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THE

BAMPTON LECTURES

FOE 1873.

"It has come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by
many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of
enquiry ; but that it is, now at length, proved to be fictitious.
 On the contrary,  any reasonable man, who will
thoroughly consider the matter, may be as much assured as
he is of his own being, that there is not however so clear a case,
that there is nothing in it." — Extract from Bishop Butler's
Preface to Ms " Analogy of Religion."

CONSIDERED IN
EIGHT LECTURES
PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
m THE YEAR 1873,
ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE
REV. JOHN BAMPTON, M.A.
CANON OF SALISBURY.

REY- I. GREGORY SMITH, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OE BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD ;
VICAR OF MALVERN, AND PREBENDARY OF HEREFORD;
Intfeox of ""Jraxt& ano f hiloaonte" " &piomt of t\t life of tfnr
f Icsmb ^abioOT," "Jta ^trgdito ano 0%* fontus," tfct.

Oxford and Stotuton:
JAMES PARKER AND CO.
1873-

EXTRACT
FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
OP THE LATE
REV. JOHN BAMPTON,
CANON OF SALISBURY.

,  " I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the
" Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of
" Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the
" said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and
" purposes hereinafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and
" appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of
" Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the
" rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, re
parations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all
" the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture
" Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University,
" and to be performed in the manner following :
" I direct and appoint, that, upon the first Tuesday in
" Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads
" of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining
" to the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the
" morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity
" Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in
" Oxford, between the commencement of the last month in
" Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term.

vi EXTRACT FROM CANON BAMPTON's WILL.
" Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lec-
" ture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the follow-
" ing Subjects — to confirm and establish the Christian Faith,
" and to confute all heretics and schismatics — upon the
" divine authority of the holy Scriptures — upon the autho-
" rity of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the
" faith and practice of the primitive Church — upon the Di-
" vinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the
" Divinity of the Holy Ghost — upon the Articles of the
" Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and
" Nicene Creeds.
"Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity
" Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two
" months after they are preached ; and one copy shall be
" given to the Chancellor of the University, and one copy
" to the Head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor
" of the city of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the
" Bodleian Library ; and the expense of printing them shall
" be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given
" for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons ; and the
" Preacher shall not be paid, nor be entitled to the revenue,
" before they are printed.
" Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be quali-
" fied to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he
" hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of
" the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that
" the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture
" Sermons twice."

TO THE
REV. EDWARD HARTOPP CRADOCK, D.D.
PRINCIPAL OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD,
THE
REV. SAMUEL WILLIAM WAYTE, B.D.
PRESIDENT OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,
AND THE
FELLOWS AND SCHOLARS OF THOSE COLLEGES
ARE INSCRIBED.

PREFACE.

npHE pressure of other duties, of which I had no
¦*- anticipation when , I undertook the Lectureship,
has compelled me to modify the original plan of these
Lectures. This may be some excuse for their faults.
I hope that others will do more effectively what
I have here attempted. The moral features of Chris
tianity are an essential part of its evidences, espe
cially for the requirements of our time.
Among the friends to whom I am indebted for
assistance kindly given I have especially to thank
the Eev. J. B. Mozley, D.D., Eegius Professor of
Divinity, Canon of Ch. Ch., Oxford, and the Eev.
Phipps Onslow, M.A., Eector of Upper Sapey, for
valuable suggestions in revising. If I have omitted
acknowledging any obligation to previous writers, it
is an oversight which I regret.
The intelligence of- the death of Mr. John Stuart
Mill arrived while these Lectures were being de
livered. I trust that, in essaying to reply to some
of his opinions, I have never been unjust to one
whose candour and earnest desire to be impartial
command the respect of those who differ from him.
I. G. S.
Malvern,
May 31, 1873.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.
What is Morality ?..... l
LECTURE II.
Virtue is Unselfishness : Vice is Selfishness . .15
LECTURE III.
Christianity and the Appetites . . . .33
LECTURE IV.
Christianity and Ambition . . . .49
LECTURE V.
Christianity and Self-dependence . . .63
LECTURE VI.
The Universality of Christian Morality . . 77
LECTURE VII.
Alleged Defects of Christian Morality . . .87
LECTURE VIII.
Summary and Conclusion . . . . .99

Appendix . . . • . .109

LECTURE I.
hat is Jloralttg ?

ISAIAH xxiv. 18.
" The foundations of the earth do shake."
T70E good or for evil, in these days of ours, nothing
*- is taken for granted. Creed, system, institution,
all must justify their existence. No prescription
however venerable, no authority however sacred, may
plead exemption. The restless tide of thought washes
away the accretions of ages ; the convulsive heavings
of doubt and enquiry lay bare the hidden principles
of belief; "the foundations of the round world are
discovered;" " the foundations shake ;" "the founda
tions are cast down." Surely for good in the end.
Many a stately edifice, the pride of generations past,
comes crashing down, because reared on shifting
sand, "and great is the fall thereof." But that
which stands on the rock will stand unshaken, while
all else is reeling and tottering around.
So, then, Christianity must be prepared to prove
itself. For Christianity is simply nothing, unless it
is reasonable and voluntary. Only a debased and
sentimental Christianity would say, "Feelings are
better than reasons, and render reasons unneces
sary3." Christianity claims no inert acquiescence,
a "People are accustomed to believe, and have been encouraged
in the belief by some who aspire to the character of philosophers,
B

2 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
no servile prostration ; it appeals emphatically to the
conscience. It must stand or fall by this criterion, —
Is it founded on the sand or on the rock ?
I propose in these Lectures to consider the morality
of the Gospel as an evidence for the doctrines of
which it is the accompaniment; nay, of which it
is the substructure and the foundation. Eeligion
without morality is a body without a soul. If the
ethical teaching of Christianity, fairly tested, is
superior to that of other systems, here is one
of the surest arguments, if not the very surest
of all, for Christianity as a whole : and the argu
ment is strengthened, in proportion to the degree
of superiority.
I need not remind you who hear me,' that, outside
the pale of numbers b, proof positive and irrefragable,
is simply not to be had ; and that the most we may
dare to hope for is but a balance of probabilities. If
moral and religious truths admitted of demonstration,
their influence as a probation and discipline of cha
racter would not be what it is. Need I implore you
also to bear in mind the axiom, more than ever need
ful where the question is so wide in its range, so
momentous in its issues, that the justice of the cause
must not be gauged by the inadequacy of its advo-
that their feelings on subjects of this nature" (rules of conduct)
" are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary." —
J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 4.
b If the value of words and their relation to one another could
be defined as exactly as in numbers, to the exclusion of all irrele
vant matter, the inference logically drawn from them would be
as an inference, demonstrable.

I.] WHAT IS MORALITY? 3
cate ; an inadequacy of which he is himself only too
well aware.
Are we over-stating, if we call morality the founda
tion of religion? Surely no. "By their fruits ye
shall know them," are the words of the Founder of
Christianity; and the test holds good, as of His
disciples, so of His doctrine, and, with reverence be
it spoken, of Himself. For what is Faith ? Not the
dry apprehension by the intellect of barren formula?,
but a willing appreciation of what is beautiful and
good, and a trustful surrender of self to one worthy
of love and reverence. What is there blameable in
Unbelief0, but the wilful rejection of truth and holi
ness ? Or, to be more exact, since all believe in one
thing or another, the difference lies in the object of
faith. There is a gradation from the lowest to the
highest faith; from the faith of mere materialism,
a faith, as it has been called, "in man's digestive
powers and in the Everlasting Nothing11,'' up to
the loftiest conceptions of Almighty Holiness and
Love. This connexion between faith and morality, be
tween worship and common things, is an especial
mark of Christianity. In other religions, with which
we are familiar, the daily life was slightly enough
affected by creed or ceremony. The Greek or the
Eoman might go his way from altar or temple,
c The unbelief which comes from circumstances, either within
the man or without, for which he is not responsible, is essentially-
different from the unbelief which comes from the will being warped
by any selfish prepossession. d T. Carlyle.
B2

4 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
satisfied that having poured his libation, or sus
pended his votive offering, he had done all that his
gods could require. But from the first the key-note
of Christianity has been, not hands cleansed by
lustral ablutions, but hearts pure from taint of evil ;
not the praises of the lips only, but a life devoted
to what is good. Inconsistency there is, of course,
among Christians, as elsewhere; and this proneness
to relax the obligation, to put asunder what God
has joined, is encouraged now-a-days by a vague and
unreal way of speaking, as if morality were some
thing different from what is termed spirituality0,
something of a lower sort. Still, be the faults of
Christians what they may, Christianity promulgated
itself as a new morality, though not as a morality
only; it marched over the earth, "conquering and
to conquer," with "Love to God, Love to Man,"
blazoned on its banner ; even its more abstract doc
trines, if not merely gazed at from afar, but realized
by an experimental sympathy, and assimilated into
the believer's being, are an inspiration of the highest
morality'; and, by consent of all, the truest Chris
tianity is there, where the life and the creed are
most truly in accordance. To many minds, if not to
all, the moral loveliness of the Gospel is a stronger
J> c S. T. Coleridge has remarked that the word " Spirit," " as
a power or property seated in the human soul," never occurs in
the New Testament but in context with some moral quality. —
Aids to Reflection, p. 42.
f One of the most obvious illustrations of the connexion between
morality and theology is in the Manichean rejection of the doctrine
of the Incarnation.

I.] WHAT IS MORALITY? 5
proof of its truth than any manifestation of power,
however stupendous.
But here we are confronted by the question, old as
the Sophists g, yet ever new, — What is morality ? We
are told of an almost infinite, quite irreconcilable, di
versity of opinion about the rules of right and wrong.
" No two ages," it is said by a great thinker of our^
own day, "and scarcely two countries, have decided
the question alike; and the decision of one age or
country is a wonder to another V It may be. But
rules are not principles. Eules of morality may
vary, as laws, customs, languages vary. But to
argue from this diversity of rules that there are no
fixed principles of morality would be as reasonable,
as to argue from the difference of dialects that these
have no common origin, or from difference of in
flexion or of syntax, that there are no grammatical
principles at all. Eaces of men, like individuals,
may be predisposed especially to this or that virtue,
repelled especially by this or that vice. The hardy
Scandinavian, the versatile Greek, the subtle Hindu,
s Cf. Arnold's Thucydides, vol. iii. Pref. xxi.
h Mr. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 3. It may be noticed, however,
that Mr. Mill, after saying " what these rules" (of conduct) " should
be, is one of those" (questions) " in which least progress has been
made in resolving," yet allows in the context that we must " except
a few of the most obvious cases." This is an important limitation.
Mr. E. B. Tyler speaks similarly of " the shifting rules by which
men have divided right from wrong." — Primitive Culture, ii. 97.
In other parts of his able and almost exhaustive book he speaks
of the "moral standard" even "in savages," (as, indeed, it is in
children,) being "real enough, but far looser and weaker than
ours." (i. 27.)

6 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
the dull Hottentot, may have each his own idea of
what constitutes a hero, each his own idea of a fool
or a knave. Particular periods in history may canon
ize one moral quality, may proscribe another. One
generation may look too leniently on the inordinate
pursuit of wealth ; another on the inordinate pursuit
of military glory. Even at the same moment, within
the four corners of the same territory, may coexist
side by side almost contradictory standards of moral
excellence and of moral depravity, according to the
prejudices of different classes in society. Notions of
morality vary with the varying predispositions of
time and place, of circumstance and temperament.
Nay, the immediate impulse may vary. An Italian
may be swayed by sentiment chiefly ; a man of more
phlegmatic, less gesthetic habit, by a sterner sense of
duty1. But all this does not prove that there is
no fundamental consent under these discrepancies.
The manner of applying rules of action to particular
cases may vary almost endlessly ; the rules themselves
cannot be stereotyped independently of contingencies
which may arise ; but the great principles of truth,
purity, kindness, are as undisturbed by these vicis
situdes, as the depths of the Atlantic by the storms
which ruffle its surface. The moral sense of even
the wisest and best of men is fallible j, for he is but

1 Cf. J. S. Mill, Inaugural Address to the University of St. An
drew's, Eeb. 1, 1869, p. 43.
' " The fallibility of what is called the moral sense." — J. S. Mill,
On Liberty, p. 5. The " odium theologicum in a sincere bigot," which
Mr. Mill cites in the same sentence " as one of the most unequivocal

I.] WHAT IS MORALITY? 7
one. The collective voice, if not of all humanity,
yet of the humanity most worth listening to k, speaks
with no faltering voice. To this we make our appeal,
"Judicet orbis terrarum !"
How this sense of right and wrong comes to be
what it is, is no part of our question. We need not
pause to ask, whether it is an heirloom from the re
motest past, or the product of a progressive evolution
from savagery to civilisation, just as, to borrow an
illustration1 from an able writer on civilisation, the
sextant is developed from the mediaeval astrolabe, or
the needle-gun from the obsolete matchlock. On the
likelihood of this or that hypothesis we may have an
opinion, and a strong one. But the question itself
is hardly practical. Man, it has been well said, with
all his rare endowments, is what he is, — a being
" with such large discourse,
Looking before and after;"
be his lineage what it may ; even as the athlete
or the philosopher, with all his developed sym
metry of limb or intellect, was once an embryo in
the womb. So conscience is, what we feel it to be,
eases of moral feeling," is simply a case of a diseased moral feeling,
so far as it is really hatred. So far as men in persecuting others
for their religious tenets have believed it "the only way to save
souls," the error, however deplorable, is an error of judgment
rather than of the moral sense, an error not about the end in
view, but about the means to it.
k Cf. Aristotle's appeal to those only who are competent to speak
— ot 7T(Trm8eiiJ,evoi {Nic. Mh., I. iii. 5).
1 E. B. Tyler, Primitive Culture, i. 13.

8 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
a voice claiming to direct, to urge m, to restrain,
even were it as certain as it is problematic, that
conscience had its beginning in blind instincts of
mere utility". Even could it be shewn, that our
conceptions of what we call right and wrong ori
ginated in some mere physical convenience, and have
only by slow transmission from age to age attained
their matured strength as bonds of society, stj.ll the
fact remains — they are here, they are among us, they
are within us ; in thrilling tones heard above the
storm of passions, they assert, not their existence
merely, but their rightful sovereignty over us and
our actions. What matter whether conscience, yearly,
daily, hourly, expanded itself and ripened, as from
the feebleness of infancy, or leapt into being at the
Creative Word, full-grown and panoplied for the
strife of passions, like the virgin-goddess of Athens ?
Questions like these, as unnecessary for our present
purpose as they are interminable, may well be left
on one side. We take our stand on what is, not on
m Mr. J. S. Mill strangely narrows the office of conscience, by
regarding it mainly as " negative," ..." with most men a power
chiefly in the way of restraint, — a power which acts rather in
staying our hands from any great wickedness, than by the direc
tion it gives to the general course of our desires and sentiments."
Inaugural Address to the University of S. Andrew's, p. 43. This
is, indeed, to bring against " the conscience of most men" the
same very grave accusation which Mr. Mill elsewhere ( On Liberty,
p. 29) brings against Christianity, of attending to the passive
duties of life to the neglect of those of an active kind.
a The fact that expediency and right as a rule coincide in their
consequences, is no proof that right is based upon expediency.
" Honesty is the best policy ;" but, it has been well said, " the
man is a knave who acts on that motive."

