, of being playful, quick as
lightning, and always at command,--not like the ponderous satire which
takes an hour to get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly masculine
type of wit which the owner--

        “Beareth not about,
  As if afraid to use it out,
  Except on holidays or so,
  As men their best apparel do.”

Her logic--if by happy circumstance she has really trained her mind to
work logically--will not lose the famous feminine faculty for springing
to the top of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up the
steps, because she has acquired the power of recognizing whether she be
on the right landing or the wrong.

Regarding the rhetorical faculties of women, I may first remark that,
by a well-known law of acoustics, a female voice will, if equally
strong, reach further and be audible more clearly at a distance than
that of a man; and, for some kinds of eloquence, at all events, its
softer and purer tones will probably find their way most easily to the
heart. What her actual powers of oratory may be is one of the problems
of the future; but the experience of feminine public speaking during
the last few years seems to point to a curious but not inexplicable
fact,--namely, that, given the same _ideas_, a woman will generally
_express_ them more easily than a man, at least than an Englishman.
This gift of facile and appropriate expression is obviously one
dependent on a special faculty of the brain (the loss of which
constitutes _aphasia_), and is very variously distributed among races,
and also, I think, between the sexes. Oratory, which is dependent upon
it for its machinery, as a pianist on his fingering, is proverbially
rare among men of our nation, though, when it does exist, it seems to
reach sometimes to the climax of power and grandeur. English_women_,
on the contrary (so far as we yet may guess), possess more often the
ready-wordedness, the fluency and _verve_ of speech, of the Celt or
the Italian. Either the feminine nervous temperament is favorable to
this faculty, or (as I would rather imagine to be the case) the root
of the difference lies in the region of sentiment, and women speak
more fluently because they are more apt to be carried away by interest
in their subject or sympathy with their audience. The dread of making
himself ridiculous by stammering, by talking injudiciously, or making a
mistake of any kind, is so deeply ingrained in the mind of the ordinary
English gentleman that, if one--not a barrister or clergyman, and
consequently not inured to the sound of his own voice--be called on
suddenly to return thanks at a wedding-breakfast, he will, nine times
out of ten, stutter and hum-and-haw, and, after putting every one on
thorns, will end by making some extraordinarily _malapropos_ joke, like
the celebrated one of Lord Feenix in _Dombey and Son_. Or, if he be
aware overnight that he will be called on to address his own tenants on
the morrow, his slumbers will be considerably less sound than if he had
been warned he must go out and fight a duel at sixteen paces. As to an
Englishman taking kindly to public speaking when advanced in life, so
miraculous an event, I believe, is scarcely on record.

Nearly the contrary of all this holds true as regards women. Those
among them who are willing to speak in public seem to be carried
away the moment they begin by feelings which leave little room for
self-reflection, whatever pangs of shyness and diffidence they may have
endured beforehand.[34] But is it not very superfluous to expatiate on
the special gifts of speech assigned by nature to womankind, since in
all ages their proneness to over-exert them has been the theme of jest
and satire, and at no very remote date hostelries were adorned by the
sign of the “Good Woman,” meaning a woman with no tongue; penal laws
were in force against the creature (now happily classified among the
Extinct Mammalia), the Common Scold; and even tombstones were enlivened
by a sort of dig at the sleeper beneath, as in the case of the
celebrated Arabella Young, whose death is specified as the date when
she “began to hold her tongue”? Perhaps it is not unjust to entertain
the suspicion that masculine wit may sometimes have proved rather tardy
in parrying the thrusts of that “little member,” which we all know is
sharpened in so terrible a furnace, and that the ponderous sarcasms
recorded against its misuse may be likened to the boulder-stones thrown
by Polyphemus after the retreating and exultant Greeks.

Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women are even exceptionally
endowed with several, if not all, of the qualities necessary to
oratory. The originality and depth of their ideas and the culture they
have received may in many cases be open questions; but there can be no
doubt at all that, when they have got the ideas, they will find out
remarkably well how to express them.

It is time now to pass to the graver part of our subject,--the
value which may attach to women’s thoughts about Religion; for, if
that value be trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should
they possess any facilities for imposing them upon us by wordy
fluency,--that “fatal fluency” which the best men in America have
deplored as among the gifts of their countrymen.

Thoughts of the class which are properly expressed in pulpits are,
of course, of various kinds. There are thoughts which are purely
reflections and speculations of the intellect on critical and
philosophical problems, and which an able lawyer, an acute critic, or
a profound metaphysician can make as well, or better, than a prophet
or a saint; nay, in which a Mephistopheles might excel a Tauler. It is
no doubt sometimes necessary (though surely by no means so frequently
as some preachers seem to take for granted) to offer thoughts of this
class to a congregation, and, in short, to read out in church an
article which _minus_ the text might have appeared in a Review. If it
be a very lofty and religious mind from which such thoughts emanate,
they will of course possess an elevating power proportioned to the
momentum of such a mind brought to bear on ordinary intellects. To be
lifted by sermons of this class into the serene and purified atmosphere
of noble speculation will of itself effect a quasi-religious result,
independently of any conviction of theological truths which may or may
not be brought away. The hearers who have followed for half an hour
the upward flight of one of these eagle souls will return to the petty
concerns, interests, pleasures, anxieties of common life, calmed and
ennobled, and able to see all things in more just proportions. On the
other hand, if the preacher be merely a clever critic or metaphysician,
who deals with sacred themes as a counsel with the case in his brief,
the result of his sermons, however brilliant and interesting they may
be found by an intellectual audience, and triumphantly satisfactory to
those who find their cherished opinions clinched by his arguments, will
be the reverse of religious. The listeners will go away, not awed and
calmed, but eager for controversy and confirmed in self-confidence,
having lost any benefit which they might have derived from the previous
acts of worship. They have been made to rise from their knees to
sit down instantly in the seat of the critical, always very closely
contiguous to that of the scornful.

Of this intellectual and theoretical class of sermons it is not to be
anticipated that women will preach many. I should rather say that one
of the good things which may be hoped from the introduction of women
into the ministry may prove to be the falling out of fashion of a class
of discourses which can only be beneficial or desirable in the case of
exceptional mental greatness, combined with a piety warm and powerful
enough to hallow every region of thought into which it may pass.