L] WHAT IS MORALITY? 9
what may have been. We appeal to the normal con
science of civilisation.
What, then, do we mean by morality? Only the
relations of man to man, or his relations also to a
power above himself? We may not exclude these
latter altogether. It will be said, that we are im
porting alien matter into the argument; nay, that
we are begging the question. Not so : we do not
assume, in so doing, the truth of this or that theology,
nor even that there is any truth in any theology at
all. We argue simply from what we see and know ;
we take theology as exhibited practically in its bear
ings on life and character. Nor are we importing
anything extraneous; for there is a mutual action
and reaction of morality and theology ; each is largely
shaped and coloured by the other ; nay, so inextri
cably are they blended, that you cannot sever them
without violence to both. To men of different creeds
duty has not the same meaning. The man who does
not believe in a God, or, what is in fact the same
thing, does not believe that he knows anything about
Him, is a foundling on the earth, without a tie to
parents whom he has never known. The man taught
that his gods are cruel, false, licentious, indolent, or
capricious, is a son whose father's example conflicts
with all that is noblest in himself0. The man who
0 trov xph Tideo-dai ravra, Ttov 8' alveiv, orav
ra 6eV iiraivav tovs Oeoiis evpa Kaxovs;
Soph., Phil, 451.
Compare Horace's theology (Sat. I., v. 101) with its practical
result {Epist. I., vi. 1).
For the Pagan idea <p66vepov to edov, see the story of Polycrates

10 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
looks up to a just, pure, beneficent Deity has, in love
and reverence for Him, the strongest incentive to
justice, purity, benevolence. Even though the actions
may seem to coincide, the motive-principle does not ;
and motives, not actions, are the business of morality.
Therefore, while we fix our attention chiefly on mo
rality as ruling the relations of a man to himself and
to his fellows, we may not in fairness close our eyes
to the relation in which he stands to his God.
But we are asked what we mean by Christian mo
rality p ? and we are told that the morality of one
sect is not that of another. True, speaking super
ficially. A Scotch Covenanter, for instance, and a
Spanish monk of the Inquisition may easily be drawn
so as to present very different types of morality. But
while the points of contrast stand out from the surface,
the points of identity are, if we look within, deeper
and more real. This at least will be granted. If we
find a principle of conduct which is a common feature
in the several groups, so strangely, sadly sundered, of
the Christian family, not peculiar to one period, one
race, one school of thought, one set of conditions, — this
is Christian morality. The fatalism of the Calvinist,
— the fear of God which seems almost to " cast out "
the love of God in Puritanism, — the austerity, the
blind submission to authority of Monachism, may be
long severally to a one-sided development of Chris
tianity. But the love of enemies, the forgiveness of
injuries, are duties recognised in theory, if not always
of Samos (Herod., Hist., iii. 41), and the speech of Artahanus to
Xerxes (lb., vii. 10). * J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 28.

L] WHAT IS MORALITY? 11
in practice, by Christians everywhere. We need not
go to chapter and verse in Gospel and Epistle, nor
to the sayings of Saint and Doctor, however eminent ;
but we take the pervading dominant intention of the
records of Christianity, and the essential moral unity
of Christendom. Even in the words of Him who is
the Truth, who " spake as never man spake," we look
in vain for an elaborated code of rules, or even of
principles. It is indeed here, in the life and teaching
of Christ, that we find the fullest embodiment of our
morality ; if, that is, we realise that He was indeed
made " like unto us in all things," and that His being
"without sin" was not immunity from temptations,
but a triumph over them ; if, instead of imagining
Him while He walked the earth clad in armour of
proof against evil, something between God and man,
like the demigod of antiquity,
" Too fair to worship, too divine to love ;"
we realise that He laid His glory by for our sake,
and was indeed God made Man. It is in Christ Jesus
that we see the "Beauty of Holiness11." Still, it
cannot be too often repeated, He came not to found
a school of philosophy, but to live and die in entire
self-sacrifice for others. His life on earth contains
the germs of all that is good, as the seed-vessel con
tains the fruit and flower ; but it is a suggestion, not
a demonstration of what we ought to be; that men
should learn not a parrot-lesson of performing. certain
q Por the present argument it- is enough, if the Gospel narrative
is accepted as authentic in its outlines of the character and teaching
of Christ.

12 WHAT IS MORALITY? [Lect.
acts, but a habit of willing with a certain intention ;
should become good, not merely do good things.
So, then, let us take morality in its fullest sense,
as embracing not only what man owes to man, but
what he believes himself to owe to a higher power,
so far as this affects his human relations. Let us
mean by morality those fundamental principles of
right and wrong, which are of general, if not abso
lutely universal, acceptance. Let us understand by
Christian morality, the standard of morality generally
accepted among Christians. In attempting our com
parison of the Christian morality with that of other
systems, let us be careful to discriminate between
what is essential and what is accidental, between
what is of general and what of only particular ap
plication, between what is really distinctive of a
creed and what is not. On the one hand, we must
not impute to Christianity any moral excellence pre
viously existing in full vigour, any amelioration
really due to some other cause, — for instance, to
nationality or to the progress of civilisation. On
the other hand, we must deduct from the claims of
systems posterior to Christianity, whether at Eorne',
Alexandria, or Paris, what they owe to the Christian
atmosphere which they breathe, to the unacknowledged
influences of the very discipline which they repudiate
with scorn. Let us measure a system, not as it may
have been caricatured by its opponents, but as it is
seen in its best specimens; not contrasting, as has been
done, John Knox with Pericles8, nor, as we might
r See Note A. " J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 361.

I.] WHAT IS MORALITY? 13
be tempted to do, Nero with St. Louis of France. Let
us mark not the highest types only of a morality,
but the average level of its proficiency ; not so much
the one or two solitary achievements of a system,
as its results ordinarily; not merely what it has
aspired to in theory, but what, though only too often
thwarted and baffled by human frailty, it has actually
done. Above all, may the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit
of Love, guard us from unjust disparagement of what
is really honourable, wherever we may meet it ; guard
us from stinting or grudging our praise to those who
deserve it, whether friends or foes of the faith which
we cherish. Bow down we must in lowest reverence
before the only faultless holiness which the world
has ever seen ; but let us hail with thankfulness the
scintillations, faint and broken though they be, which
attest in all times and in all places the never-ceasing
struggle of light against darkness, and which con
verge from saint and sage in every quarter under
heaven, to weave a crown of glory for the brows of
Him who said, "I am not come to destroy, but to
fulfil."

LECTURE II.
Uice is Selfishness ? Virtue is SEnselfishitess.

ST. MATTHEW x. 39.
" He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it."
rFHAT morality is not a name, but a thing ; that
*- a comparison may fairly be drawn between the
morality of the Gospel and the morality of other sys
tems ; and that the truth of a creed is evidenced by
the soundness of its morality ; so far we have ad
vanced already. Bear with me, if I ask you to pause
yet on the threshold. The more cautiously we move
at first, the surer, and swifter, too, will be our pro
gress in the end.
We want a clear conception to start with, of some
one essential principle of right and wrong. Granted
that there is such a thing as duty or responsibility ;
that the word "ought" is not a mere expletive in
our vocabulary ; — still, we have to ask the limits and
the nature of this responsibility. How far is man
responsible for his conduct? And what is it that
makes his conduct right or wrong ?
It may, I suppose, be taken for granted, that, just
as in our ordinary speech the adverb is the most im
portant word of the sentence, so the conditions of an

16 VICE IS SELFISHNESS .- [Lect.
action qualify it as good or evil; that responsibility
begins and ends within the bounds of possibility, or,
in other words, that an action must be judged ac
cording to what is possible in the circumstances;
that the act of doing is more important than the thing
done, if for no other reason, because productive of
a moral habit the parent of many similar actions;
that the action is, as it has been well expressed, but
the clock-finger of the process going on within a man ;
that, in short, morality is to be found in the inten
tion, not in the act. All these are axioms which
are not of yesterday °. We see and feel, besides, what
may be termed a strong family-likeness in the cate
gory of the virtues which the moralist approves and
commends, and something of the same deformity in
the vices which he reprobates. Any kind of fault,
if unchecked, seems invariably to lead on to others,
which might even have been thought diametrically
opposite. The tender-hearted man becomes hard as
a flint, in the gratification of his lust. The man who
is scrupulously just becomes unjust to others under
the spell of rancour and animosity0. Morality, in
fact, like everything else, must be taken as a whole ;
it is no aggregation of anomalous precedents ; it obeys
a law ; it is quickened by a living principle. What
then is it, which underlies the manifold forms of what
we call morally right and wrong, and gives to each
its being ?
• Arist., Hth. Nicom., I. vii. 14; I. x. 13 ; I. vi. 15.
b Similarly, there is a close intcr-dependencc of virtues, at first
sight unconnected, e.g. of courage and purity.

II.] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 17
We must have recourse to psychology. There is
no need, happily for us, even to set foot on that
mysterious domain, where the transcendentalist
" Finds no end in wandering mazes lost."
But, while questions of ontology, of the existence
or non-existence of time and space, and so forth, are
far removed indeed from any practical bearing on our
question, psychology is as real and practical a study
as any other ; and to the moralist it is indispensable.
For how can questions about man's responsibility be
answered, without first defining what he is? And
this we must attempt to do, avoiding, so far as pos
sible, technicalities of expression.
Let us frankly concede, at once, to materialism,
all that is not really tenable. As physical science
extends its researches, it seems scarcely to admit of
question, that much in our composition which has
hitherto been vaguely regarded as immaterial and
spiritual, is really the direct result of certain opera
tions in our physical organization, which are as me
chanical as the revolutions of the wheels in a watch.
But in this concession we are not for one moment
surrendering the great, and, as I most firmly believe,
the inexpugnable truth of man's free-will, of man's
responsibility. That which differentiates man from the brutes
is not the faculty of reasoning, — for they reason
too, and what we are pleased to call instinctive
sagacity is often our own inductive process in its
lowest, homeliest form. Nor yet is it our emotive
c

18 VICE IS SELFISHNESS : [Lect.
nature, — for even our nobler qualities, fidelity or
courage, for instance; find their counterpart in other
creatures. It is this. While the dog apparently
knows not whether he is faithful or faithless, and
the elephant reasons to all appearance without any
consciousness of his cleverness, man is introspective,
— is able to detach himself from himself, — is always,
more or less explicitly, sitting in judgment on him
self, passing sentence on himself, awarding to himself
praise or blame. In brief, man is conscious.
So, then, let us regard the personality of each one
of us as co-extensive and identical with this conscious
ness of willing. Granted, that our moral sentiments
are not intuitive, not innate ; or only innate, as the
invisible writing, which cannot be deciphered with
out being held to the fire, or as the characters, well-
nigh obliterated, of a palimpsest. Granted, that
the most complicated concatenations of consecutive
thought may all be resolved into the bare perception
that this and that are like or unlike, identical or not.
Granted, that the many-tinted play of the emotions
may all be analyzed into a mere liking or disliking
for this or that object presented by the senses im
mediately, or mediately by the intellect. But the
life, the personality of each resides in his individual
consciousness. All else, even within the man, is but
as the dress which he wears, the apparatus with
which he is equipped, the dwelling assigned to him
for his sojourn. His faculties, of intellect, of emo
tion, are not himself. He is a machine, if you will ;
but a machine with a living person continually ad-

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 19
justing, directing, controlling it ; and that person
is himself.
This way of regarding human nature, as it accords
with the investigations of modern science, is also
essentially in accordance with Christianity. So long
as we suppose that a man's intellectual ability or
feebleness, his emotional tastes or distastes, are him
self, rather than something belonging to him, for
the use or abuse of which he is responsible, so long
a grave difficulty must remain, for those who believe
in a future state. This strange disparity, which we
see around us on every side, of mental and moral
endowments, how is this to be reconciled with our
belief in an identity of existence which survives the
grave ? Must not the inferiority of capacity, which is
a clog and a hindrance here, be a clog and a hindrance
hereafter? But once let us grasp the idea, that the
faculties, intellectual and moral, of a Shakespeare,
say, or of a Plato, are like his money, or his dress,
or his bodily health, a part of what he has, rather
than of what he is, a property entrusted to his keep
ing, more to one, and less to another, like the talents
in the parable, in every case to be made the most
of — then we can understand how the street arab from
the Seven Dials, who starts in the race of life so
grievously weighted, or the peasant who plods along
with disqualifications in their own way as serious,
may, if they do their best, find themselves one day
on a level with the philosopher and the statesman,
who have lived and died faithful to their high calling,
and this, without ceasing to be themselves.
c2

20 VICE IS SELFISHNESS: [Lect.
It may be said, that in thus surrendering to mate
rialism so much of our being, we are opening the
door to the surrender of all ; tracing on the sand an
arbitrary line, which the next wave of scientific pro
gress will efface with its touch. Not so. We are
merely exchanging an untenable position for one
which is proof against assault. We draw the line
between matter and spirit, where conscious volition
commences ; and the distinction is no arbitrary, no
merely theoretical one. It is founded on a fact,
which is, I think, generally admitted. Will any one
say, that a man is responsible for the images, fair
or foul, which flit across the retina of his intellect,
except so far as he allows these or those to linger
there? Or for the desires within him, noble or
ignoble, crying out to be appeased, except so far
as he gives ear to the one or the other? It is be
cause he prefers, because he selects, because — two
courses lying before him — he lets himself be drawn
to the worse or the better, because by a supreme and
irrevocable fiat, an inheritance from his Creator, he
pronounces his deliberate decision, that the idea
figured to his conception by the brain, and urged
by all the eager advocacy of the heart, is to be con
summated into action, and, because in so deciding
he knows that he is deciding for good or for evil,
herein is his responsibility.
But all this, we are told, is exploded. The will
acts, it is allowed, "in accordance with motive;"
but to suppose that the will can " break loose from
continuity and act without cause" is as absurd, it

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 21
is added, as to suppose " a balance sometimes acting
in the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty
of turning by itself, without or against its weight0."
But we do not say that the will is " acting without
cause ; " for the will itself is an item in the causa
tion; nay, to omit the will is to omit the most im
portant factor in the calculation. We do not say
that the will is "breaking loose from continuity,"
for the will itself is a connecting link in the chain
of continuity. With contending motives equal, as
sometimes happens, a man would be as powerless
to stir one way or the other, as the ass between the
two bundles of hay, but for the intervention of the
will. Even with one motive, to all appearance and
by all laws of experience outweighing the other,
the will, simply by its own adhesion, can reverse the
balance. The tender maiden chooses rather to en
dure the rack or the dungeon, than succumb to the
torturer. The veteran confessor for his faith frus
trates all the hopes of his disciples by preferring
shame to suffering. The scales are adjusted ; the
weightier motive, be it of a better or a worse sort,
an appetite, an ambition, a self-devotion to some un
selfish cause, is sinking down ; the lighter kicks the
beam; but the will, like the victorious Gaul, flings
its sword into the scale, and all is changed in a
moment. True, the weights in these scales have no
fixed intrinsic value, but one which varies subjec
tively to each of us. Even causes external to us,
hereditary predispositions, early influences, local asso-
b E. B. Tyler, Primitive Culture, i. 3.

22 VICE IS SELFISHNESS: [Lect.
ciations, all must be counted in. True, habitual in
dulgence may give to a propensity a force not its
own, may even make it, by long persistence, a tyrant
of that to which it should be a servant and an in
strument. True, the will may become so enfeebled
in its miserable thraldom that only by an extra
ordinary effort can it be free. Still, after all, the
final verdict in that little court, where each man
presides, arbiter of his own actions, of his own happi
ness, is not in the power of any propensity or in
clination, but rests with himself, and resides in the
conscious energy of his will °.
One part of our question is answered. But what
is it which makes this exercise of volition good or
evil morally ?
The whole universe, real or phenomenal, it matters
not for our present enquiry how we style it, if con
sidered from the stand-point, at which we have ar
rived, of each man's personality, resolves itself for
him into self and nonself ; and the faculties, mental
and moral, already spoken of, are, through the in
strumentality of sense, the media of attraction or re
pulsion between the world without and the smaller
world of each individual existence. Here, then, we
have a principle, wide as the range of our conceptions,
simple as all first principles are, determining the
moral character of all that we do, say, feel. When
the individual, using his faculties as a prehensile
instrument, draws the outer world to himself, there —
in one shape or another, in greater or less degree,
c See Note B.

II.] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 23
disguise it, deny it, as we may — there is selfish
ness. When the individual, by the same media
of communication, lets himself be transported out of
himself, and drawn to the world without, there is
the opposite of selfishness, call it what you please,
self-devotion, self-renunciation, unselfish love, charity.
" Drawn," you will say, " to something evil — can
that be virtuous ?" Stay. To say that a man is drawn
to anything vicious, is simply a loose and inaccurate
way of speaking. The pure, high-minded artist is
drawn to the beauty which he worships. The volup
tuary, the miser, the tyrant, are stamped as vicious
in this, because they are, each and all, absorbing into
themselves the world around them, to glut their in
satiable cravings for pleasure, wealth, power a. Things
and persons e. In these words is a practical touchstone
for us and our motives. The ideally vicious man re
cognises no personality but his own. Outside him
self all is impersonal. Others exist only as things
for his pleasure or convenience f. On the other hand,
the unselfish see everywhere in the world around them
the claims, not to be slighted, of beings like them
selves. Self seems as nothing in presence of all these
manifold demands on their sympathy. Far from re
garding their fellows as inanimate chattels, the world
to them teems with the sacredness of life. In the
noble Words of one, from whom I find myself some-
d St, James, Epist. iv. 1 ; cf. Carlyle, French Revolution, bk. ii. \
ch. viii. p. 49. e The idea is, I think, Bentham's.
1 The wickedness which takes account of other personalities
only to torture them is a monstrosity.

24 VICE IS SELFISHNESS .¦ [Lect.
times compelled to dissent, they feel " the miserable
smallness of self, — the poorness and insignificance
of human life, if it is all to be spent in making
things comfortable for ourselves and our kin, in
raising ourselves and them one step higher on the
social ladder g."
This is no mere theory. Take any statute-book
that you please, from the Sinaitic decalogue to the
latest codification of modern legislators. The things
forbidden, — murder, theft, adultery, and their cog
nates, spring from self disregarding the rights of
other personalities, and into this are resoluble. Pass
from overt acts to the virtues and vices of moralists,
— cruelty, lust, deceit, what are these but self caring
only for self, and closing its eyes to the existence of
others as persons. Or take those two widely-diver
gent, mutually-abhorrent affections, which we, as if
the inconsistency of our hearts must brand itself on
the mintage of our lips, class together under the ho
monym of love, desecrating the highest attribute of
humanity — the love which is indeed hatred, for it
would make a holocaust of the happiness of those
whom it professes to cherish, to feed the devouring
flame of its own passion — and the self-immolating
love — it is no poet's dream, it can be, has been, is —
which "holds its life but as a pawn" for others,
and which, in the Apostle's fervent words, would
even wish itself " accursed " to secure another's
happiness. Are we not justified in saying, that
8 J. S. Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew's University, p. 44.

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 25
selfishness and unselfishness, the bane and the an
tidote, grow side by side at the very root of all
within us which we term good and evil h ?
But, it must be kept in mind, this self-abnegation
for the sake of others is no suicidal frenzy, no self-
annihilation, no absorption of self into the soul of
the universe. For what in that case would be left
for love to live for, to energise upon ? Obviously,
unless the result is to be an utter vacuity of inani
tion, each one is bound to observe the law of self-
preservation, for this very reason, that he may live
for others ; is bound to look to his own interests,
that he may live for others more effectively. Nor
is this limitation incompatible with the purest dis
interestedness. The motive makes all the difference.
If a man saves, that he may have to give to those
who need ; or economises health and strength, that he
may work longer for others ; or studies self-culture,
that he may better play his part in life's drama, not
to catch the plaudits of the audience, but to carry
out the glorious conceptions of the great Designer, —
he will do more good to others in the end, than by
reckless almsgiving, or by defiance of hygienic laws,
or by shuffling through his part on life's stage, be
cause it is his own. Here is the " gulf" that is "fixed"
h Contrast St. John xiii. 34, "A new commandment I give
unto you, That ye love one another ; as I have loved you, that
ye also love one another," with
e>s Tras tis dvrbv tov nekas paWov (piKet,
ol p-tv biKalws, ol de Ka\ Kep&ovs x&piv.
Eurip., Med., 86.

26 VICE IS SELFISHNESS : [Lect.
between faith and fanaticism. Both have the same
motive principle. Both give up self for others. Faith
is reasonable, and takes account of the means indis
pensable to the end. Fanaticism is blind, and de
spises them. Here, in this due adjustment of what
have been called our centripetal and centrifugal forces,
is that harmony of love and order which the artist
sighs for. Moralists have spoken of inordinancy as
that which vitiates affections innocent otherwise, or
even laudable \ But it is not the amount of energy
bestowed which makes them wrong, it is the motive
which lurks at their core. The highest ideal which
we can imagine of goodness and greatness is surely
this, entire self-devotion for the good of others as the
motive power, with wise regard to every considera
tion which can in any way be made to subserve
this end.
One word more, before we apply this cardinal prin
ciple to our enquiry. It may be objected, even by
those who admit man's free-agency and his respon
sibility in volition, that we are, after all, only sub
stituting one kind of selfishness for another ; that the
man whose motive is love, is really pleasing himself
as much as he who thinks only of his own ease, ad
vancement, self-improvement; that, in brief, he is
doing what he likes best. The objection in one sense
neither admits of any answer, nor requires one. Of
course, every exercise of the will implies a choice and
a preference. It is a tautology, a truism to say so.
1 "Strong impulses are perilous only when not properly ba
lanced." — /. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 35.

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 27
The will selecting what it does not like best is an
impossibility, except indeed, which is virtually no
exercise of the will at all, under constraint of a
physical necessity. So far no answer can be, need
be given. But how is the will to be brought into
this state of cheerfully surrendering the things
dearest, because nearest, to itself for the sake of
others? By no short nor easy process. Even in
those who are most happily constituted the prepara
tory discipline is a work of time and toil ; of stern
battling with desires and appetites. I will not say
it is a constant crushing down of rebellious cravings,
for the unselfishness which we are speaking of is not
that dreary silence of human affections which some
call peace j, but a harmony of all their voices; it is
a constant "keeping them in subjection k." Wisest
and holiest can tell us, if we ask of them, that the
attainment of perfect unselfishness is, like the artist's
pursuit of ideal beauty, a life-long striving towards
an ever-receding goal; it is self victorious over self;
it is self victor and vanquished in one.
It will be my endeavour in subsequent lectures to
apply this criterion of unselfishness to Christianity.
But we are asked, how we dare to claim this as
a specialty of Christianity, we who have seen rising
before our eyes a system which protests against
Christianity as selfish, and boasts itself more pure
from self-love; a system which, though an exotic
in England, yet approves itself to the thoughts and
> "Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." — Tac., Agric.
k 1 Cor. ix. 27.

28 VICE IS SELFISHNESS : [Lect.
usages of a civilization, such as we have arrived at,
and is at this moment not without an indirect prac
tical influence in this country ?
Now, before meeting the charge of self-seeking
advanced against Christianity, it must be premised
that "Altruism" is itself an offspring and a product
of Christianity. Whether, indeed, Altruism could
ever have been but for the fostering care of eighteen
centuries of Christianity, and whether it can exist
in any vigour apart from Christianity, may fairly
be doubted.
But, waiving this, let us look more closely at
what "Altruism" means. What is its motive and its
mainspring? I think we shall not be doing an in
justice to the Positivist, if we say that his "Altruism"
means doing good to another, because this will be
the good of all. But this is by-no-means tantamount
to saying, " Do well to others, because it is their
due." Prudence or amiability may make it easy for
any one to confer benefits which will redound to the
good of all, the benefactor included ; but a recipro
city of favours like this, a co-operative partnership for
mutual advantages, is something different from the
teaching of words like these, "He that loveth his
life shall lose it ; he that loseth his life for My sake
shall find it."
Let it be noticed, besides, that in proposing love
for Himself as the motive to His disciples, Christ is
proposing a yet higher motive than love for our
fellow- creatures. And this for two reasons. First,
because the object proposed is more truly worthy of

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 29
love. Next, because the sincerity and the reality
of love are then most tried and proved when it is for
one unseen, and apprehended only by an effort of
thought, even as the remembrance of an absent friend
is a better proof of love than constancy to one whom
daily associations make it almost impossible to be un
mindful of. So far, I think, it will be allowed that
Altruism falls short of the motive which Christ pro
poses to His disciples : " Bear all, do all, be all for
My sake1," and "that men may glorify your Father
which is in heaven"1."
But exception is taken to the promises of the
Gospel : " He that loseth his life shall find it."
And to this I must ask your patience while I devote
to it a little space, before I conclude.
Let all be conceded that in fairness ought to be.
Yes. The Gospel of Christ does hold out a hope of
future retribution ; does enforce its precepts with a
blessing and a curse, — with a promise of great re
ward, with a threat of severe punishment. Still,
even if it must be granted that what has been
called " other- worldliness," is really a modified form
of selfishness, and that those wjiose motive is only
the hope of heaven, the fear of hell, are in their
own way as selfish as the miser or the voluptuary,
are not really "lovers of that which is good," let
us pause before we believe that a creed which
again and again reiterates the great principle of
1 St. Matt. v. 11 ; x. 18, 22, 39 : St. Mark viii. 35; xiii. 9. 13 :
St. Luke vi. 22 ; ix. 24; xxi. 12, 17 : St. John xiii. 38 ; xv. 31.
m St. Mark v. 16.

30 VICE IS SELFISHNESS: [Lect.
self-sacrifice can belie itself by encouraging a mer
cenary spirit in its adherents. That some believers
in Christianity allow their thoughts to dwell too
much on its prizes and penalties, that we are all in
danger of doing so, is no fault of Christianity, un
less, indeed, Christianity puts these things first and
foremost. This can hardly be affirmed. They are
always there, these hopes and fears, in the Gospel
of Christ, but they are in the background of the pic
ture. The " outer darkness" reserved for the unholy,
far from casting its gloom over all the canvas, is
shrouded by a veil of mystery. The mansions of
the blest are only seen faintly and far away, like
the distant hills of the promised land seen by the
seer on Pisgah. Again and again Christ warns those
who would follow Him, that they must "count the
cost n " of what they are doing ; that they must nerve
themselves to take up the Cross, to bear the Cross
without a murmur as He bore it up the slope of
Calvary, to immolate upon the Cross the self-love
which hinders perfect self-renunciation, even as He
offered Himself upon it. If Christianity ever seems
to allure its disciples by its promises, to scare them
by its threats, it is but as an earthly parent, well-
knowing all the time that virtue, unless sought for
its own sake, is not virtue, yet strengthens the
native weakness of purpose in his child, by wise
apportionment of praise and blame, of reward and
punishment, till the lesson has been learned, so hard
to learn rightly, that, though duty and happiness are
n St. Luke xiv. 28.

IL] VIRTUE IS UNSELFISHNESS. 31
one, duty must always be sought first, without even
a sidelong glance at consequences.
Above all, the nature of the reward promised must
be considered. It is distant, and therefore cannot be
grasped even in thought without that "patient con
tinuance in well doing," which is the only test, the
only discipline of a resolute will. It is unknown,
and therefore can have no charm except for those,
who, in the trustfulness of love, cast themselves on
His Word, whom they believe to be too wise, too
true, too loving, to deceive them. It is not merely
unlike vulgar notions of happiness, but contradictory
of them ; no prolongation of earthly joys, but a trans
figuration of them ; and therefore it appeals to those
only who act from conviction. It is not the hire
ling's coin, grudgingly worked for, grudgingly paid
down, but a gracious Master's approval of willing
service, — no bait to attract half-hearted votaries to
swell His train, — no vision of sensual joys or of
earthly dominion, — it is only for those, who, in re
nouncing all that the selfish deem life worth having
for, can find outside themselves the happiness which
they have not sought. For
" Love is Heaven, and Heaven is Love."

LECTURE III.
Chrtstianitg auto tfje appetites.

GALATIANS v. 24.
" They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its
affections and lusts."
TF, in accordance with principles indicated in pre-
-1- vious lectures, we are to test a system of morality
by the position and attitude of self to the world with
out, it will be convenient to classify the emotions :
for through these the individual is attracted to, or re
pelled by, the objects of which he is cognisant ; by
these he is moved to draw them to himself or to
repel ; while, as has been said already, in the assent s
which the will in each instance consciously gives or
withholds, the essence of morality resides.
Without pretence of philosophical exactness, it will
be enough for practical purposes, if we adopt an old
threefold division of the emotions, according to the
various objects on which they are exercised. There
are the bodily appetites, as they are called; there
are, what may be called, the desires of personal ag
grandisement ; there are the desires, in regard to
which, in a stricter sense than usual, self is at once
centre and circumference, which end, as they begin,
in self, which seek their consummation in a serene
abstraction from external things. Thus the great
D

34 CHRISTIANITY 'AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
typical temptations of the Son of Mana ascend pro
gressively from the lower appetites, and from the
desire of earthly dominion, to the selfishness of self-
dependence. Obviously, in this enumeration the appetites of the
body are the lowest; they are common to man with
the brute; common, among men, to the coarsest or
ganizations with the finest. Not that vices of this
class are of necessity the worst. On the contrary,
if a comparison must be made, and if the old saying,
" corruptio optimi pessima," is true, the perversion
of higher impulses is yet more fatal to moral excel
lence than a grosser kind of depravity. Caliban,
with all his brutality, moves our pity even more than
our detestation. The sensuality of the brute-man is
not so hideous as the fiendish malignity of Mephis-
topheles. How, then, does Christianity deal with these appe
tites of the body ?
It would be idle to set about proving that Chris
tianity preaches temperance and purity. If there
have been here and there in history fanatics who
have sullied the name of Christianity by "turning
the grace of God into lasciviousnessb," they are too
exceptional and too inconsiderable to be noticed.
Equally futile would it be, and most unjust, to at
tempt to deny, that these same virtues have been
inculcated outside the pale of Christianity. Glowing
panegyrics on sobriety and purity, grave cautions
against excess, lofty aspirations after the repose and
' St. Luke iv. 3—12. b gt- Jude Ep 4_

III.] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 35
serenity which wait on appetites subdued, may be
quoted from the precepts of Greek and Eoman phi
losophers, or of Oriental mystics. It may be possible
even to find a parallel elsewhere to what is more dis
tinctive of Christianity, its earnest and repeated warn
ings on the necessity of being pure in thought as
well as in deed, of guarding the secret well-springs
of intention from pollution. If the Gospel teaches,
"Blessed are the pure in heart0," and "He that
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath already
committed adultery with her in his heart d;" so
Buddhism teaches that it is wrong even to think,
in regard to a married woman, that her husband is ,
a fortunate man e ; so the Eoman satirist f tells us,
that the man who meditates a crime is guilty of the
action. Where, then, is the difference ? It is here — in the
motive, which is the life and the essence of the pre
cept. Of all the passages which might be culled from
the Christian Scriptures on this subject, the words
in the text seem to declare most emphatically the
Christian's motive for temperance and purity. " They
that are Christ's," — so writes St. Paul to his con
verts in Galatia — "have crucified the flesh with its
affections and lusts." f Ye are Christ's, — here is the V
° St. Matt. v. 8.
d St. Matt. v. 28. Mr. F. W. Newman calls this " an extrava
gant and obscure way of speaking." — Defective Morality of the New
Testament, p. 25.
e I cannot recollect in what writer on Buddhism I found this
statement. f Juvenal, Satir. xiii. 209, 10; cf. Herodot., Hist., vi. 86.
D 2

36 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
motive ; and, because ye are no longer " your own,"
but His, who died for you, therefore your affections
and lusts, being a part of the nature dedicated by
you to Him, to whom you owe everything, must be
"kept under and brought into subjection6," even
as He for your sake subjected Himself to the death
upon the Cross. Christianity regards our human
nature as identified with the divine in Christ ; " Ye
are members of His Body, of His flesh11." "Shall
I then take the members of Christ and make them
the members of a harlot i ?" Christianity regards the
human body as a shrine for the presence of Christ
by His indwelling Spirit. Our mortal bodies are
"temples of the Holy Ghost j." How, then, can we
desecrate what Christ in His love has hallowed for
Himself? Others may tell us of the injurious effects
of intemperance to health of body and of mind, of
the misery which it entails, of its degradation. But
Christ would have us temperate, not so much from
calculation of consequences to ourselves ; not so much
with a view to our own comfort and convenience ;
not so much even from respect to the dignity of our
nature, as because intemperance is a detraction from
e 1 Cor. ix. 27. h Ephes. v. 30.
1 1 Cor. vi. 15. Mr. F. "W. Newman, in his ingenious but un
practical essay on the Defective Morality of the New Testament,
represents St. Paul as "propounding chastity only as a spiritual
or transcendent duty, binding therefore on the saints but not on
common men," (but "saints" was the designation of Christians
generally,) and proceeds even to argue that, according to the Apo
stle's teaching, fornication with a Christian woman would not be
sinful [!]. (p. 24.) J 1 Cor. iii. 16.