Again, there is an order of thought more practical than this, and
surely more suitable to form the sequel of a service of prayer;
namely, ideas concerning duty in all its forms, religious, social, and
personal. It is amazing, considering the place which Christianity in
every phase assigns to obedience to the will of God, how exceedingly
small a space lessons and discussions concerning what _is_ that Divine
Will, as regards every-day conduct, ever take in Christian instruction.
We are eternally exhorted to repent; but what are the sins and failures
which ought to be included in our penitence, few preachers take the
pains to inform us. We are exhorted to “renounce the devil and all his
works”; but what those “works” may be, as distinguished from works
of righteousness in the shop, the camp, the bar, the exchange, the
interior of our homes, we are left to find out for ourselves. Sermons
treating carefully and thoughtfully any subject of the kind are among
the most rare of clerical addresses. Bishop South confesses, indeed,
that two-thirds of Christianity are a Christian temper. But how many
times have any of us heard rebuked from the pulpit that odious
sullenness which makes the unhappy inmates of the same home with the
sulky person live in a perpetual November, or yet the despotic violence
and anger which threaten them like a perpetual thunder-storm brewing in
the distance? What master of a household is told, by the only man who
_dare_ tell him, that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty,
exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless dependant, make up a
sum total of misery to them and of offence on his part, worse than the
results of many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no less guilt?
What wife and mother is told that her selfishness, her bickerings, her
discontent, her spitefulnesses, are sins for which no prate of high
religious feeling or incessant fussing about church-going can possibly
atone? And, again, as regards other offences,--let us say, lying and
dishonesty,--when have we heard wise and just definitions of them from
our pastors, or fitting exhortations to nobler standards of veracity
and probity than are common in the world? In the upper classes of
society, a certain slipshod rule of thumb on these subjects is pretty
generally received. But where did we learn it? Certainly not when
we occupied our seats in church, but rather at the dinner-table, in
the playground at school, at the club, or in the drawing-room. Among
the lower ranks, where this traditional code, of honor rather than
of morality, does not hold equal sway, the ignorance which prevails
concerning the very rudimentary principles of truth and probity is
often no less startling than deplorable. The neglect of the clergy
of all denominations to draw clear definitions on these matters of
hourly concern, so that their flocks may at least _know_ what is right,
supposing they are so fortunate as to be able to inspire them with a
resolution to _do_ it when known, is of a piece with the indifference
of all the churches to moral heresies of the most soul-debasing kind,
while they punish to the utmost of their powers the faintest divergence
from theological orthodoxy.

I cannot but think that, if women now enter the pulpit, a great many
more sermons will be preached dealing with these points of practical
ethics. The concrete and the personal will probably always possess
keener interest for the majority of women than the abstract, the vague
and the universal; and there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a very
distinct superiority in the womanly propensity to translate ideas into
action, over the man-of-the-world habit of admitting high and rigid
principles in theory, while practising quite other rules in commerce,
politics, and social affairs. A very eminent thinker and scholar, a
leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me with characteristic
simplicity, “I do not know how to account for the fact, but I notice
that, when a good woman is convinced that something is true or
right, she tries immediately in some way to square her beliefs and
conduct accordingly; whereas when I have, perhaps by infinite labor,
succeeded in convincing a man of the same thing, he goes on just as
he did before, without altering his behavior a jot, and as if nothing
had happened!” Now, I think this practical tendency of the feminine
nature (though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter when women
submit more generally to the friction of contact with many minds) will
inevitably show itself in a preference for the inculcation of definite
duties rather than for the vague declamations about repentance and
regeneration which so often leave their hearers perfectly undisturbed
and on the high way (as they think) to heaven, leading lives of odious
selfishness, and combining profit and piety after the fashion of the
celebrated grocer, “Sand the sugar, John--and then come in to prayers.”

It has been often remarked that the most profound difference between
modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast between the
value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of the individual
was of old treated as altogether subordinate in importance to the
interests of the State. In our time, we have almost come to recognize
that states and churches--nay, society itself--exist for the sake of
building up individual souls to their perfection; and there is every
reason to expect that this sense of the supreme importance of morals
over every other human concern will rather increase than dwindle
through all time to come.

Now, it would certainly appear that this _Hebraism_, as Mr. Arnold
calls it, is rather characteristic of the higher sort of women.
The moment a woman rises above the passion for personal admiration
and the struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matrimonial
scheming, to which so large a number of unhappy ones are trained and
consigned from girlhood, on the principle of “keeping women in their
proper sphere,”--the moment, I say, that a woman has been lifted by
education or her natural force of character above all this frivolity
and baseness, we almost invariably find in her a degree of earnestness
about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is far more rarely
traceable among men. It is true that her exclusion from a great many
fields of masculine interest naturally centres her thoughts more
on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are more or less
removed, we must expect to see more frequently women absorbed in the
same worldly interests as men, and perhaps some who now think night
and day of a ball will be equally eager about a bill in Parliament.
Still, I believe that, independently of circumstances, women have a
special tendency (as Renan avers of the Celtic race) to “long after the
infinite,” and to yearn to bring an element of sacredness and nobleness
into the transactions of daily life such as their moral aspect alone
affords. I believe that nine women out of ten (of the better sort, of
whom I have spoken) would, if they had the choice, oftener speak of
duty and religion than of any other themes.[35] If this be so, it would
follow that, as time goes on, instead of women falling behind in the
progress of humanity, that progress will constantly tend to bring women
more to the front as students and expounders of morality.

There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves
consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they
would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find
nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in
the very closest and most important of human relations of husband or
father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a
lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively
either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for such
an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral heresies, or
else from masculine pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily
different from that of a woman, and who practically know next to
nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties of her lot. We have had
of recent years in many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul’s
Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various clergymen to men
alone, from which women have been rigidly excluded. Would it be too
much to hope that some time or other, in some humble chapel (since
no one would dream of devoting the national religious edifices to
the exclusive use of women for a single hour), women may enjoy the
privilege of being especially addressed by pastors of their own sex,
who may talk to them at once with cultured minds and experienced hearts?

And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of thoughts
to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,--of which, alas! we
know far too little,--the Spiritual. The store of this latter class
of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of richest
experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious drops from
the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture by the
help of culture and reflection. They are the thoughts which concern the
baseness, the loathsomeness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as
_Sin_, not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy of Holiness,
felt as _Holiness_, not as Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of
our spiritual existence; the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward
the Blessed Life.” In some sense, sermons which contain thoughts like
these may be called Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs
of our moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past,
heart-strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most
powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our souls. But
they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or expositions
of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region of feeling
and appeal to another class of our faculties than the ratiocinative.
We do not sit and judge them, but they come from above and judge us.
When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel the temptation (as we
are so often inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or the
moral discourse) to express our approbation by the familiar tokens of
public applause. On the contrary, it is our own breasts we are fain
to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer of the
publican.

Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts like
these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if
anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought
out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost
every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine in
his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of insight
into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In Jesus
Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally blended.
Of course there are other qualities besides the characteristically
feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of religious teacher;
but the sterner qualities are no more invariably deficient in women
than are the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems the
reverse of improbable that women may arise uniting both in hitherto
almost unexampled degree. Let us remember that, after all, the one
great Force of the spiritual world--its correlated Gravitation, Light,
Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force, all in one--is pure Divine
LOVE. This alone, radiating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves
and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it responds as the flower to
the orb of day--we know not how. The human spirit which receives from
on high the largest influx of this divine light and warmth thereby
becomes a focus of reflected power and fervor for all those who can be
brought into spiritual contact with it. It is the “love of God shed
abroad” in the heart,--the love of that goodness which God is, and
for which man is made, whose germs even now the illumined eye of love
discerns deep-latent in every human soul,--in a word, the love of God
and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles are done, all
leprous souls cleansed, all demon passions cast out, all blind eyes
opened, all maimed and crippled faculties made whole. If we could but
find the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely
loving of men or women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the
midst of us to be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of
peace and blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the
philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever
give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart
beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as tender
in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant’s
cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s supremacy,
and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of loving-kindness
and unselfishness, we should find many more women than men. It is quite
impossible, I think, that this difference should not make itself felt,
and a new impulse be made to flow through all the channels of spiritual
life whenever the influence of women may be brought to bear directly
and largely on the religious feelings of the community.

Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our
religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this
familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the _traditional_
part of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably
one-sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate
the importance of _any_ idea of God which comes to us through our
fellow-men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious
life, the child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons)
of some beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and
that when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints
have likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the
mists of earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore
causes the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to
render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to seem
unreal and worse than inadequate. When _that_ stage is reached, it is
probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor may tell him about
God’s character. All he says is only like a book which describes a
person we ourselves have known or a place we have visited. Nobody can
make the man believe (at least so long as his own living faith and
open vision endure) that the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer
is less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though the dogmas he
accepts practically attribute to him a totally different character.
The only injury he can suffer is a negative one: he is denied the help
and sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper office of his
minister to supply to him. But at an earlier stage, when all religious
experience is yet vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be
provisional and taken on trust at second hand,--at that period there
can be no question of the misfortune of receiving cold, hard, narrow
notions about God, instilled by teachers who themselves have little
love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly borrowed their
ideas from the confessedly imperfect rendering, age after age, of
other men’s experience. How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when
God is represented to it as One from whom it would far more naturally
turn away? And let it be remembered that the attributes of God which
call out the spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely
those whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry
formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except
by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths. Power,
Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the meaning may
be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and command of language.
But I disbelieve that any one who is not himself full of love and
tenderness has ever, since the world began, yet transmitted to another
soul the truth that God is Love.

There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the
religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the
religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and
harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine
of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish
Inquisition. _Who_, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity
during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and
writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and the
story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born generation?
They were _men_, exclusively men; nay, men who, in taking their office,
renounced those ties of natural affection through which the Author of
Nature has caused the human heart to grow tender, and to be taught the
practice of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to the hearts
of their brethren the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, they began by
renouncing the experience of human fatherhood for themselves. The
Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches still boast, was
for fifteen centuries a school for the transmission of ideas about a
Divine Parent down a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants
have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to _us_ the story of
the Prodigal are at least able to speak out of the abundance of their
hearts when they say that, “like as a father pitieth his children,
so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him.” But is there not one
step even further to be taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother
for the son of her womb” a still profounder image of the Divine Love
than the father’s pity? Ought it not also to be brought home to our
comprehensions (if in any measure human words may so bring it) through
the lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women?

The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be classed
as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended with evils
innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a vehement popular
instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by Mariolatry. The
orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their masculine
Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral reverence which the
Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism of virgin
worship has obliterated. But how much have they not lost by excluding
those sentiments which can only be given to One in whom we recognize
not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but also tenderness,
sympathy, love? The truth is we are so constituted that great benefits
received,--if we think of them as bestowed merely because it is right
and good to give them, and not from love for ourselves,--so far
from awakening in us spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather
an opposite tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be
grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the
most generous have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large
donations from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have
failed to waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some
mere trifle given by a loving mother--a flower from a well-remembered
rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework--has filled our eyes with tears.
In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may
presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as
they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts
may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one which can only
control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible to estimate the
amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many thousands
of souls might have been won by _love_ to a life of piety and holiness
who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and
have wandered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical atheism?

If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust, in the nature of
our great Parent above, certain characters of tenderness and sympathy
with His creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more vividly
reflected, in the love of human mothers for their children than by
aught else on earth; if there be, in short, a real meaning in the old
lesson that God created woman as well as man in His own image,--the
image being only complete in the complete humanity,--then I think it
follows that there is urgent need that woman’s idea of God should have
its due place in all our teaching of religion. I think that there must
be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will conceive
and only a woman’s lips can teach,--truths, perchance, which have come
to her when baby-fingers have clung round her neck in the dark while
infant trust overcame infant terror, and she has asked herself was
there anything in heaven or earth which could make her cast down to
destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of care and guardianship,
the helpless little child thus lying in her arms,--a living parable of
all our race in the everlasting arms of God.


FOOTNOTES:

[27] It will be seen that I differ _toto caelo_ on this point from Mr.
Mahaffy in his interesting recent essay on the _Decay of Preaching_.
He seems to me only to recognize the _moral and intellectual_ forces
which move men, and these compared with the spiritual are only what
mechanical ones are to the electric.

[28] Ingoldsby’s rendering of this world-famous story, the favorite
theme of so many eminent painters, is probably no very exaggerated
reading of the general impression of the monastic mind respecting the
fair sex:--

  “There are many devils which walk this world,
          Devils great and devils small,
          Devils short and devils tall;
  Bold devils which go with their tails unfurled,
  Sly devils which carry them quite upcurled;

         *       *       *       *       *

  But a laughing woman with two bright eyes
          Is the worsest devil of all!”


[29] I know not on what authority the familiar jovial couplet has been
attributed to the great Reformer:--

  “Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib, und Gesang
  Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.”

The ascetic spirit had very far departed, at all events, from the
author who composed it.

[30] I. Cor. xiv., 26. If this graphic description had applied to a
_female_ assembly, should we have ever been allowed to forget the
circumstance?

[31] “The Hebrew Woman,” by Constance de Rothschild (Mrs. Cyril Flower).

[32] A sermon by this lady on “The Sacrament of Life,” preached and
printed at Melbourne, would amply justify, I think, to every reader the
above remark.

[33] In the case of the M.P., this would need to be a majority of
_men_, seeing that the whole female contingent of qualified voters will
only (if admitted) add about a fifth or sixth to the register.

[34] This at least is the impression left on me by the female speakers
(some twenty perhaps) whom I have chanced to hear. I never knew one
of them “hum” or “haw,” or stammer, or break down, even when (as in
one very remarkable case) the gentle and learned speaker had never
addressed an audience till the occasion, when she had already passed
middle life. Among the most remarkable phenomena of the present day,
I reckon the preaching of Mrs. Booth, the wife of the General of the
Salvation Army. The combination of fervent zeal with practical good
sense in her extempore discourses must be admired even by those who
differ most widely from her views.