III.] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 37
that willing service which we owe to Him, a breach
of our allegiance, a faithlessness in our love.
The comparative feebleness of other motives is
attested by results, as "the tree is known by its
fruits." Motives of self-interest are as powerless to
quell the insubordination of the appetites as the
" seven green withs" of the Philistines to bind down
the son of Manoah. For if it is due merely to
myself, if I owe it to myself alone, this temperance,
I am debtor and creditor in one ; nor can any one
gainsay my right to relax the obligation, if I please,
or even to cancel it altogether, giving myself a full
and free acquittance. If, with my eyes open, and
seeing what the end of the bargain must be, I still
choose to squander the happiness which is my birth
right for a passing gratification, who shall complain,
for, who is wronged? But if I am bartering away
what is not mine but another's, the health and
strength which ought to be expended in His ser
vice to whom I am bound by every tie of gratitude
and love, if I am prostituting affections which are
of right His alone, then I have a motive which can
quench the fire within, if anything in the world can.
A Cicero or a Seneca may descant on the charms of
temperance, on the folly and baseness of excess ; but
the impotency of their eloquence is evidenced not by
one, or two, or three vicious emperors only, but by
the wholesale debauchery of an Empire. The founder
of Buddhism may hold up to the eyes of his disciples
a dazzling vision of the grandeur of a superhuman
mastery over the senses, of a godlike isolation of the

38 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
spirit from the material world, but the myriads of
India are the slaves of an impure superstition. The
Koran may enjoin temperance, but Mahometanism
is a byword for sensuality. Even the sterner mo
rality of the Mosaic law cannot command obedience,
or emancipate man from the tyranny of himself. It
was "a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ";" but
the appetites were unruly pupils. The ceaseless and
reiterated rebukes of the prophets, in the later days
of the national existence, are but an inevitable sequel
to the old story of Israelitish contact with Moab, of
Israel's wisest, greatest kings seduced by fleshly lusts
from the self-control which they could extol, but
could not practise. Nothing short of that passionate
yet stedfast devotion to Christ, which is the answer
of the soul to His self-sacrificing love, and which the
Apostle speaks of as "constraining1" us, can keep
down these volcanic forces, for ever making havoc
and anarchy in our nature by their wild upheavings.
What can be more attractive at first sight, or, so
far as it goes, more compact and complete, than the
teaching of Epicurus ? Virtue is the highest pleasure,
the only true happiness. Be virtuous, and you have
all that you can desire. But the charmer charms in
vain. Men will not see it ; or, rather, they will ac
cept the half of his doctrine, and refuse the rest.
Pleasure shall be their end; but not such pleasure
as he proposes. They will seek happiness, as he
bids them, but not in his way. Thus the amiable self-
love, so like benevolence to a hasty glance, which the
k Gal. iii. 24. ' 2 Cor. v. 14.

III.] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 39
master taught, soon degenerates in his scholars into
mere sensuality ; the optimist's acquiescence in what
ever is, becomes a languid indifference to improve
ment; the artistic love of beauty becomes an idolatry
of the senses; and the followers of one whose ideal
happiness was virtue, as if transformed by the wand
of the enchantress, grovel in the mire, and devour
greedily the husks of a momentary self-indulgence.
For the motive, if not radically wrong, is inadequate
and incomplete. The mainspring is wanting. Self-
love must be dethroned ; and in its place must stand
One worthy of entire self-devotion.
But has Christianity succeeded in this apparently
hopeless undertaking of reducing the flesh to sub
mission, and of evoking harmony out of its discordant
cries? Are there no sins of the flesh among Chris
tians ? Alas ! these vices have been in every age
a reproach to the "pure religion and undefiledm"
which we profess. Still, let this be remembered ;
these vices have never dared among Christians to
assert an undisputed sway. In every age, and not
least in our own, Christianity has originated heroic
efforts to cope with a gigantic evil; efforts which
serve to hold the foe in check, if not to dislodge
him from his position. The carnality, which assimi
lates itself with other creeds so readily as to become
soon an integral part of the ritual and of the daily
life, has always been a glaring enormity among Chris
tians ; a thing protested against unremittingly ; a
plague-spot, the very sight of which suggests con-
ra St. James i. 27.

40 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
tinually new remedies, new preventives. If our great
cities teem with solicitations to drunkenness and un-
chastity, is there not an army in array of noble-
hearted men and women, such as no other religion
can shew, ever at work with their manifold organi
zations, as well as with the yet stronger persua
siveness of a holy example, to remove the reproach
from among us ? And what is it that nerves the soul
in this never-ceasing conflict with evil? It is no
sordid calculation of results to self; nor is it even
a nobler regard only to the welfare of our fellows and
to the prosperity of our country ; but, above all other
motives, it is that " love of Christ n " which believes
that it can never do enough for His sake who has
done all for us, and which rejoices in so believing.
Besides, as no other motive can so effectually sub
due the lusts of the flesh, so no other motive, paradox
though it may sound, can hold the balance steady,
when by a recoil in its oscillations the pendulum sways
from sensuality to an undue distrust and dread of the
senses. The longing for purity becomes in Buddhism
a panic-stricken loathing of all that is material, nay,
by an insensible step forward, of life, of existence
altogether. The thirst for rest from the unworthy
importunities of our animal nature can only be slaked
by the utter annihilation of the individual. And,
(need I remind you ?) the very intensity of this yearn
ing to be enfranchised from the bondage of the flesh
often drives the soul in its despair to the recklessness
n 2 Cor. v. 14.

ILL] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 41
of the grossest materialism. Often, the more sublime
the upward soaring, the more headlong the fall of the
soul, unless upborne by a strength not its own, by
the power of love. For if the motive of our strivings
after purity be of a merely selfish kind, a wish to be
independent of the troublous fluctuations of the ma
terial universe, to be self-poised and self-contained in
a sublime tranquillity, then what limits shall be set to
our endeavours, day by day to live more completely
aloof from the contamination of matter, more and
more ensconced within a world whither the illusions
of the senses cannot enter ? The goal recedes ever
before us. But if, in our endeavours to be pure, we
are acting not for ourselves and by ourselves, but
for Christ and by Him, then we shall regard matter,
not as a defilement to our touch, but as a thing to be.
handled with care and reverence in His service ; and
our senses, not as of necessity traitors to us in our
dealings with the outer world, but as emissaries whose
communications are to be received with caution, not
rejected utterly, and the desires of our lower nature
not as foes to be exterminated in an internecine war
fare, but as mutineers to be brought back to their
allegiance to their king. For, to abhor the material
world, the senses, the affections of the body, is to
abhor the agents and the instruments which are all
to be dedicated to His service.
Perhaps it will be objected, that Christianity itself
has engendered a morbid asceticism, as extreme and
as unreasonable as can be found anywhere. Are not
Simeon on his pillar, Antony in his cave, the monks

42 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
of La Trappe in their cells, worthy to be ranked with
the self-torturers of India ? But let us examine the
parallel more closely. Monasticism, even if we take
the word in its widest sense, as embracing both the
solitary life and the ccenobitic, though widely pre
valent among Christians under certain conditions, is
no integral part of Christianity, but an excrescence,
an abnormal product of local and temporal circum
stances. Monasticism was originally provoked by the
fury of persecution, and by the seemingly hopeless
corruption and misery of the society by which Chris
tianity in its infancy found itself environed. And
whenever the flickering, dying flame of monastic
ardour has been re-kindled in subsequent ages, it
has been as an exceptional and extraordinary protest
against luxury and indifference. Monasticism, if con
sidered dispassionately, not with the blind partizan-
ship of those who welcome it as the most potent
agency for consolidating the power of the Papacy,
nor with the blind intolerance which sees in it a
manifestation of Antichrist, must be allowed to have
its merits. To some it has been, and these not a few,
a shelter for souls wearied out by the storms of a tur
bulent age ; it has attracted others by offering them
a more thorough devotion of their lives to the Sa
viour's service. But it is not the offspring of Chris
tianity, as the names of the Essenes and of the Thera-
peutse testify ; it is no specialty of the Church, as the
name of the Encratites reminds us ; it can only jus
tify its existence under the Gospel by appealing to a
text here, and a text there, divorced from the general

ILL] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 43
tenor of the Gospel message. In short, whatever may
have been its services to religion, monasticism fos
ters the notion that there is merit in making life
more miserable than it need be ; it implies a derelic
tion of active duties, and an abhorrence of matter
strangely at variance with the life and doctrine of
Him, who "came eating and drinking0," whose
first miracle was wrought at a wedding-feast p, and
of Apostles who learned from Him "how to use the
world as not abusing itq," and how for His sake to
"become all things to all men1."
Take marriage for instance. See how Christianity,
while vindicating the lawfulness and the dignity of
marriage against the disparagement of an ecstatic
asceticism, guards it from degenerating into the
legalised licentiousness of polygamy or concubinage.
Christianity takes the animal passion, and ennobles
it. "Marriage is honourable," it says, "and the
bed undefiled ; but whoremongers and adulterers God
will judge"." Where else is the marriage - bond
riveted with so firm yet tender a hand, or hallowed
by a sanction so inviolable? A man is "to leave"
(even) "father and mother, and" (to) "cleave to his
wife;" and "what God has joined, no man" is to
" put asunder4." Elsewhere, the wife is often a thing
to be bought and sold, a part, and not always the
most precious of the husband's chattels, or, at best,
his companion for a time in a partnership "lightly
° St. Matt. xi. 19. " St. John ii. 2—11. « 1 Cor. vii. 31.
r 1 Cor. ix. 22 ; cf. 1 Tim. iv. 3 ; Col. ii. 16—23 ; Rom. xiv. 14 ;
Tit. i. 15. a Heb. xiii. 41. * St. Matt. xix. 5, 6.

44 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
enterprised," and as lightly sundered. In Chris
tianity the tie, once accepted, is all but indissoluble,
and its mutual responsibilities are great in propor
tion. Wantonly to sever this more than lifelong
compact, and to commence new relations of the same
kind, while the other party to the compact is yet
alive, is stigmatised in one word as "adultery"."
Nay, as though to deepen and intensify the sense of
the sacredness of marriage, even re-marriage, in any
case whatever, is rather discouraged than otherwise v.
On every side the wedded life is fenced about, like
holy ground, from rash precipitancy, from fickleness
and instability of purpose, from the intrusion of all
low associations. Wedded love is to be undivided,
undistracted, concentrating itself —
" To love one only and to cleave to her";"
not losing itself aimlessly ; the large-hearted, generous
love which —
" Alters not when it alteration finds,
Nor bends with the remover to remove x."
Can this tender reverence for marriage be paralleled
outside Christianity, even in the strictest days of the
Eoman Eepublic, even in the purest traditions of
the Hebrew law? And, if we look for the vital
principle of it, we find it here, as always in Chris
tianity, to be that love of Christ which draws Him
and His people together inseparably for ever. The
u St. Matt. v. 32; xix. 9; Eom. vii. 3. v 1 Cor. vii. 10, 11.
w Tennyson, Dedicat. Pref. to Idylls of the King. * Shakesp.,
Sonnets.

III.] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 45
mutual trust and joy of the wedded life are an
emblem of the soul's communion with its Redeemer,
nay, rather an expression and a realization of the
same feeling. The Church is "a chaste virgin es
poused to one husband;" — the Bride, "adorned for
her Lord," waiting on earth with eager fidelity for
his long-promised, return. He is the Bridegroom,
absent and far away, yet ever watching over His
Church, as a man cherishes "the wife of his bosom7."
Can we wonder if, with so high, so pure an ideal
before their eyes of what wedded love may be, Chris
tians, with all their controversial differences, with
all their inconsistencies in practice, have neverthe
less consented in regarding the holiness -of marriage
as a distinctive and fundamental tenet z ?
Indeed, the position which woman holds in Chris
tianity is absolutely unique. Bound to a loving obe
dience, yet not the slave, the drudge of her lord ;
y St. Matthew ix. 15 ; St. John iii. 29 ; 2 Cor. xi. 2 ; Eev.
xix. 7, xxi. 2, 9, xxii. 17.
z And yet we are told, " No Apostle seems to have been aware,
nor does Jesus teach, that love ennobles and spiritualizes," (F. W.
Newman's Defective Morality of the New Testament, p. 24,) and that
" defilement with women in the Apocalypse" means "marriage,"
(lb., p. 27.) The same writer (lb., p. 28) adds, in the face of
1 Cor. vii. 1 — 17, "the reasons which Paul gives for marriage
are not moral." It is important to discriminate in this passage
between the general principle which the Apostle lays down of the
lawfulness of marriage, and his personal preference for the un
married life under existing circumstances, (cf. vv. 2, 7).
The compatibility of marriage with perfect devotion to God is
beautifully expressed by Keble, Christian Tear, "Wednesday be
fore Easter : — = "And there are souls," &c.

46 CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. [Lect.
not the toy of his fleeting passion, but his "yoke
fellow" in all the joys and sorrows of life ; his help
mate in all those gentler avocations, for which the
softness and delicacy of her temperament fit her,
without arrogating to herself his proper functions ;
endeared to him by the very weakness which looks
up to his protecting care, and yet all the time well-
nigh worshipped by him for the graces of which her
outward form is the interpreter, — this is Christian
womanhood. Pagan and Christian art, each in its
way, have given us types of female beauty, types
which will live for ever, in the voluptuous charms
of the Paphian queen rising from the waves, in the
more spiritual loveliness of sweet and saintly Ma
donnas. As we stand and gaze at these master
pieces of the chisel and of the brush, can we doubt
which of these two ideals of womanhood is the
higher ; in other words, which of the two awakens
the more unselfish love ?
Yes ! this tender reverence for women is no mere
product of culture and civilization, for it was un
known to Greece and Eome in the zenith of their
refinement ; it is no heritage of race, for the Freya
of Northern Europe is the Aphrodite of Greece ;
it does not date its existence" from the days of tilt
and tournament, though chivalry and feudality may
have helped to develope and deepen it; it is the
reflexion on earth of that self-devoting love which
1 Guizot attributes it to the isolation of the feudal castle (Hisloire
de la Civilisation en Europe, pp. 106, 107). But the isolation of
the harem produces a directly opposite effect.

III.] CHRISTIANITY AND THE APPETITES. 47
brought the Son of God down from heaven; it is
an echo of those accents which, on the hills of
Galilee and in the streets of Jerusalem, ever drew
to the Saviour's side those who needed His love
the most. "Through all channels, good and evil,
Love from its pure source enticed,
Finds its own eternal level
In the charity of Christ.
Te who hear, behold the river
Whence it cometh, whither goes —
Glory be to God the Giver,
From whose throne the river flows ;
Flows and streams through all creation,
Counter-charm of every curse,
Love — the waters of salvation
Flowing through the universe b."
b Tannhaiiser.

LECTURE IV.
ffiftrtstianitg ano Ambition.

2 CORINTHIANS viii. 9.
" Though He teas rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that
ye through His poverty might be rich."
"YTEXT in order to the appetites of the body come
¦ ' the desires of personal aggrandisement; that is,
of wealth and power, or rather, in one word, of power.
For money is only a means to an end ; valuable from
a selfish point of view, either for the comfort and
luxury which it can purchase, or for the larger im
portance and wider influence which it symbolises, and
for the acquisition of which it is one of the things
most needful. The miser gloating over his useless
hoards for their own sake, ever amassing without any
ulterior purpose, is simply a monstrous anomaly, too
monstrous to be worth noticing. Now, so far as
wealth ministers to the pleasures of sense, it need
not occupy us now, since these have been considered
in a previous lecture. It remains only to regard
wealth as one among the incentives to those forms
of self-love which we may class together under the
name of covetousness or ambition. The virtues es
pecially called into play by these desires are obvi
ously truth, honesty, justice, frugality, industry, li
berality. The correlative vices, whether of excess
or defect, there is no need to specify.
E

50 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
That Christianity has promoted open-handedness in
giving, while, by proposing beneficence as the end
and object of saving, it rescues frugality from its
innate tendency to become parsimony, is not ques
tioned, and cannot be. Indeed, if we are to believe
the opponents of Christianity, a Quixotic propensity
to excessive almsgiving is one of its worst blemishes.
It may be worth while to dwell some little time on
this point,
" No prominence is given in Christianity to jus
tice ;" so writes one of the ablest of those who have
impugned Christianity " as a virtue of prime import
ance3." The same writer hails the dawn of some
" nobler religion, which will establish a more general
good-will through justice than endless talk about love
will ever produce °." But the antithesis is unpractical
and unreal; unless we are to take justice in the hard
est and narrowest conception possible, as weighing
men's rights and wrongs, like the Jew's pound of flesh,
to the fraction of an ounce, and rigidly disallowing
any the most infinitesimal variation from its prescript.
But there is a higher, truer justice than this. The
man whom the old philosophy terms eVtet/c^y is far
above the aKpifiodiKcuos". Equity, in place of this
dry conformity to the letter, which may be, and often
is, a gross injustice in spirit, takes into account all
circumstances which may intensify or extenuate the
praise or the blame in each particular instance. With-
"¦ F. "W. Newman, On the Defective Morality of the New Testa-
p. 19. b Ibid., p. 33.
' Arist., Nicom. Etk, v. 10, 8.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 51
out these considerations to temper judgment, true
justice is not, cannot be. And this considerateness
depends for its very being on love. For without
sympathy a true understanding is impossible of rights
and wrongs, of merit and demerit. The absence of
sympathy, the presence of antipathy, prejudice the
appreciation of persons and things. "The only way,"
it has been said, " of knowing human nature is to
love it ; and it can only be won at this price d."
Therefore, to oppose Justice to Love, as though
either could exist independently of the other, is
unreasonable. But is it true in any sense, that " no prominence
is given in Christianity to justice as a virtue of prime
importance?" It would be nearer the truth to say,
that the idea of justice pervades the Gospel from be
ginning to end. When the approach of Christ is
heralded by His forerunner, it is thus: "He shall
turn the disobedient to the wisdom of the just e."
When the final day of reckoning is foretold, that
day is to sever the "just from the unjust'." But
it would be superfluous to string together the many
passages in the New Testament where justice is
used as a synonym for holiness, in order to shew that
the virtue which is the basis on which the super
structure of all other virtues must be reared, and on
which society depends for its coherence, is not slurred
over by Christianity, or thrust into the background
as if it were not " of prime importance." Nay, to
d Ozanam. e St. Luke i. 17. ' St. Matt. xiii. 49.
E 2

52 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
be honourable— and I need not remind you either
that the Greek word rendered " honest " in our ver
sion would rather be in our modern English "honour
able," or that a finer sense of honour has been a
specialty of Christianity — implies more than to be
just ; and honour includes strict justice as the greater
includes the less5. But we must pass on to meet
other allegations.
Christianity is accused of fostering a "profuse
charity," and by consequence a habit of "mendi
cancy h ; and with a singular misapprehension of the
relative proportion of things, the writer already
quoted speaks of " communion of goods as the only
visible religious peculiarity of the early Christian
Church1;" as if Stephen had been stoned, Peter
imprisoned, Paul mobbed, " the brethren" persecuted
from city to city, as being Communists.
This imputation of encouraging a mischievous in
discriminate almsgiving, if substantiated, would argue
a serious fault in evangelic morality. For the reductio
ad absurdum is obvious. " To command all men to
sell their property is to command an absurdity ; for
if all tried to obey, there would be no buyers j."

* As the motive in Christianity is more unselfish, so the sense
of honour is more exquisite. Stoicism, by the mouth of the Stoic
Emperor, teaches, "Lie not, even in things indifferent, for it
weakens the understanding." — G. Long, M. Aurelius Antoninus,
p. 62. Christianity teaches, "Lie not one to another, for ye are
brethren in the Lord."
h F. W. Newman, On the Defective Morality of the Gospel, p. 10.
1 F. W. Newman, Against Hero-making in Religion, p. 9. ' Ibid.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 53
It might be added, the precept, " Give to him that
askethk," if it meant incessant and indiscriminate
almsgiving, would be similarly its own refutation.
But the very fact that words like these cannot be
taken in their naked literalness, implies of necessity
that some qualification is understood by a mental
ellipsis to complete the sentence. The allegation
loses its force, nay, falls to the ground utterly, if
for disjointed texts we substitute the whole tenor
and drift of the Gospel's teaching ; if, as in fairness
we are bound to do, we see in its words not so
many stereotyped rules, but organic principles, ad
dressed, indeed, primarily, with a special intention
to a special occasion, and yet instinct with a germi-
native life, unfolding itself continually to ever-vary
ing requirements.
Let us take the instances in question. The charge
of Communism against the Church at Jerusalem is
soon disposed of. The very narrative on which it
rests, plainly shews that the husband and wife, whose
names have become a byword for the pretence of
sanctity without the reality, had full right to keep
their property from the common fund, if they were
so minded. "Whilst it remained, was it not thine
own?" the Apostle asks ; and even " after it was sold,
was it not in thine own power1?" Clearly, when
we read how " the multitude of them which believed
were of one heart and of one soul ; neither said any
of them, that aught which he possessed was his own,
" St. Matt. v. 42. ' Acts v. 4.

54 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
for they had all things common"1," we are to un
derstand no confiscation of property, but that close
ness and tenderness of sympathy which bound rich
and poor together in one, till the corrosive influences
of the world had sundered this fellowship of " the
brethren in the Lord."
Or take the case, — for it is a crucial one, — of the
Eich Young Man, to whom were addressed those me
morable words, which provoke the especial indigna
tion of the able sceptic already quoted, " If thou
wilt be perfect, go thy way, sell all thou hast, and
give to the poor n." These are the words which he
stigmatises as "a fierce threat," "a crushing, arbi
trary command ° ;" words which certainly fall on the
ear with something of harshness and austerity, and
which, if they stood alone, might seem to extort from
the followers of Christ a precipitate renunciation of
all their worldly possessions. These are the words
which sounded as a call from heaven to Antony, as
he worshipped in a church of Alexandria, and longed
for some heroic act of self-abnegation. These are
the words which fired the son of a merchant at Assisi
to forsake "his own people and his father's house,"
for a brotherhood of barefooted friars. And it has
been with a view to escape from what to a cooler
judgment seems a suicidal infatuation, and would
be, if it ever could become general, simply annihila-
tive of our social life with its manifold privileges
and responsibilities, that a distinction, delusive and
m Actsiv. 32. " St. Matt. xix. 21. ° F. W. Newman,
Against Hero-making in Religion, p. 18.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 55
impracticable, has been invented by casuists between
"counsels of perfection" for saints, and a lower
standard of obedience for ordinary Christians. But
the main solution of the difficulty is to be found in
that trite old caution, never out of date, necessary
alike for those to whom Christianity is an offence,
and for those among Christians who exaggerate some
favourite dogma or precept out of proportion, — that
one side of the truth must always be complemented
by the other ; a caution necessary most of all in re
gard to a teaching so essentially suggestive as that of
the Gospel, and without which the truth itself be
comes a lie.
For here surely, and here alone, is the key to this
and other similar injunctions of Christ ; first, to mark
the symptoms of the moral state of the person ad
dressed p ; for the great Physician adapts his remedies
to each one's needs, and his glance, like the touch of
Ithuriel's spear, detects self-deceit in its disguise :
next, from this moral diagnosis in the mind of Christ
to discover the intention which makes the precept
of universal application for all similar cases; for
human nature repeats itself: and, lastly, to guard
the precept from collision with other laws of mo
rality, lest it trespass on ground which they have
pre-occupied. Now even a c ursory glance at the narrative shews
that the one thing wanted to test the sincerity of
this would-be convert, was that he should be forced
p Compare, for instance, the command to the demoniac (St. Mark
v. 19), and to the leper (St. Matt. viii. 4).

56 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
to ask himself that question, which one way or
another all must ask of their own souls, and answer,
"Am I willing to part with what I love best in the
world for the truth's sake?" It is easy to play the
hero when self has nothing at stake. The latent
selfishness betrays itself in the words, " Good Master,
what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal
life0-?" It meets its indirect reproof in the demurrer
of Christ to be called "good" by one whose notion
of goodness was dwarfed by selfishness. To have kept
this or that commandment might be, to one naturally
so disposed, little more than a supine acquiescence.
The touchstone of real unselfishness was to consent to
shatter his idol. This he would not ; and thus self-
convicted of unreality he went away, we are told,
sorrowing. Surely the gist of all these precepts of
self-abnegation, which only the wildest fanaticism
can take as they stand — cut off the right hand, pluck
out thine eye, submit unresistingly to every insult,
to every outrage, fling thine alms broadcast to every
mendicant, provide nothing, take no thought for the
morrow — is briefly this : Whatever usurps the place
in thine heart where love should reign, must be de
throned — be the pang what it may — and cast away.
But a charge, diametrically opposed to these of
reckless improvidence and of lavish almsgiving, comes
from the same quarter. The teaching of Christ is
accused, almost in the same breath, of fostering a
temper improvident and yet mercenary. The com
bination is startling.- In the very instance just cited,
q St. Matt. xix. 16.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 57
in His interview with the rich young man, our
Lord is represented as " dealing in low motives and
thoughts of reward — promises of power — salvation by
works — investment of money for returns beyond
the grave — prudential adoption of virtue which may
soften judgment, win promotion, deliver from prospec
tive judgment and hell-fire r." It is asked, "Does
such a teacher build from within by implanting love
— does he act upon love at all, or on a selfish am
bition?" And it is added with an indiscriminating
generalisation, " In the mind of Jesus all actions
seem to stand in the closest relation to the thoughts
of punishment and reward on a great future day."
" I seek in vain," says the writer, " for anything to
implant in the heart a sense of freedom, to excite
willing service, gratitude, tranquil love, careless of
other reward than love." These are caustic and in
cisive words. Are they true ?
Now without quoting, appealing to, that personal
devotion to a personal Saviour which is a special
characteristic of St. Paul's writings 8, and which has
its practical embodiment in his sublime description
of charity, let us confine ourselves at present to
the teaching of Christ Himself. Let it be freely
granted, as it must be in fairness, that our Lord
very frequently enforces His moral dictates through
the hope of reward, and through the fear of punish-
r F. W. Newman, Against Hero-making in Religion, p. 19.
s Professor Newman arbitrarily excludes all reference to St. Paul
on this point, allowing that the Apostle's " precepts are, concerning
property, in full agreement with those of Greek and Eoman sages,"
but contending that they "are widely different from those of
jesus.» — On the Defective Morality of the New Testament, p. 11.

58 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
ment hereafter. But what then ? These hopes
and fears are not the essence of the motive, but aux
iliary and subsidiary to it; useful in stemming the
force of temptations well-nigh irresistible, as the
swimmer seizes a drifting spar in his struggle with
the waves. Those whom the Saviour was primarily
addressing were not men with their minds illuminated
by the flash of an instantaneous revelation. They
were to have a slow and gradual discipline before
becoming in His Name the teachers of the world.
With their inveterate prepossessions about a Messiah
who should inaugurate a reign of mundane felicity,
with their minds steeped in the Mosaic traditions of
temporal rewards and punishments, they needed, like
children, all possible support from without for the
nascent efforts of the soul within. No parent or
teacher would act otherwise with a child, unless
in defiance of the laws of our nature. These pro
mises and threats are as a framework round a tender
plant, a defence against the blast, till its inner life
is matured : but all the time the inner life is nou
rished, not by these adventitious appliances, but by
deep and secret contact with the parent earth.
Nor may it be forgotten that these promises and
threatenings are at most only one aspect of the teach
ing of Christ. " In the world ye shall have tribula
tion'," for your Leader is the homeless one, "a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Forbear
dreams of your own greatness, " for He is meek and
lowly of heart u." " Take up thy cross x " and bear it
unflinchingly, for thy Lord must die on it the death
4 St. John xvi. 33. u St. Matt. xi. 29. x Ibid. xvi. 24.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 59
of a slave and a malefactor. " Can ye drink of My
cup of sorrow ? Can ye be baptised with My baptism
of blood?" Christ7 demands of those whose hearts
are intent on sharing His glory, who are in thought
anticipating the day when they " shall sit on thrones,
judging the twelve tribes- of Israel"." But I need
not multiply these presageful warnings of the self-
renunciation required from those who would be fol
lowers of Jesus. The joys foretold are far away, the
sufferings are imminent. Strange not to see, that to
embrace these promises of Christ at such a cost im
plies a moral conviction that He is indeed the Truth ;
and that to reiterate these forebodings of what must
be endured by His followers, is the part not of one
bribing men to His side, but of one who seeks that
" willing service " of " gratitude " and of " love"
which alone can give the soul " a sense of freedom "
from the tyranny of self !
Nor is it to be overlooked that the promises of re
ward are collective not individualistic. The exalta
tion, the aggrandisement of the individual are dis
couraged invariably. When the disciples ask, " What
shall we have" because we have addicted ourselves
to Thy service ? they are answered, under the si
militude of the "labourers in the vineyard a," that
they are to work for love not for pay, with no evil
eye to fellow-labourers, with no mutinous murmurs
against the Lord of the vineyard. When they dispute
among themselves about the preeminence, they are told
' St. Matt. xx. 22. z Ibid. xix. 28.
a Ibid. xx. 1, et sea.

60 CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. [Lect.
each and all to learn from " a little child b" how to be
lowest and least in the kingdom of their* Lord. Even
so honourable a title as that of " Benefactors ° " they
are to disclaim, lest the praise of men should alloy
the genuineness of love. The promise of future hap
piness is not for one or other, singly and separately,
the realisation of selfish schemings. The faithful are
all to rejoice together, as the reapers in one great
harvest-field, — the world. Above all, the reward is
Christ Himself. His love is motive and recompense
in one. The renunciations are to be for His sake ;
and the reward is this, — to be near His throne, and
to gaze with adoring love on the unveiled radiancy
of His Presence. Truly a small inducement, except
to those whose hearts have caught from Him that
ardour of self-sacrifice which loses itself in love.
The selfish might have been allured to the banner
of the Cross by promises of inglorious repose, and
languid self-gratification ; but in the Christian's hea
ven every faculty of body and soul is consecrated to
the willing service of his Lord. " This is life eternal,
to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom Thou hast sent."
See what Christianity has done in teaching men
" to spend and be spent " for others. Granted, that
the fingers of dying men have, ere now, relaxed their
grasp of their money-bags from fear and not from
love ; that the scared conscience has drugged itself by
the hope of buying heaven with its ill-gotten hoards ;
that even into the noblest breast will intrude at times
b St. Matt, xviii. 2. ° St. Luke xxii. 25.

IV.] CHRISTIANITY AND AMBITION. 61
a selfish thought of recompense; still, all this fails
utterly to account for the innumerable enterprises
which Christianity has initiated, to assuage and al
leviate the woes which it cannot prevent, as it tracks
the devastating course of sin and sorrow through the
world. Christianity proclaims a communism not of
constraint, but of will. Property is a sacred thing,
it tells us d ; because it is to be employed for the good
of others. The poor must be frugal and industrious,
it teaches; that they too may have to give to the
more needy than themselves e. If ever, as some pre
dict, Christianity could become a thing of the past,
its hospitals, its orphanages, its schools f would re
main the trophies of its bloodless victories over the
greediness of Mammon. No cautious balancing of
future loss and gain could have called these things
into being. It is what the great Apostle felt when
he owned himself " debtor g" to all men for His Sa
viour's sake ; in one word, it is gratitude. It is un
selfish gratitude to One, who, though He was rich,
yet for our sakes made Himself poor; who, being
Lord of all things, stooped for us to the manger at
Bethlehem and the Cross on Calvary; who bared
Himself of the glory which He had from the begin
ning, to wrap forlorn and destitute humanity in its
celestial folds.
d e.g. Eom. vii. 7. ' Eph. iv. 28. f Cf. Lecky,
History of European Morals, ii. 34. s Eom. i. 14.