[35] A curious illustration of this is to be found in a passage in the
first series of Mrs. Kemble’s charming autobiography published three
years ago. She describes the late Lady Byron as often expressing envy
of her (Mrs. Kemble’s) public readings, and her longing to have similar
crowds in sympathy with her own impressions. “I made her laugh,” says
Mrs. Kemble, “by telling her that more than once, when looking from
my reading-desk over the sea of faces uplifted toward me, a sudden
feeling had seized me that I must say something _from myself_ to all
those human beings whose attention I felt at that moment entirely at
my command, and between whom and myself a sense of sympathy thrilled
powerfully and strangely through my heart as I looked steadfastly at
them before opening my lips; but that on wondering afterwards what I
might, could, would, or should have said to them from myself, I never
could think of anything but two words--‘_Be good!_’” (Page 317.)



THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY.

AN ALLEGORY.


Two simple-minded men, who had dwelt all their lives in a country far
inland, at last undertook a long journey together. This happened many
ages ago, when there were no such things as printed books or village
schools, and when the people in isolated districts saw no travellers,
and knew nothing of the great world beyond the hills which closed their
horizon.

Wolfgang and Athelstane, so our pilgrims were called, walked on over
downs and heaths, and through the vast forests of oak which then
overspread the land, till at last, after a night’s toilsome march, they
came, in the early dawn, to a spot which seemed to them the strangest
they had ever visited. Walls of rock shut out any distant view; but
immediately before them on a gentle declivity there stood a structure,
much larger than the humble cottages which Wolfgang and Athelstane had
inhabited, and of a singularly different form. Instead of a pointed
roof of thatch or tiles, there was, on the top, a flat floor of boards;
while beneath, where there should have been a solid square foundation,
there was a long thin wedge, almost like a roof which had been reversed
and turned downward. Also, through the floor rose up two long, slender,
tree-like erections, with all the branches carefully smoothed away.
Crossbars were slung on these poles, and ropes connected them together;
while a great roll of coarse woven stuff, like sackcloth, lay folded
up beside them. At one end, and outside of the wooden structure, hung
a huge beam, standing, as it seemed, in some unaccountable relation
to the rest of the fabric, and connected with it by machinery passing
into the interior. All these singular things were slowly and carefully
noted by our two humble travellers, as they walked round the wooden
building in the morning twilight. No one was near who could afford them
an explanation of the use or purpose of what they saw; and their doubts
and wonder grew every moment.

“What can it mean?” said Wolfgang. “What did the builder--whoever he
can have been--intend by such a mansion as this?”

“It is clear enough,” answered Athelstane, thoughtfully, “that it is
the work of some very ingenious hands. How soundly and skilfully it is
all fitted together!”

“True,” replied his comrade; “and yet ought we to say it is well made
before we can tell for what purpose it is constructed? To me it seems
that our own old huts of wattled willow and turf were, after all, of a
better shape for a house to stand on the ground.”

“Do you think this is a house, _only_ a house?” said Athelstane,
suddenly looking up.

“Well, if it be not a house, what else can it be?” said Wolfgang. “Let
us try to look inside of it, and examine it more closely.”

The two men soon contrived to enter the edifice which so puzzled them;
and presently Wolfgang exclaimed triumphantly:--

“See! there can be no question more on the matter. This is only a
house. Here are seats and tables for men to sit at, and beds for them
to sleep in; and here is a fire-place and a great iron pot to cook
food. Now, you can have no hesitation. It is just a wooden house, and
rather stupidly planned.”

“I have no doubt,” said Athelstane, “that it is intended for a
habitation; but is it not inexplicable that a builder who can work so
cleverly should construct it so unsuitably for a common house? Why is
it not made to stand squarely and steadily on the ground? What is the
sense of these long soaring poles standing up through the middle, with
the coils of ropes and bales of sacking? And this? This is the most
mysterious thing of all,” said Athelstane, placing his hand on a wheel,
which instantly stirred the great beam at the back.

“They are strange certainly,” replied Wolfgang,--“very strange and
useless things, I should say, about a house which would be much more
comfortable and answer its purpose better without them. I cannot agree
with you that the builder was really a clever man, or knew what he
was about, else he would never have erected those poles or made that
senseless, upside-down roof, instead of a foundation; or, above all,
have constructed that totally unmeaning apparatus behind the whole
structure.”

“I differ from you,” said Athelstane, after some moments more of
reflection. “I think it is we who are not clever or ingenious, and who
cannot find out what the carpenter who made this building intends to
do with it. I do not believe that singular form beneath (so little fit
for a building only intended for a house), nor those poles and ropes
and vast sheets of woven stuff, nor yet that mysterious great beam,
were all added to a mere house for nothing,--for no purpose whatever.
I think, Wolfgang,” and Athelstane laid his hand on his friend’s arm
earnestly,--“I think what we are looking at is something _more than a
house_. I think _it is not intended to stand always where we see it_.”

“You are dreaming, Athelstane,” said Wolfgang, with a short laugh.
“Where on earth should a house go, if it is not to stand always where
it is built? Who would want to move such a structure as this?”

“I do not know,” said Athelstane, humbly. “I do not profess to
understand the mystery of it: only I see that the master carpenter who
built it must have been a very great carpenter indeed; and I cannot
believe that he has made all these things in vain, or for no important
purpose. If he wanted only a house, why did he not simply build a house
standing flat on the ground, and with no shafts piercing the air, and
no vast guiding beam at the back? Trust me, friend Wolfgang, this is
something more than the common abode of which alone you seem able to
think.”

While the two simple-minded men yet talked together, the sun had risen,
and there was a sound of many waters and of rising waves; and through
an opening in the rocks, which the travellers had not perceived in the
twilight, the great ocean became revealed to their eyes. Higher and
higher rose the tide, till it almost reached where the strange wooden
building still lay motionless; and the travellers retreated a little up
the shore, and stood, awe-struck and breathless, watching what might
happen. Then down from the cliff above ran a band of mariners, and
leaped on board the vessel, and hauled in the anchor; and presently the
waves lifted up the ship, and she floated bravely on the waters. Very
soon, the mariners set the sails, which had lain idly on the deck, the
pilot placed his hand on the rudder and guided the noble barque, and
she was borne by the winds of heaven far off beyond the uttermost ken
of the two poor travellers upon the shore.

Then, after a time, Wolfgang turned to his companion, and said:
“Athelstane, you spoke truth. Yon House-of-the-Sea was made, as you
foresaw, for other use than to stand upon the ground. It was planned
for a different element,--the free world of waters. And now we see
what was the purport of so many things which before seemed to us
useless,--the keel, the masts, the sails, the marvellous and mysterious
rudder. How wonderful it is! How wise and far-seeing the great
carpenter who made the ship!”

As Wolfgang spoke, Athelstane lifted his head, which had drooped in
heavy thought, and he saw the wide ocean leaping in the morning light
stretched out before him, and the new-risen sun smote his face with
glory. And Athelstane laid his hand on Wolfgang’s arm, and spoke as his
friend had never heard him speak before, for it was as a man in whose
soul a great new thought had sprung to life: “Aye, Wolfgang, aye,” he
said; “but if that marvellous work of human hands was not made only for
earth, do you think _we_ were made for nothing better than the life
which now we lead,--to eat and drink, and marry, and toil, and sleep,
and die, and be forgotten? Are not _we_ too, O Wolfgang, made for other
things than these? Are we not fitted for some other element than that
in which now we have our being, some other existence than that which
yet we lead? If we were intended only to live our few years of animal
life on earth and then perish, why were we given minds to plough the
seas of thought, and aspirations to point to heaven, and love to swell
beneath the breath of affection, and conscience to guide us on our way
as the pilot lays on it his mighty hand? O Wolfgang! we could perceive
that the ship was intended to float on the great ocean which we had
never beheld. Can we not see that we and all our race are made to live
in a world yet unseen, wider, freer, grander a thousand times than
earth,--a world which we shall enter whensoever the tide of death shall
lift us up and bear us away?”



THE PEAK IN DARIEN: THE RIDDLE OF DEATH.


It is somewhat singular that the natural longing to penetrate the great
secret of mortality should not have suggested to some of the inquirers
into so-called “Spiritual” manifestations that, before attempting
to obtain communication with the _dead_ through such poor methods
as raps and alphabets, they might more properly, and with better
hope of gaining a glimpse through the “gates ajar,” watch closely
the _dying_, and study the psychological phenomena which accompany
the act of dissolution. Thus, it might be possible to ascertain, by
comparison of numerous instances, whether among these phenomena are any
which seem to indicate that the mind, soul, or self of the expiring
person, is not undergoing a process of extinction, but exhibiting such
tokens as might be anticipated, were it entering upon a new phase of
existence and coming into possession of fresh faculties. It is at
least conceivable that some such indications might be observed, were
we to look for them with care and caution, under the rare conditions
wherein they could at any time be afforded; and, if this should prove
to be the fact, it is needless to dilate on the intense interest of
even such semblance of confirmation of our hopes. I must earnestly
protest, however, at starting, that, in my opinion, to regard anything
which could be so noticed as being _more_ than such a confirmation,
or, as if it could constitute an argument for belief in a future life,
would be foolish in the extreme, seeing the great obscurity and the
evanescent nature of all such phenomena. Our faith in immortality
must be built on altogether different ground, if it is to be of any
value as a part of our religion or of our philosophy. But, assuming
that we are, individually, already convinced that the quasi-universal
creed of the human race is not erroneous, and that “the soul of a man
never dies,”[36] we may not unreasonably turn to the solemn scene of
dissolution, and ask whether there does not sometimes occur, under one
or two perhaps of its hundred forms, some incidents which point in the
direction of the great fact which we believe to be actually in process
of realization? According to our common conviction, there is a moment
of time when the man whom we have known in his garb of flesh casts it
aside, actually, so to speak, before our eyes, and “this mortal puts on
immortality.” As in Blanco White’s beautiful sonnet, he is, like Adam,
watching his first sunset, and trembling to lose sight of the world,
and the question to be solved is whether darkness has enshrouded him,
or whether

  “Hesperus with the hosts of heaven came,
  And, lo! Creation widened in his view”;

and he may have asked himself,--

  “Who would have thought such darkness lay concealed
  Within thy beams, O Sun? or deemed,
  While flower and leaf and insect stood revealed,
  That to such countless orbs thou mad’st us blind?”

and life, like light, had been only a deception and a veil.

We have walked in company with our brother, perchance for years,
through the “wilderness of this world,” over its arid plains of toil
and through its sweet valleys of love and pleasure; and then we have
begun to climb the awful Andes which have always loomed before us at
our journey’s end,--their summits against the sky,--and beyond them the
undiscovered land. Onward, a little before us, as chance may decide,
our companion perhaps mounts the last acclivity; and we see him slowly
approach the mountain’s crown, while our lagging steps yet linger on
the slopes below. Sometimes, ere he reach the hill-top, he is enveloped
in cloud, and then we see him no more; but again, sometimes, he remains
in the full sunlight, and though distant from us, and beyond the reach
of our voice, it is yet possible for us to watch his attitude and
motions. Now, we see him nearing the summit. A few steps more, and
there must break on his vision whatever there may be of the unknown
world beyond,--a howling wilderness or a great Pacific of joy. Does he
seem, as that view bursts on him, whatsoever it may be,--does he seem
to be inspired with hope or cast down with despair? Do his arms drop
in consternation, or does he lift them aloft with one glad gesture of
rapture, ere he descend the farther slope, and is lost to our sight
forever?

It appears to me that we may, though with much diffidence, answer this
question as regards some of our comrades in life’s journey, who have
gone before us, and of whom the last glimpse has been one full of
strange, mysterious, but most joyful promise. Let us inquire into the
matter calmly, making due allowance both for natural exaggeration of
mourning friends, who recall the most affecting scenes, and also for
the probable presence of cerebral disturbance and hallucination at the
moment of physical dissolution.

Of course, it is quite possible that the natural law of death may
be that the departed always sink into a state of unconsciousness,
and rather dip beneath a Lethe than leap a Rubicon. It is likewise
possible that the faculties of a disembodied soul, whatever that may
be, may need time and use, like those of an infant, before they can be
practically employed. But there is also at least a _possibility_ that
consciousness is not always lost, but is continuous through the passage
from one life to another, and that it expands rather than closes at
the moment when the bonds of the flesh are broken, and the man enters
into possession of his higher powers and vaster faculties, symbolled
by the beautiful old emblem of Psyche’s emancipated butterfly quitting
the shell of the chrysalis.[37] In this latter case there is a certain
_prima facie_ presumption that close observation ought to permit us
occasionally to obtain some brief glimpse, some glance, though but
of lightning swiftness and evanescence, revealing partially this
transcendent change.