LECTURE V.
(Eftrtstianitg anu ^elf^ejrentrence.

EOMANS xiv. 7.
"None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself."
A S we ascend in thought from the importunities of
-*"*- sense and the solicitations of ambition, to those
emotions in our nature which are more independent
of external things, we breathe a finer atmosphere,
the view widens below our feet, and the path of
Christian morality diverges more determinately than
ever from that of the morality which is not Christian.
Hitherto the difference has been, for the most part,
either in the motive which animates the strivings of
humanity after perfection, or in the degree of success
which these strivings obtain. But here we have in
Christianity a diametrically opposite ideal of perfec
tion set before us for imitation. Humility, in the
true sense of the word, is as distinctively a Christian
virtue, as self-dependence, the crown and culmination
of non-Christian morality, is in the Gospel of Christ
a weakness and a vice.
For self-dependence is pride ; and pride, rather
than ambition, deserves to be called
" The last infirmity of noble minds."
When the lower desires have been reduced to sub
mission, when the soul can look down from its philo-

64 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
sophic watch-tower on cravings for wealth or power,
then, and because of these triumphs which it has
achieved, it is in danger of pride. And pride is not
only the subtlest form of self-love, but the worst;
for it is the perversion of the noblest faculties to a
most ignoble end, the deification of self; it is cruelty
without the excuse of passion. The foe, repulsed
from the outposts, works surreptitiously his insidious
way into the citadel itself ; and the fortress falls at
the very moment when its defenders dream them
selves most secure from peril.
Genuine humility, as the experience of all time
shews, is the rarest, because the hardest of virtues ;
the hardest, because it involves the most absolute
uprooting of self from the system. No virtue has
so many or so plausible counterfeits. The self-de
preciation which courts praise is not humility ; the
indifference to praise, which is contempt for others,
is not humility; nay, the humility which secretly
and half-unconsciously lauds itself in and for the
very act of self-condemnation is but a spurious hu
mility, like the cynic's pride thinly veiled under his
ostentatious tatters. Nowhere is the involuntary
homage which vice pays to virtue more strikingly
exemplified than by these semblances of humility,
which pass current in the world, so as almost to defy
detection. Now, of all the characteristics of the Son of Man,
humility is the most remarkable. To those who see
in Him the Son of God incarnate, no words can ex
press the depth of His self-imposed humiliation.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 65
Even those to whom He is only a Teacher among
teachers, one among many leaders of the multitude,
cannot but admire His divine calmness under oblo
quy and insult, as well as amid the Hosannas of the
crowd ; the calmness not of apathy, but of a nature
exquisitely tender in its sympathies". Even they
will admit, that, notwithstanding many inconsisten
cies in practice, this "meekness and lowliness" of
spirit have been an especial badge of those who take
" His yoke upon b " their shoulders, and learn of Him
that self must be as nothing, and love as everything
in the hearts of His disciples.
Self-reliance is in other systems the aim and object
of all the upward soarings of the soul. For, if the
health of his soul is the first thing for a man to con
sider ; if virtue is health, vice disease c ; then, though
beneficence to others may be a duty, as subserving
self-culture, still, the primary law being self-preser
vation, the summit of moral perfection is to rise
above every feeling which can obstruct this work of
self-improvement, which can mar the symmetry, the
harmony, the autarchy, the entelechy of the soul.
There must, indeed, be no outward manifestation of
this inward consciousness of strength. That would
be arrogance ; and arrogance would be a flaw in the
circle of self-dependence, as betokening a recognition,
however contemptuous, of other existences than our
ownd. But the consciousness itself must be there.
Take, for instance, that system of philosophy, of
a e.g. St. John xi, 35. t> St. Matt. xi. 29. ° Grote's Plato,
iii. 131. d M. Antonin., Meditat., ii. 17.
F

66 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
which it has been said by a great Christian thinker
that it comes "nearest to Christianity6;" which, in
deed, like Christianity, lifts the soul above the trivial
hopes and fears of the world of sense, and, like
Christianity, makes virtue independent of success
and failure, of good fortune or bad; although its
hardness, its avaLa-0-qaia, contrasts strongly with a
teaching which, instead of ruthlessly extirpating the
affections1, trains them tenderly round whatever it
can find worthiest in earth or heaven ; — take Stoicism.
" Be like the Olympian Jove of Phidias," the Stoic
writes, "in an unclouded confidence and strength g."
In other words, "Be self-contained, self-centred, self-
orbed. So will you be able to look down with pity,
if not with contempt, on the errors and delusions of
the multitude." We have not so learned from our
Master. In strange contrast to this self-conscious,
self-satisfied intellectuality, Christ teaches His dis
ciples to be as children, teachable and lowly, for their
strength is to be perfected in weakness h, and out of
weakness they are to be made strong1. His sternest
denunciations are not against sins of passion, but
against a hard and scornful self-righteousness. The
prayer which He best approves is, " God be merciful
to me a sinner k." The verdict of acquittal, of com
mendation at the last, is for those who are least aware
of their own merits ; who ask in unfeigned astonish-
e S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 62. ' Cf. Tacit.,
Agric, 30. s Arrian., ii. 8, quoted by Lecky, Hist, of Euro
pean Morals, i. p. 161. h 2 Cor. xii. 9. » Heb. xi. 34.
k St. Luke xviii. 13.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 67
ment of their Judge, " When have we done aught
for Thee1?" Fearless of the sneers of supercilious
Pharisees, Christ sits at meat, by a preference to
them hopelessly unintelligible, under the roof of
"publicans and sinners10;" and singles out for a
special blessing the outcast whose only plea is this,
that she has "loved much11."
Stoicism and Christianity alike teach, that the life
of man consists not in those external appliances
which to so many seem to constitute the idea of
living, but in the perfection of the soul; that this
alone is life. Both alike enjoin strictest self-ex
amination °. But the practical character of this self-
examination, in the one case and the other, differs
as widely as the dialectical promptings of the Demon
of Socrates from the persuasive influences of the Holy
Ghost on the life and will of a Christian p. In the
Pagan philosophy man reviews his own handiwork,
effaces a line here, inserts a touch there ; studious
of the model which he proposes to himself, that he
may not have to reproach himself for inadequacy of
execution; a severe critic of himself; true to his own
conceptions of excellence ; and, let it be granted,
caring far more to have realized his ideal than for
the silly plaudits of the crowd. But, all the time,

1 St. Matt. xxv. 87— 39. m St. Mark ii. 16. n St. Luke vii. 47.
0 e.g. Persius, Satir. iv. 21.
p "The Demon of Socrates was but an intellectual guide, and
checked his erring judgment ; the Holy Spirit guards the vigils
of duty, and succours the disciple's tempted will." — Martineau,
Studies of Christianity, p. 307.
P2

68 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
he begins and ends his task in himself. In Chris
tianity the penitent rises from his knees with even
the sense of his own unworthiness lost in the sense
of God's pardoning love, and in sympathetic tender
ness for his fellow-sinners. Marcus Aurelius has
been fitly styled "the purest, gentlest spirit of the
Pagan world q;" his writings, "the highest ethical
product of the heathen mindr." In words which
sound like an echo from Calvary, he says, " Love
those who have offended you, for they do it igno-
rantly," they "know not what they dos." But
mark the undercurrent of thought and feeling. I
am not unfair, I trust, to this noble Eoman if I read
it thus : " It is beneath philosophy to waste a thought
on beings so unworthy; hatred is a perturbation of
that tranquillity of spirit which we aim at; life is
too short ; the work of self-improvement too moment
ous V But Christian forgiveness is rather thus :
" How can I refuse to forgive others, I who am
myself so greatly forgiven? How can I but prefer
others in honour, I who know so well my own deficien
cies ? " " For none of us liveth to himself, and no
man dieth to himself: whether we live or die, we
are the Lord's." In brief, Stoicism is a deification
of man for himself11; Christianity is a deification of
man for his God and for his fellows.
q Lecky, History of European Morals, i. 219. r J. S. Mill
On Liberty, p. 15. s Meditat., vii. 22. * Medit., vii. 26 ;
ii. 17; xi. 18.
u What has been said of Buddhism, " It is a barren waste of
intellectual perfection," (M. Miiller, Buddhism, p. 19,) may not
unfairly be said of Stoicism.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 69
These intense yearnings of sympathy flow directly
and flow exclusively from the Cross on Calvary. For
there we see, not, as some have represented it, a mere
substitution on the sacrificial altar of one victim for
another, not the mere intervention of a stranger pay
ing down a sum for those who cannot pay, but heaven
condescending to identify itself with the sins and
sorrows of earth ; the divine nature attuned by love
to perfect unison with the heart-throbbings of hu
manity. " Greater love hath no man than this, that
a man lay down his life for his friends." And the
Christian's faith or love, call it as you will, in
volves a responsive unification of himself with the
lowest and weakest of his brethren. This it is
which sent forth Saul of Tarsus, Boniface, Xavier,
Schwartz, Patteson, to lay down their lives for those
who, aliens and outcasts in the world's estimation,
were brought near to them by the very extremity
of their need. " No Jew, Greek, Eoman, Brahman,"
it has been said by one especially competent to
speak on the subject, "ever thought of convert
ing people to his own national form of belief31."
Even in Buddhism can we find an instance of so
entire a sympathy with the wretched, as that which
has induced Christian missionaries to devote them
selves to a forlorn and lifelong exile on an island
peopled only by lepers y, in the spirit of Him who
laid His healing hand on the miserable victims of this
loathsome malady, who on the eve of His own agony
stooped down and washed His own betrayer's feet,
who shrank not from the polluted touch of the woman
* M. Miiller, Buddhism, p. 22. J In the Greek Archipelago.

70 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
who had been a grievous sinner ? Others may teach,
that it is politic and right to leave the stricken deer
to pine and die alone, while the herd makes for fresh
pastures. Not so the Gospel of Christ. There, even
unworthiness has a claim on those who feel their own
unworthiness in the presence of their Saviour.
To the Stoic, even to one like Marcus Aurelius,
pain, bodily or mental, is simply a thing to be endured
as best may be. Dimly and uncertainly through the
mysterious darkness of sorrow he sees that pain is
a teacher, and the only teacher, for those who refuse
to learn otherwise. But to him it comes only as
a disagreeable consequence of having infringed a law
stronger than himself, — of having blindly come into
collision with nature and had the worst of it. He has
foolishly allowed himself to be caught and entangled
in the resistless, relentless mechanism of the universe,
and must pay the penalty ; he must extricate himself
from his dilemma, if he can, with a firm resolve to be
more wary lest he jeopardise himself again ; if not,
he may as well cut short his troubles summarily and
for ever, by making a speedy exit from a struggle in
which pride forbids him to confess himself beaten.
It is useless, he argues, to contend against what
must be ; Fate is inexorable ; and so, with sullen
and defiant acquiescence, he accepts what he cannot
avoid z. But the Christian is taught, that suffering
is not merely penal, but remedial for the sufferer;
that it is the "loving correction" which a Father
inflicts reluctantly; the sharp but momentary pang
which a wise and tender healer, probing and cauter-
z M. Antonin., Meditat., xi. 18, ii. 17.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 71
ising the wound, knows must be submitted to ; that
patience can only thus have "her perfect worka;"
that the Son of God Himself, in His life on earth,
had to "learn obedience by the things which He
suffered," and that there is no other school for His
followers ; that the gold must be purged of its dross
in the fire; that the spikenard must be bruised and
broken, or it will not yield the sweetness which is in
it; in short, that pride, the last stronghold of self
in the heart, must be levelled with the ground, for
love to be all in all.
Nor is there, as some say, anything mean or pusil
lanimous in Christian humility. Because the Gospel
commends the "poor in spirit";" because it preaches,
" Eesist not evil ° ;" because it seems to a hasty glance
to inculcate a tame and abject submission to extor
tion and oppression a, we are told that Christianity
is wanting in self-assertion. But these precepts, as
was observed in a previous lecture, if they are to
have any meaning at all, must be understood with
those qualifications which are suggested by com
paring them with other passages, by supplying the
omissions, incidental to speech always, and too ob
vious to need specifying ; above all, by having regard
to the mental and moral capacity of those on whose
ears they fell in the first instance. " The letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life6." We must bear
in mind, that these precepts of submission were
spoken to men of a nation more stubbornly tena-
a St. James i. 4. b St. Matt. v. 3. c Ibid. v. 39.
d Ibid. v. e 2 Cor. iii. 6.

72 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
cious, perhaps, than any other of its self-assertion;
to men who had been taught from childhood that
merciless retaliation is a sacred duty, that " eye for
eye," "tooth for tooth f," is not merely excusable,
but right. We must bear in mind that an utter
disruption of law and order would ensue, if the words
were taken literally, and without context. We must
bear in mind that the same Teacher who says, " Ee-
sist not evil6," tells His "little flock h," when left in
the world like " sheep among wolves1," and " without
a shepherd," to "fear not," even though dragged
"before synagogues, and magistrates, and powers15;"
but to confess their Master boldly before men, with
out a thought of the shame, or of the peril ; — that He,
who pleaded so tenderly for His disciples, " Let these
go their way," Himself confronted His foes with the
intrepid declaration, " I am He ;" — that He trod the
winepress alone, and drained the cup of agony to
the dregs, not, indeed, without shrinking, but with
an unwavering purpose, to save others at any cost
to Himself. Clearly the gist of these precepts of
submission is this, — to exorcise from the heart
the spirit of self-assertion, so far as it conflicts
with duty ; to foster and encourage self-assertion,
so far as it stands forward as the champion of
others, "fighting the good fight1" under the banner
of Love. Paradoxical as it may sound, the truest
courage, nay, the only true courage, is, like real
magnanimity, inseparable from humility. For true
£ St. Matt. v. 38. e Ibid. v. 39. h St. Luke xii. 32.
' St. Matt. x. 16. k St. Luke xii. 11. '2 Tim. iv. 7.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 73
courage differs from rashness, from empty boast-
fulness in this, that it implies a true estimate of the
dangers to be faced, and of a man's own ability
to face them ; it measures the hazard, and counts
the cost, and yet is content to abide the issue. The
martyrs of Antioch or of Lyons, lavish of their own
lives, refusing to avail themselves of any subterfuge,
however venial, from the dungeon, the stake, the
lions of the amphitheatre, were they timid, vacil
lating, irresolute ? Was it a pusillanimous spirit,
which, not satisfied with the persistent profession of
its own faith, dared even to affront, in its aggressive
zeal for Christ, the massive organization, the pitiless
inflexibility of the Eoman Empire ? The martyrs
and confessors of Christianity are rather liable to the
charge of provoking persecution and of courting death,
than of cowardice.
Nor is there anything mawkish or feebly senti
mental in Christian humility. With all its compas
sion for the sinner, it never condones the sin. The
Antinomianism which " sins that grace may abound m,"
which almost glories in wrong- doing, in its eagerness
to magnify the Atonement, is a caricature of the
Gospel of Christ, intolerable to the reason and con
science of men. What was said of the great me
dia? val poet of Christendom, —
"He loved well, because he hated,"
is essentially true of Christianity. Uncompromising
hatred of evil is an integral part of Christian love.
m Eom. vi. 1.

74 CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. [Lect.
There is no place in Christianity for the lukewarm
zeal of Laodicea. " He that is not with Me," Christ
has said, "is against Me;" "he that gathereth not
with Me, scattereth n." The same voice, which so
often breathed pardon and peace on penitents, whom
Pharisaic scorn would have spurned from His feet,
denounced, in tones wherein even pity is well-nigh
drowned in sternness of reproof, the sin which would
not own itself sinful, which in its pride hardened
itself even against love.
Nor, lastly, can Christian humility be fairly ac
cused — whatever pretext for the accusation may have
been given by fanatical distortions of Christianity — of
a morbid self- depreciation, of a morbid exaggeration
of its own wretchedness. The Christian may not feel
contempt, — even for himself. While prostrating him
self in his self-abasement before the glorious ideal
which he fails to realise, while " abhorring himself
in dust and ashes," he still cannot forget that human
nature was created in the likeness of the divine ; that
this image of God on the soul, tarnished and defaced
by sin, was restored by the incarnation of divinity ;
that it is continually renewed by the sweet influences
of the Holy Spirit. "Self-reverence," as well as
"self -distrust," is part of "self-knowledge" in a
Christian °.
" True dignity abides with him alone,
"Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect and still revere himself
In lowliness of heart p."
n St. Matt. xii. 30. ° " Self- reverence, self-knowledge, self-
distrust." — Tennyson, QSnone. p Wordsworth.

V.] CHRISTIANITY AND SELF-DEPENDENCE. 75
To the Stoic or the Buddhist, baffled and foiled in
his struggles to break loose from the thraldom of evil,
only one escape is left, — self-annihilation. To the
Christian, failure and disappointment, even in the
pursuit of holiness, are an incentive to new exertions.
His hopefulness can never die, for the mainspring of
hope is without, not within the soul. To him despair
is an impossibility, for, in the " darkness that may be
felt," the soul casts itself the more undoubtingly on
the love which never changes. For
"  all through life I see a Cross,
"Where sons of God yield up their breath ;
There is no gain except by loss ;
There is no life except in death ;
Nor glory, but in bearing shame ;
Nor justice, but in taking blame ;
And that eternal Passion saith,
1 Be emptied of glory, and right, and name 1 ! ' "
q Olric Grange. (Madehouse, Glasgow.)

LECTURE iVL
&fte SEntbersalttrj of Christian JHoralitu.

GENESIS xxiii. 18.
" In Him shall all nations of the earth be blessed."
TX7E have completed — if such a word is pardonable
' " of what is, I am well aware, so incomplete — our
survey of the emotions, and of the treatment which
they receive from Christianity and from other sys
tems. Let us ascend in thought higher still. Let
us contemplate, as from the mountain's summit, one
of the most important characteristics of Christian
morals, their universality.
No one can be conversant with the poetry and
philosophy which exhibit civilization before the Chris
tian era in its highest form, without observing how
incommensurate they are with the life of man as a
whole. So far as life is sunny, joyous, prosperous,
they express it well ; with less indeed of reserve and
of qualification, with a more thorough abandonment
to it for the moment than is possible for one whose
religion teaches him to grieve for others, if not for
himself. But life is not all sunshine. None are
exempt — it is a truism to say it — from pain; to
many, if not to most, painful experiences prepon
derate over pleasurable; while over our brightest
moments death, ever drawing near, casts its dark

78 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
shadow before. And here Pagan philosophy fails us
in our need. Mark the undercurrent of sadness,
nay, of utter hopelessness, which ever and anon
forces itself to the surface, as we listen to the festive
lyrics of Horace, crowned with roses, and with the
wine-cup in his hand. See how Stoicism, in its de
spairing effort to assert its indifference to evils which
it can neither remedy nor explain, has only one word
of comfort for its votary ; that he fold himself in his
toga and die a. The philosophies of Zeno, or of Epi
curus, stand dumb before the Sphinx of man's destiny
with its insoluble enigma ; they would fain escape,
if they could, from the stony gaze of those pitiless
eyes. But Christianity faces every aspect of our
existence, sunlit or under the cloud. It is no privi
lege of the rich, the learned, the prosperous. It
knows "how to be abased and how to abound1"." It
bids its disciples " rejoice with those that do rejoice,"
as well as " weep with those that weep c." And if
joy is impossible for souls beset, beaten down, all but
crushed under their woes, it whispers of a " peace
which passes understanding d."
See, again, how each race of mankind contributes
its portion to the common fund of Christian morality,
and derives thence in return something which it de
siderates. The Hebrew brings his stubborn tenacity
of conscience and conviction, and in the crucible of
the Gospel what was hard and unsympathetic glows
with the ardour of a world-wide diffusiveness. The
a See Note C. b Phil. iv. 12.
c Eom. xii. 15. d Phil. iv. 7.

VI.] THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 79
Greek brings his readiness of invention in art and
science, and what was sensuous, material, selfish, is
transfigured with a glory not of earth. The Eoman
brings his soldier-like obedience to order, the Teuton
his rugged loyalty to hearth and home, and both
alike learn that an uncompromising sense of duty is
strengthened, not weakened, by tenderness of feeling.
Like the gate of a mediaeval monastery, Christianity
. opens itself to all comers; welcomes all to its shelter;
receives from each his peculiar inheritance of truth ;
imparts to each that which was wanting to complete
it, and fuses the scattered fragments into a whole.
Or mark the elasticity of Christianity in adapting
itself to various forms of government. True : in our
own experience, as elsewhere, the Church of Christ
has not always been proof against the temptation of
identifying itself with a political party. True : in
the past history of this country, as elsewhere, the
Church has, ere now, clung with unreasoning fidelity
to a dynasty that has ceased to represent the nation.
Still, if we review the course of ecclesiastical history
from first to last, it is clear that the Gospel is no hot
house exotic, only kept alive by artificial appliances,
but a hardy plant, that can thrive, if need be, on the
bleak mountain side. The Gospel precept of obedience
to those who are in authority, applies alike to the
subjects of a despotic empire, of a constitutional mo
narchy, of a democracy where all are on a level.
When the French republican of the last century
called the Founder of Christianity "le bon sanscu
lotte," and when the Jacobite adherent of the exiled

80 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
Stuarts appealed to his creed as teaching him to
"honour the king," they were unconsciously combin
ing their testimony to the breadth and elasticity of
Christian politics. When the words " Unity, Indivi
sibility, Brotherhood, or Death," were inscribed over
the doors of the houses in Paris in 1790, it was
a ghastly parody of the universal fellowship which
the Gospel proclaims. For Christianity recognises
fully the two great principles, too often forced into
an unnatural antagonism, of spontaneity and authority,
because it recognises fully the rights of each indivi
dual, and the rights of the community at large. On
the one hand, it insists unhesitatingly on the price
less value of each man's personality : " What shall
a man give in exchange for his soule?" On the other
hand, it lays an equal or even greater stress on the
reciprocal obligations of society : " For we are mem
bers one of another f." The obedience which Chris
tianity preaches is no Chinese obedience, no sluggish
and unprogressive conformity to routine, for it is tem
pered and quickened by the ever-present sense of
personal freedom, of personal responsibility. The
liberty which Christianity proclaims is not anarchy,
for though it is "perfect liberty," it is itself a
"lawg." Mark, again, the absence of minute and vexatious
regulations in the oldest records of Christianity. If
we look to the life and teaching of Christ, either as
pourtrayed in the simple and inartistic narrative of
the Gospels, or as thrown into perspective in the
e St. Mark viii. 37. f Eom. xii. 5. * St. James i. 25.

VI.] THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 81
Epistles, we find nothing there like the Levitical
ordinances, nothing like the grotesque technicalities
of the Talmud, or of the Institutes of Menu h, elabo
rate enough to occupy a student for a lifetime. The
Sermon on the Mount speaks to all, learned and un
learned alike. The rude peasant hears homely rules
for the daily ordinary course of his uneventful life.
The philosopher, who disdains not to sit at the feet
of the meek and lowly Teacher, discerns the great
moral principles which hold the world together.
All recognise the expression of a something, of which
they were half-aware, dimly conscious before; and
the heart, like the earth on a morning in spring,
feels within itself the stir of a dormant energy. As
Bp. Taylor quaintly but beautifully says, the teach
ing of Christ " enters like rain into a fleece of wool1."
Even precepts such as these, "to abstain from meat
offered to idols k," and not to "muzzle the ox that
treadeth out the corn1," which have been cited as
a contradiction of this universality of the Gospel,
are no contradiction really. In both cases a great
principle underlies an apparently arbitrary enactment.
There is the principle of not even seeming to coun
tenance a popular delusion. There is the principle
of providing for the temporal wants of those who
hold a spiritual office. In both cases the minuteness
h "The Institutes of Menu, the Leviticus and Deuteronomy of
the Hindus for so many ages, speak of killing .... and eating
with unwashen hands as crimes of parallel magnitude." — Cobbe,
Darwinism in Morals, &c, p. 227.
' Quoted by Mr. Martineau in his Studies of Christianity.
k Acts xv. 29. ' 1 Cor. ix. 19.

82 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
is in the expression, not in the thought ; in the illus
tration, not in the thing illustrated.
The very incompleteness of Christianity as a theory
comes from its largeness of conception, from its not
being the peculiarity of any age or clime. A French
Positivist can elaborate on paper a system to the eye
faultless in its symmetry, but experience shews that
the practical excellence of a system is not infre
quently in an inverse proportion to its excellence in
the abstract. "The Christian Scriptures," it has
been well said, "are singularly sparing of" (even)
"general rules m." It has been objected, that the
warnings of the Gospel are pointed against sects
whose very names have passed away; but in their
characteristics the Pharisee and the Sadducee never
die ; the formalist and the materialist are rife in one
age as in another. It has been objected, that the
Apostles lived in hourly expectation of their Lord's
Second Advent; but to live as servants, always
watching for their Lord's return, is a cardinal prin
ciple of Christianity. Strip off all that is really local,
temporal, personal, from the Christian Scriptures ;
separate, so far as the human intellect can separate
things so closely woven together, the divine and the
human elements : in the residuum you find funda
mental principles of life, coeval with time, and co
extensive with humanity.
This universality is a characteristic as of Chris
tianity so of its Founder. Sectarian partialities may
narrow our conception of Christ Jesus, may exag-
m Martineau, Studies of Christianity, p. 291.

VI.] THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 83
gerate, may dwarf, may distort this or that feature
in His character, but the one-sidedness is not in Him.
Nay, to a careless observer the apparent inconsistency
almost amounts to paradox. Christ denounces Pha
risaism, yet teaches His disciples to obey their Phari
saical rulers. He consorts with Publicans and sin
ners, and yet teaches that only "the pure in heart
shall see God11." He rebukes Sabbatarian scruples,
and yet conforms sedulously to the very ritual which
He is superseding. He proclaims that " God is a
Spirit0," not confining His presence to the Hill of
Sion, or to the rival Mount of the Samaritans, and
yet evinces special love and reverence for the Temple,
makes it His favourite resort, displays an almost
unique severity of castigation on its behalf, and even
while predicting its downfal and extinction is " con
sumed1"' by zeal for its hallowed walls. He teaches
"as one having authority5," and yet by a course of
gentle questionings which evoke intelligence in the
dullest or most timid listeners ; His parables are like
stories for a child, and yet to those who "have ears
to hear" are instinct with profoundest mysteries. The
catalogue of seeming inconsistencies is well-nigh end
less. Unlike His forerunner, the Baptist, austere as
a hermit to king, to multitude, to himself, the " Son
of Man" (it is our Lord's favourite designation of
Himself, and it symbolises the range of His affections)
is at home under the roof of Levi the Publican or of
Simon the Pharisee ; amid the festivities of the mar-
n St. Matt. v. 8. ° St. John iv. 24. J> Ibid. ii. 17.
i St. Matt. vii. 29.
02

84 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
riage feast in Cana, or amid the wailings of the
chamber of death ; has a blessing for the rich man,
like Zacchaeus, who knows how to use his riches, as
for the poor widow dropping her scanty offering into
the treasury of God. He is uncompromising with
sin, yet tender with the sinner; He walks alone
through the crowd, rapt in heavenly musings, yet
has an eye for Nathaniel under his fig-tree, and
a word of comfort for the nameless sufferer, laying
her trembling hand on the hem of His robe ; He
is unceasing, unresting in doing " His Father's busi
ness1," crowding almost an infinity of words of wis
dom and of works of love into those three short years,
yet ever imperturbable in His calmness ; He can si
lence His adversaries with a word, and yet stands
without a word when they suborn false witnesses
against Him; He is "meek and lowly" with all His
majesty of deportment ; with all His lowliness He is
a King. Truly the heart of the " Son of Man" beats
in .accord with every pulsation of the hearts of men
that is not sinful.
I am not forgetting that this universality of the
Gospel is questioned, nay, positively and emphati
cally denied by some. The able opponent of Chris
tianity, from whom I have had occasion to quote in
some previous lectures, flatly rejects the idea as an
exploded error. " When people tell me," he writes,
"that Jesus first established the brotherhood of man
the equality of races, the nullity of ceremonies ; . . . .
that He overthrew the narrowness of Judaism ; found
r St. Luke ii. 49.

VI.] THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 85
a national but left an universal religion ; found a nar
row-minded ceremonial, and originated a spiritual
principle; I can do nothing but reply, that every
one of those statements is groundless and contrary
to fact8." "'Tis quite incredible," he adds in an
other passage, " that Jesus ever taught His disciples
the religious nullity of Levitical ordinances, the
equality of Gentiles with Jews before God'." But
mark, I pray you, on how slight a basis these vehe
ment and sweeping assertions rest. " What His dis
ciples never understood Him to teach," it is argued,
"He certainly did not teach effectively11." But the
objector overlooks what surely he would be one of
the last to deny, that the greatest truths can only
be imparted gradually ; that the earliest stage in the
acceptance of them is often, if not always, uncon
scious ; that the highest teaching is not that which
communicates certain formulae, but that which de
posits in the mind a seed hereafter to bear fruit
a hundredfold; not that which loads the memory,
but that which quickens the apprehension ; not that
which imparts the thing to be learnt, but that which
imparts the power of learning. True, the disciples
did not understand their Master's meaning at the
time. How should they ? If when He told them
of earthly things, of the. common duties of daily
life, of forgiving one another, and so forth, they
were dull of hearing, how could they fathom His
thoughts when He spoke of a divine love, wide as
8 F. "W. Newman, Against Hero-making in Religion, p. 23.
'Ibid., p. 11. " Ibid., p. 23.

86 THE UNIVERSALITY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect. VI.
the canopy of heaven, embracing all races and lands
without distinction ? Yet even they, these same dis
ciples, so slow of understanding, had learnt the mean
ing of His words, when immediately after His de
parture from them they admitted a Eoman centurion
into their communion. When Christ Jesus cancelled
the prescriptive and exclusive claim of Abraham's
seed to be the children of God, He virtually abolished
the exclusiveness of privilege everywhere. When He
announced, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to
Mex," and when He commanded His bereaved and
bewildered followers to "go and teach all nations7,"
He established " a brotherhood of man and an equality
of races z" which neither the barbaric turbulence of
feudal ages, nor the more subtle disintegration of
modern luxury, can ever nullify. The very gradual-
ness of the change that came over the world is the
most wonderful thing about it. Not by convulsive
tremblings of the earth, as when the rocks of Horeb
in the thick darkness were rent by the clang of the
trumpet, but by the almost imperceptible subsidence,
age after age, of the barriers of caste and faction, at
the still small' voice of Evangelic morality, will the
prophetic word sometime be accomplished: "Every
valley shall be exalted, and every mountain shall be
brought lowa," and "all nations of the earth shall
be blessed in Himb," who came, and lived, and died,
and rose again, and lives for ever for all.
* St. John xii. 32. * St. Matt, xxviii. 19. 2 F. W. New
man, p. supra. a St. Luke iii. 5. b Gen. xxiii. 18.

LECTURE VII.
^llefletf IBefects of Christian fltoralttg.