In a majority of deaths, the accompanying physical conditions hide from
the spectators whatever psychological phenomena may be taking place.
The sun of our poor human life mostly sets behind an impenetrable
cloud. Of all forms of death, the commonest appears to be the awful
“agony” with its unconscious groans and stertorous breath. The dying
person seems to sink lower and lower, as if beneath the waters of an
unfathomable sea; a word, a motion, a glance, rising up at longer
and longer intervals, till the last slow and distant sighs terminate
the woful strife, and the victory of Death is complete. When this is
the mode of dissolution, it is of course hopeless to look for any
indication of the fate of the soul at its exodus; and the same holds
good as regards death in extreme old age, or after exhausting disease,
when the sufferer very literally “falls asleep.” Again, there are
deaths which are accompanied by great pain or delirium, or which are
caused by sudden accidents, altogether hiding from our observation the
mental condition of the patient. Only in a small residue of cases, the
bodily conditions are such as to cause neither interference with nor
yet concealment of the process of calm and peaceful dissolution in the
full light of mental sanity; and it is to these only we can look with
any hope of fruitful observation. I ask whether in such cases instances
have ever been known of occurrences having any significance taken in
connection with the solemn event wherewith they are associated. Does
our forerunner on the hill-top show by his looks and actions, since
he is too far off to speak to us, that he beholds from his “Peak in
Darien” an Ocean yet hidden from our view?

I should hesitate altogether to affirm positively that such is the
case; but, after many inquiries on the subject, I am still more
disinclined to assert the contrary. The truth seems to be that, in
almost every family or circle, a question will elicit recollections of
death-bed scenes, wherein, with singular recurrence, appears one very
significant incident,--namely, that the dying person, precisely at the
moment of death, and when the power of speech was lost, or nearly lost,
seemed _to see something_; or rather, to speak more exactly, to become
conscious of something present (for actual sight is out of question)
of a very striking kind, which remained invisible to and unperceived
by the assistants. Again and again, this incident is repeated. It is
described almost in the same words by persons who have never heard of
similar occurrences, and who suppose their own experience to be unique,
and have raised no theory upon it, but merely consider it to be
“strange,” “curious,” “affecting,” and nothing more. It is invariably
explained that the dying person is lying quietly, when suddenly,
in the very act of expiring, he looks up,--sometimes starts up in
bed,--and gazes on (what appears to be) vacancy with an expression of
astonishment, sometimes developing instantly into joy, and sometimes
cut short in the first emotion of solemn wonder and awe. If the dying
man were to see some utterly unexpected but instantly recognized
vision, causing him a great surprise or rapturous joy, his face could
not better reveal the fact. The very instant this phenomenon occurs,
death is actually taking place, and the eyes glaze even while they gaze
at the unknown sight. If a breath or two still heave the chest, it is
obvious that the soul has already departed.

A few narrations of such observations, chosen from a great number
which have been communicated to the writer, will serve to show more
exactly the point which it is desired should be established by a larger
concurrence of testimony. The following are given in the words of a
friend on whose accuracy every reliance may be placed:--

“I have heard numberless instances of dying persons showing
unmistakably by their gestures, and sometimes by their words, that
they saw in the moment of dissolution what could not be seen by
those around them. On three occasions, facts of this nature came
distinctly within my own knowledge; and I will therefore limit myself
to a detail of that which I can give on my own authority, although the
circumstances were not so striking as many others known to me, which I
believe to be equally true.

“I was watching one night beside a poor man dying of consumption. His
case was hopeless, but there was no appearance of the end being very
near. He was in full possession of his senses, able to talk with a
strong voice, and not in the least drowsy. He had slept through the
day, and was so wakeful that I had been conversing with him on ordinary
subjects to while away the long hours. Suddenly, while we were thus
talking quietly together, he became silent, and fixed his eyes on
one particular spot in the room, which was entirely vacant, even of
furniture. At the same time, a look of the greatest delight changed the
whole expression of his face, and, after a moment of what seemed to be
intense scrutiny of some object invisible to me, he said to me in a
joyous tone, ‘There is Jim.’ Jim was a little son whom he had lost the
year before, and whom I had known well; but the dying man had a son
still living, named John, for whom we had sent, and I concluded it was
of John he was speaking, and that he thought he heard him arriving. So
I answered,--

“‘No. John has not been able to come.’

“The man turned to me impatiently, and said: ‘I do not mean John,
I know he is not here: it is Jim, my little lame Jim. Surely, you
remember him?’

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember dear little Jim who died last year quite
well.’

“‘Don’t you see him, then? There he is,’ said the man, pointing to the
vacant space on which his eyes were fixed; and, when I did not answer,
he repeated almost fretfully, ‘Don’t you see him standing there?’

“I answered that I could not see him, though I felt perfectly convinced
that something was visible to the sick man, which I could not perceive.
When I gave him this answer, he seemed quite amazed, and turned
round to look at me with a glance almost of indignation. As his eyes
met mine, I saw that a film seemed to pass over them, the light of
intelligence died away, he gave a gentle sigh and expired. He did not
live five minutes from the time he first said, ‘There is Jim,’ although
there had been no sign of approaching death previous to that moment.

“The second case was that of a boy about fourteen years of age,
dying also of decline. He was a refined, highly educated child, who
throughout his long illness had looked forward with much hope and
longing to the unknown life to which he believed he was hastening. On a
bright summer morning, it became evident that he had reached his last
hour. He lost the power of speech, chiefly from weakness; but he was
perfectly sensible, and made his wishes known to us by his intelligent
looks. He was sitting propped up in bed, and had been looking rather
sadly at the bright sunshine playing on the trees outside his open
window for some time. He had turned away from this scene, however,
and was facing the end of the room, where there was nothing whatever
but a closed door, when all in a moment the whole expression of his
face changed to one of the most wondering rapture, which made his
half-closed eyes open to their utmost extent, while his lips parted
with a smile of perfect ecstasy. It was impossible to doubt that some
glorious sight was visible to him; and, from the movement of his eyes,
it was plain that it was not one, but many objects on which he gazed,
for his look passed slowly from end to end of what seemed to be the
vacant wall before him, going back and forward with ever-increasing
delight manifested in his whole aspect. His mother then asked him, if
what he saw was some wonderful sight beyond the confines of this world,
to give her a token that it was so by pressing her hand. He at once
took her hand, and pressed it meaningly, giving thereby an intelligent
affirmative to her question, though unable to speak. As he did so, a
change passed over his face, his eyes closed, and in a few minutes he
was gone.

“The third case, which was that of my own brother, was very similar
to this last. He was an elderly man, dying of a painful disease, but
one which never for a moment obscured his faculties. Although it was
known to be incurable, he had been told that he might live some months,
when somewhat suddenly the summons came on a dark January morning.
It had been seen in the course of the night that he was sinking; but
for some time he had been perfectly silent and motionless, apparently
in a state of stupor, his eyes closed and his breathing scarcely
perceptible. As the tardy dawn of the winter morning revealed the rigid
features of the countenance from which life and intelligence seemed to
have quite departed, those who watched him felt uncertain whether he
still lived; but suddenly, while they bent over him to ascertain the
truth, he opened his eyes wide, and gazed eagerly upward with such an
unmistakable expression of wonder and joy that a thrill of awe passed
through all who witnessed it. His whole face grew bright with a strange
gladness, while the eloquent eyes seemed literally to shine, as if
reflecting some light on which they gazed. He remained in this attitude
of delighted surprise for some minutes, then in a moment the eyelids
fell, the head drooped forward, and with one long breath the spirit
departed.”

       *       *       *       *       *

A different kind of case from those above narrated by my friend was
that of a young girl known to me, who had passed through the miserable
experiences of a sinful life at Aldershot, and then had tried to drown
herself in the river Avon, near Clifton. She was in some way saved from
suicide, and placed for a time in a penitentiary; but her health was
found to be hopelessly ruined, and she was sent to die in the quaint
old workhouse of St. Peter’s at Bristol. For many months, she lay in
the infirmary, literally perishing piecemeal of disease, but exhibiting
patience and sweetness of disposition quite wonderful to witness. She
was only eighteen, poor young creature, when all her little round
of error and pain had been run; and her innocent, pretty face might
have been that of a child. She never used any sort of cant (so common
among women who have been in Refuges), but had apparently somehow got
hold of a very living and real religion, which gave her comfort and
courage, and inspired her with the beautiful spirit with which she
bore her frightful sufferings. On the wall opposite her bed, I had
hung by chance a print of the “Lost Sheep”; and Mary S., looking at
it one day, said to me, “That is just what I was and what happened to
me; but I am being brought safe home now.” For a long time before her
death, her weakness was such that she was quite incapable of lifting
herself up in bed, or of supporting herself when lifted; and she,
of course, continued to lie with her head on the pillow, while life
gradually and painfully ebbed away, and she seemingly became nearly
unconscious. In this state she had been left one Saturday night by the
nurse in attendance. Early at dawn next morning,--an Easter morning,
as it chanced,--the poor old women who occupied the other beds in the
ward were startled from their sleep by seeing Mary S. suddenly spring
up to a sitting posture in her bed, with her arms outstretched and her
face raised, as if in a perfect rapture of joy and welcome. The next
instant, the body of the poor girl fell back a corpse. Her death had
taken place in that moment of mysterious ecstasy.

A totally different case again was told me by the daughter of a man
of high intellectual distinction, well known in the world of letters.
When dying peacefully, as became the close of a profoundly religious
life, he was observed by his daughter suddenly to look up as if at
some spectacle invisible to those around, with an expression of solemn
surprise and awe, very characteristic, it is said, of his habitual
frame of mind. At that instant, and before the look had time to falter
or change, the shadow of death passed over his face, and the end had
come.

In yet another case, I am told that at the last moment so bright a
light seemed suddenly to shine from the face of a dying man that the
clergyman and another friend who were attending him actually turned
simultaneously to the window to seek for the cause.

Another incident of a very striking character was described as having
occurred in a family united very closely by affection. A dying lady,
exhibiting the aspect of joyful surprise to which we have so often
referred, spoke of seeing, one after another, three of her brothers
who had long been dead, and then, apparently, recognized last of all a
fourth brother, who was believed by the bystanders to be still living
in India. The coupling of his name with that of his dead brothers
excited such awe and horror in the mind of one of the persons present
that she rushed from the room. In due course of time, letters were
received announcing the death of the brother in India, which had
occurred some time before his dying sister seemed to recognize him.

Again, in another case, a gentleman who had lost his only son some
years previously, and who had never recovered from the afflicting
event, exclaimed suddenly when dying, with the air of a man making a
most rapturous discovery, “I see him! I see him!”

Not to multiply such anecdotes too far,--anecdotes which certainly
possess a uniformity pointing to some similar cause, whether that
cause be physiological or psychical,--I will now conclude with one
authenticated by a near relative of the persons concerned. A late
colonial bishop was commonly called by his sisters “Charlie,” and
his eldest sister bore the pet name of “Liz.” They had both been
dead for some years, when their younger sister, Mrs. W., also died,
but before her death appeared to behold them both. While lying still
and apparently unconscious, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked
earnestly across the room, as if she saw some one entering. Presently,
as if overjoyed, she exclaimed, “O Charlie!” and then, after a moment’s
pause, with a new start of delight, as if he had been joined by some
one else, she went on, “And Liz!” and then added, “How beautiful
you are!” After seeming to gaze at the two beloved forms for a few
minutes, she fell back on her pillow and died.

An instance--in many respects especially noteworthy--of a similar
_impression_ of the presence of the dead conveyed through another sense
besides sight is recorded in Caroline Fox’s charming _Journals_, Vol.
II., p. 247. She notes under date September 5, 1856, as follows:--

“M. A. Schimmelpenninck is gone. She said just before her death, ‘Oh, I
hear such beautiful voices, and the children’s are the loudest.’”

Can any old Italian picture of the ascending Madonna, with the cloud
of cherub heads forming a glory of welcome around her as she enters
the higher world, be more significant than this actual fact--so simply
told--of a saintly woman in dying hearing “_beautiful voices, and the
children’s the loudest_”? Of course, like all the rest, it may have
been only a physiological phenomenon, a purely subjective impression;
but it is at least remarkable that a second sense should thus be under
the same glamour, and that again we have to confront, in the case of
_hearing_ as of _sight_, the anomaly of the (real or supposed) presence
of the beautiful and the delightful, instead of the terrible and the
frightful, while Nature is in the pangs of dissolution. Does the brain,
then, unlike every known instrument, give forth its sweetest music as
its chords are breaking?

Instances like those recorded in this paper might, I believe, be
almost indefinitely multiplied, were attention directed to them, and
the experience of survivors more generally communicated and recorded.
Reviewing them, the question seems to press upon us, Why should
we _not_ thus catch a glimpse of the spiritual world through that
half-open portal wherein our dying brother is passing? If the soul of
man exist at all after the extinction of the life of the body, what is
more probable than that it should begin at the very instant when the
veil of the flesh is dropping off to exercise those spiritual powers
of perception which we must suppose it to possess (else were its whole
after-life a blank), and to become conscious of other things than those
of which our dim senses can take cognizance? If it be not destined to
an eternity of solitude (an absurd hypothesis), its future companions
may well be recognized at once, even as it goes forth to meet them. It
seems indeed almost a thing to be expected that some of them should
be ready waiting to welcome it on the threshold. Is there not, then,
a little margin for hope, if not for any confident belief, that our
fondest anticipations will be verified; nay, that the actual experience
of many has already verified them? May it not be that, when that hour
comes for each of us which we have been wont to dread as one of
parting and sorrow,--

  “The last long farewell on the shore
  Of this rude world,”

ere we “put off into the unknown dark”,--we may find that we only leave
for a little time the friends of earth to go straight to the embrace of
those who have long been waiting for us to make perfect for them the
nobler life beyond the grave? May it not be that our very first dawning
sense of that enfranchised existence will be the rapture of reunion
with the beloved ones whom we have mourned as lost, but who have been
standing near, waiting longingly for our recognition, as a mother may
watch beside the bed of a fever-stricken child, till reason reillumines
its eyes, and with outstretched arms it cries “Mother.”

There are doubtless some to whom it would be very dreadful to think of
thus meeting on the threshold of eternity the wronged, the deceived,
the forsaken. But for most of us, God be thanked, no dream of
celestial glory has half the ecstasy of the thought that in dying we
may meet--and _meet at once_, before we have had a moment to feel the
awful loneliness of death--the parent, wife, husband, child, friend of
our life, soul of our soul, whom we consigned long ago with breaking
hearts to the grave. Their “beautiful” forms (as that dying lady
beheld her brother and sister) entering our chamber, standing beside
our bed of death, and come to rejoin us for ever,--what words can
describe the happiness of such a vision? It _may_ be awaiting us all.
There is even, perhaps, a certain probability that it is actually the
natural destiny of the human soul, and that the affections which alone
of earthly things can survive dissolution will, like magnets, draw the
beloved and loving spirits of the dead around the dying. I can see no
reason why we should not indulge so ineffably blessed a hope. But, even
if it be a dream, the faith remains, built on no such evanescent and
shadowy foundation, that there is One Friend,--and He the best,--in
whose arms we shall surely fall asleep, and to whose love we may trust
for the reunion, sooner or later, of the severed links of sacred human
affection.


FOOTNOTES:

[36] There is an argument which, I believe, now influences more or less
consciously the minds of many intelligent persons against the belief in
the immortal life. It amounts to this: Granted that there is a God, and
that he is absolutely benevolently disposed toward mankind, it does not
follow (as commonly assumed) that He will bestow immortality on man,
because _it is quite possible that there may be an inherent absurdity
and contradiction in the idea of an immortal finite creature_,--it may,
in short, be no more within the scope of divine power to create an
immortal man than to make a triangle with the properties of a circle.
If we could be first assured that the thing were _possible_, then
arguments derived from the justice and goodness of the Deity might be
valuable, as affording us ground for believing that He will do that
possible thing. But, while it remains an open question whether we are
not talking actual nonsense when we speak of an ever-living created
being, such reflections on the moral attributes of God are beside the
mark. No justice or goodness can be involved in doing that which, in
the nature of things, is impossible.

Now, of course, there is a little confusion here between a _future_
life--a mere _post-mortem_ addition of so many years or centuries to
this mortal existence--and an _immortal life_, which, it is assumed,
will continue either in a series of births and deaths or in one
unbroken life forever and ever. In the former idea, no one can find
any self-contradiction. It is only the latter notion of immortality,
strictly so described, which is suspected of involving a contradiction.
Practically, however, the two ideas must stand or fall together; for
almost every argument for the survival of the soul after death bears
with double force against its extinction at any subsequent epoch of its
existence.

Taking then the future life of a man as, to all intents and purposes,
the immortal life, we are bound to confront the difficulty,--“What
right have we to assume that immortality and creaturehood are
compatible the one with the other?”

_A priori_ argument on such a matter is altogether futile. We know
and can reason literally nothing about it. For anything we could urge
_antecedent to the observation of a man’s actual state_, it was,
apparently, just as probable that he could not be made immortal as
that he could be made so by any conceivable power in the universe. But
we are not quite in the position of lacking all such _a posteriori_
assistance to our judgment. We can see how God has actually constituted
the human race, and the problem is consequently modified to this: “Are
there any signs or tokens that _man_ is meant for something more than
a mere mundane existence?” It is obvious that, if immortality were an
attribute which in the nature of things he could never share, nothing
in his mental or moral constitution would have been made with any
reference to such an unattainable destiny. If, on the other hand, there
be in his nature evidences of a purpose extending beyond the scope
of this life, and stretching out into the limitless perspective of
eternity, then we are authorized to draw the inference that the Author
of his being planned for him a future existence, and, of course, knew
that he might enjoy that divine heritage.

Here, then, the argument lies in manageable shape before us. It is
true we only see a small portion of humanity, as it has yet been drawn
out; but just as mathematicians can determine, from any three given
points, the nature of the curve to which they belong, so we have enough
indications to guide us to a conclusion respecting the character of our
race. In every department of our nature, save our perishable bodies,
we find something which seems to point beyond our threescore years
and ten,--something inconsistent with the hypothesis that those years
complete our intended existence. Our busy intellects, persistently
wrestling with the mysteries of eternity; our human affections craving
for undying love; our sense of justice, born of no past experience of a
reign of Astrea, but resolutely prophesying, _in spite_ of experience,
a perfect judgment hereafter; the measureless meaning which moral
distinctions carry to our consciences; the unutterable longing of our
spirits for union (not wholly unattained even here) with the living
God, the Father of spirits,--all these things seem to show that we are
built, so to speak, on a larger scale than that of our earthly life.
The foundations are too deep and wide, the corner-stones are by far too
massive, if nothing but the Tabernacle of a day be the design of the
Architect. In brief, then, we may admit freely that, for aught we know,
“God could not give to a triangle the properties of a circle,” and
yet, nevertheless, hold our faith undisturbed, since we find that the
line which His hand has actually drawn _is a_ CURVE _already_,--a few
degrees of the circumference of a stupendous circle.

[37] There is an insect, the Lunar Sphinx Moth, which exhibits, in
its first stage, not only the usual prevision for its security while
in the helpless chrysalis state, but a singular foresight of its own
requirements when it shall have become a winged moth. Having made, by
eating its way _upward_ through the pith of a willow, an appropriate
hiding-place, it finds itself with its head in a position in which,
were it to become a moth, it could never push itself down, and escape
at the aperture below. The little creature accordingly, before it
goes to sleep, laboriously turns round, and places its head near the
entrance, where, as a moth, it will make its happy exit into the fields
of air. There seems something curiously akin in the unaccountable
foresight of this insect, of a state of existence it has never
experienced, and the vague and dim sentiment of immortality, common to
mankind since the days of the cave-dwellers of the Stone Age.



“_A VERITABLE HAND-BOOK OF NOBLE LIVING._”


THE DUTIES OF WOMEN.

A COURSE OF LECTURES

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A YEAR OF MIRACLE.

A Poem in Four Sermons.

BY WILLIAM C. GANNETT.


CONTENTS.

  =1. Treasures of the Snow.=
  =2. Resurrection.=
  =3. Flowers.=
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Transcriber’s Notes

Page 91: “consummation of nonenity” changed to “consummation of
nonentity”

Page 127: In the footnote, “performed her tasl” changed to “performed
her task”



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