ST. MATTHEW xi. 19.
" Wisdom is justified of her children."
jj HAVE reserved for separate consideration some
-*- special objections to Christian morality, which
might naturally have attached themselves to one
or other of the previous Lectures, because they re
quire more attention than could be given in passing.
Such, for instance, is the objection, with which we
are familiar, that Christianity, after more than fifteen
centuries of ascendancy in Europe, still permits war,
that self-inflicted scourge of our race, to disgrace our
civilization and our religion; nay, that the carnage
is multiplied tenfold. What shall we say in reply ?
The latter part of the objection is not to the point.
If, as time goes on, the ingenuity of science can in
vent instruments of slaughter more and more de
structive, if the ponderous artillery and keen-sighted
rifle of our day deal death farther and wider than the
mediseval cross-bow or the sharpened flint of a yet
ruder age, this is simply an affair of mechanics, of
progress in material science. Nay, some will say
that these increased facilities of killing make war
less frequent, and that in proportion as the havoc

88 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
and misery which it causes are seen and felt on
a larger scale, nations are less likely to have re
course to it.
But this is not the real question at issue, as regards
Christianity. For, as we can scarcely be reminded
too often, in attempting a moral comparison between
one age or one country and another, size, bulk, extent
are not everything. The real horrors of war may be
felt as much in the skirmishings of a savage tribe as
in the colossal campaigns of a Napoleon. It is not
the number of lives which they cost, but the temper
in which they are. conducted, that marks the difference
between one war and another in morality. Now it
cannot be denied that from being the normal state
of nations, hostile because neighbouring, war, under
the influence of Christianity, is becoming a last re
source after other ways of settling a dispute have
failed. The moral sense of Christendom, though at
times corrupted by the sophistries of ambition, or
intimidated by huge battalions, still, as a rule, pro
nounces unequivocally against the aggressor. What
ever may be urged, and with reason, against war in
general, or more particularly against the " perpetual
menace " of standing armies, war must remain to the
end of time a necessity, so long as human nature,
even with religion to elevate and purify it, remains
what it is. In fact, the soldier holds among nations
something like the office of the policeman among in
dividuals; and the utmost that the most sanguine
may dare to hope is, that the appeal to arms may
-become less and less frequent of occurrence, and that.

VIL] ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 89
public opinion may side more and more strongly with
those who fight on the defensive. That much has
been done already no impartial student of history
will deny, if he compares Europe as it was in the
fifth century with what it is in our time, who have
just seen what might have been an internecine struggle
bloodlessly terminated by arbitration. We have seen,
too, how the horrors of war, even of war on a Titanic
seale, may be alleviated by a growing respect for the
lives and property of non-combatants, and by the
devoted labours Of Christian men and women, ready
to relieve the sufferings on either side.
We must throw ourselves back in thought from
our own more peaceful life to the day when the vast
amphitheatres of the capital of the civilized world
were thronged with spectators, not a few of them
ladies of rank and culture, to see hired swordmen
butcher one another in cold blood; or to the older
time, when human sacrifices reeked on the altar".
True — this "sense" "of the sanctity of human
life0" did not arrive at maturity all at once. The
world was not to be roused from its trance to a new
consciousness rudely and suddenly, but by a gentle
hand. By slow degrees the warring states of Europe
were welded into the confederacy which we call Chris
tendom, and war came to be considered not so much
a trial of brute force as a kind of ordeal, an appeal
to the God of Eight ; and its ferocity was tempered
by the interchange of knightly courtesies. In the
a Euripides, Hecub., 40, 41.
b Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 19.

90 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
far West, at the preaching of Christian missionaries,
women were freed for ever from the revolting obliga
tion of military service, with its stain of blood c ; and
if Christianity could not persuade the warlike spirit
of the Franks to "beat their swords into plough
shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks," it per
suaded them to keep, as it were, a periodical Sabbath
from their feuds, a peace, or, at least, a truce of
Godd. The leaven has done, is doing, its work.
It has leavened, is leavening, the world.
So, again, as regards slavery : Christianity is re
proached that it did not abolish and efface slavery
summarily. Indeed, it is strange, at the first glance,
to read of a public slave-mart in Eome so late as the
sixth century of our era, and of ecclesiastics quietly
standing by, apparently without a word of protest
against the traffic in flesh and blood. But, it must
be repeated, the aim, the purport of the Gospel was
not to revolutionise society, was not to effect a for
cible revulsion in human nature, but to train and
discipline it, as only it can be trained and disciplined,
gradually, or rather to help it to train and discipline
itself. If Christianity had attempted at one blow to
liberate the myriads of slaves within the Eoman
Empire, this would have been to proclaim a servile
war, a sanguinary uprising against Order and pro
perty. And the attempt must have failed, because
premature, because the world was not ready for it.
But the humanising influence of Christianity was at

i

0 By the Lex Adamnani.
In the early part of the eleventh century.

VII.] ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 91
work continually to alleviate the evil6, and to pre
pare the way for its extinction. In the principles
which it enunciated so unfalteringly, Christianity was
applying a solvent to the manacles of the slave, so
that, in the ripeness of time, they should fall from
his wrists at the voice of a Clarkson or a Wilberforce.
Even from the very first Christianity welcomed the
slave to her arms, and told him of an emancipation
commencing on' earth, but to be consummated in
heaven. Once admitted to the Christian Covenant,
the slave became the freedman of Christ, and "a
citizen of no mean city," a citizen of the city of
God. As an adopted son of God, he could hence
forth claim not equality merely, but brotherhood, with
the greatest earthly potentates. For in Christ is
" neither bond nor freef."
To say, "there is no protest" in the Gospel of
Christ "against slavery g," is to shut one's eyes to
its constant assertion of the perfect equality in God's
sight of all races and conditions of men, of the in
herent, the indefeasible rights and responsibilities
of each person separately \
Yes ! some will reply, Christianity does recognise,
and even exaggerate, what is due to each person
singly and solely, but it fails to recognise what is
due from each to the community of which he is
e Before the introduction of Christianity, even the Saxons, with
their strong domestic instincts, sold their own flesh and blood. —
Cf. Montalembert, Monks of the West, iii. 327.
f Gal. iii. 28.
s F. "W. Newman, On the Defective Morality of the New Testa
ment, p. 20. h See Note D.

92 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
a member; an obligation, the greatness of which
is instinctively attested when we speak of the in
dividual as belonging to the community, not of the
community as belonging to him. " In Pagan Ethics,"
it is justly remarked, this duty of the citizen to the
State had even a "disproportionate" value attached
to it, so as to "infringe on the just liberty of the
individual." " In purely Christian Ethics," the writer
adds, less justly, " it is scarcely noticed or acknow
ledged1." And yet the very context of these words
suggests, in part at least, their refutation ; for almost
in the same sentence Christianity is accused of un
duly magnifying the duty of obedience, of setting up
" a standard of ethics, in which the only worth pro
fessedly recognised is obedience3." But obedience,
the habit, that is, of deference to law or authority,
of postponing private predilections, private convic
tions, private advantage to the public good, is an
important element in the patriotism which makes
a nation march as one man, and which sacrifices, if it
must be, the dearest interests of self to the welfare
of the community. But let us look closer. What
is patriotism ? whence its origin ? what the . funda
mental principle which it rests upon? Patriotism
is the development of the love of home, even as the
State is the development of the family. And the
home, the family, depends, not for its stability only
but for its existence, on that reverence for the sanc
tity of marriage which is allowed on all sides, in
praise or in blame, to be an essential attribute of
1 J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 29. > Ibid.

VII.] ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 93
Christianity1". Take away this, annul the strict
ness, the permanency of the marriage - bond, the
mutual fidelity of man and wife, and, as the family
loses its cohesion, so, more slowly indeed but not
less surely, the state is broken up, falls to pieces,
crumbles away into nothing ; and mankind relapses,
from the ennobling organizations of the city and of the
nation, into the chaos of savagery, into the promis
cuous herding together of beasts. Have we not our
selves witnessed very lately the frantic efforts of an
anti-social cosmopolitanism to sweep away the par
titions which Christianity has sanctioned between
nation and nation, and between home and home ?
The objection takes a wider range. " The ideal
of Christian morality" is represented as "negative
and passive," its virtue as "innocence rather than
nobleness ; abstinence from evil rather than the ener
getic pursuit of good1." Can these words, indeed,
be written of the morality of the Gospel? Is not
the writer thinking of that older, narrower code,
which Christ came to expand and to vivify, when
he gravely tells us " ( Thou shalt not ' predominates
over ' Thou shalt ;' " thinking of some fanatical per
version of Christianity by a Manes, a Calvin, or an
Antony of the desert, when he describes the Chris
tian type of character as a " low and abject type of
character, which submits to what it deems the Divine
Will, but cannot rise to the conception of the Divine
Goodness m." Take the Sermon on the Mount and
fe See Lecture III., pp. 43—45. ' J. S. Mill, On Liberty,
p. 28. m Ibid., p. 30.

94 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
the other discourses of our Lord. The burden of
them is this, that men are to rise above the slavish
timidity which shrinks from doing good in its dread
of doing evil to a spirit of beneficence, wide as
earth and high as heaven. Take the parables of our
Lord. Few, very few, but embody, in one shape or
another, this truth, that he who folds his hands and
stands aloof from the great conflict of good and evil,
is a recreant to his Lord. Take the foreshadowings
of future judgment. The verdict of acquittal or of
condemnation turns on this, " What hast thou done
with thy time, thy talents, thy opportunities ? What
noble, unselfish purpose hast thou turned them to"?"
And the crown of victory is not for him who de
clines temptation, but who overcomes it °. Take the
life and death of Him who is to us Example as well
as Teacher, Example as well as Mediator. The key
note of His Life, of His Ministry, of His Passion,
in His own words is this: "I have a work to do,
and how am I straitened, till it be accomplished1";"
"I must be about My Father's business5;" "I must
undo the works of Satan1;" "I must do the works
of Him that sent Me;" "the night cometh, when
no man can work8;" "I am come to send fire on
the earth ; and what will I, if it be already kindled '."
The charge of inertness or passivity is certainly a
strange one to bring against Christianity.
It is admitted that " the sayings of Christ are irre-
n e.g. St. Matt. xxv. 40. ° Eev. iii. 21; St. James i. 12.
p St. Luke xii. 50. i Ibid. ii. 49. r e.g. Ibid. xiii. 16.
" St. John ix. 4 ; cf. Ibid. vii. 7, xvii. 4. * St. Luke xii. 49.

VII.] ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 95
concilable with nothing which a comprehensive mo
rality requires ;" and that " everything excellent in
ethics may be brought within them u." And yet it is
objected that they "contain only part of the truth,
and omit many essential elements of the highest mo
rality x." It has been the object of these Lectures
to shew, that no " essential element of morality " is
omitted in Christianity, but that all " the essential
elements of the highest morality" are found there
in a fulness and with a harmony which are absolutely
unique. At the same time it has been admitted, or
rather it has been urged very earnestly, that these
"elements of morality" are to be looked for in the
Gospel of Christ in an " elemental" form. To say
that "the Gospel of Christ is not a complete mo
rality," and that "it is corrective of a pre-ex-
istent morality7," is in effect a repetition of our
Lord's own words, "I am not come to destroy, but
to fulfil2." To say that Christian morality "must
be eked out from the Old Testament," that "it is
incomplete without secular standards," and that "St.
Paul ekes it out from the Greeks and Eomansa," is
no disparagement, but in strict accordance with our
Lord's retrospective allusions to the law of Moses b,
and to St. Paul's appeal to nature c and conscience d,
as a proof that the Father of all never left Himself
without a witness e. To say that the morality of the
u J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 29. * Ibid. ' Ibid., p. 28.
1 St. Matt. v. 17. a J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 28. b St. Luke
xvi. 16. c e.g. Acts xiv. 15. d e.g. Ibid. xvii. 28. * Ibid.
xiv. 17.

96 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect.
Gospel is couched in " terms most general," and that
Christian morality, as we have it, is " not the work
of Christ or of His Apostles1," but the growth of
centuries, is in other words to admit, as we contend,
that the principles of the Gospel are contained in the
Gospel implicitly rather than explicitly ; that they
are not fossilised petrifactions, but living, fructifying
principles ; that they are so framed in order to elicit
and stimulate in the heart a living, fructifying prin
ciple of action; and that by their very nature, by
this their capacity of testing what is genuine in
man and what is false, they are themselves capable
of perversion g.
One more objection, — and yet it scarcely needs
an answer, especially here in a Christian University,
which has been a centre of light to Europe in the
twilight of an imperfect civilization, and which claims,
by its very title, to encourage and direct the pursuit
of knowledge of every sort and kind. Christianity is
accused of being hostile or indifferent to knowledge.
Because in Christian education the first and foremost
thing is godliness, — and I need not stop to remind you
that godliness, as the word reminds us, is the develop
ment in man of a likeness to the wisdom and majesty
which are the attributes of God ; — therefore, yet most
illogically, it is argued, " Christian education is only
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord\" Be
cause St. Paul exalts charity, that is, self-sacrificing
1 J. S. Mill, On Liberty, p. 28. * See Note E.
h F. "W. Newman, On the Defective Morality of the New Testa
ment, p. 32.

VII.] ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 97
love, above a mere intellectual proficiency, therefore
we are told, " Knowledge is only sarcastically glanced
at in the New Testament i." And though this greatest
of Christian teachers, while exhorting his converts to
be "children" in guilelessness, adds in his very next
words, "in understanding be ye menk;" though he
charges them to be earnest and diligent in the pur
suit " of whatsoever things are lovely, and of good
report1;" though he insists that "every good gift,"
every capacity, faculty, accomplishment of man's
being, is "from above, from the Father of lights"1,"
nor scruples to make his appeal freely to the secular
literature of the Gentile world ; though, to pass from
the disciple to the Master, our Lord Himself has
taught us, by parable and by precept11, that we are
all responsible for the improvement and use of every
talent entrusted to our keeping ; yet, in the face of
all this, the sceptic writes, " That knowledge deserves
to be studied for its own sake, that the desire of
knowledge is a virtue, no hint is given in Scrip
ture0." Yet more: "If the New Testament," he
adds, " is not hostile to this faculty," (he is speaking
of the sense of beauty,) "its silence is a grave de
fect." Does an accusation like this need a reply?
To take at hazard one instance out of many. Can
we forget whose Voice has bidden the children of
men, troubled and disquieted in vain with sordid
1 F. W. Newman, On the Defective Morality of the New Testa
ment, p. 29. k 1 Cor. xiv. 20. ' Phil. iv. 8. '" St. James
i. 17. " e.g. In the parable of the Slothful Servant. ° F. "W.
Newman, On the Defective Morality of the New Testament, p. 29.
H

98 ALLEGED DEFECTS OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. [Lect. VII.
cares, to turn their weary eyes to the flowers which
fringe their path, to " consider the lilies of the field,
how they growp," and to rejoice in the beauty of the
universe, even in its minutest features. Even were
it true, this alleged silence of the New Testament on
the sense of beauty, the arts which Christianity has
fostered would speak to confute the cavil. The glow
ing canvasses of Italy or of Spain, the stately towers
and spires of northern minsters, the thrilling har
monies of Handel or of Bach, — these are our answer
to the objector who accuses our faith of discouraging
art, or of deadening the sense of beauty.
» St. Matt. vi. 28.

LECTURE VIII.
Summary anti Conclusion.

ST. MATTHEW xxvii. 54.
" Truly this was the Son of God."
TT has been the endeavour of these Lectures to set
-1- before you some of those characteristics of Chris
tian Morality which mark it off from other systems,
as purer and loftier than they. How imperfectly
the design which I proposed to myself has been ac
complished, I am well aware. But I am not without
hope that others, more competent than. I, may be
induced to prosecute the line of thought here sug
gested, and to elaborate what is but a sketch into
the fulness and exactness of a finished picture.
For in the moral characteristics of Christianity we
have a foundation for our faith, deep as the inner
most conscience of man, and wide as the earth's
circumference ".
Let me ask you to retrace very cursorily the steps
of our argument.
First, something was said with a view to assuring
ourselves that there is really any such thing as an
acknowledged standard of right and wrong, speaking
morally. For even this may not pass unchallenged ;
not a few, like Pilate, asking sadly or scoffingly,
« See Note F.
H2

100 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. [Lect.
"What is truth?" Next, an attempt was made to
shew, mainly on psychological grounds, that the vital
principle of moral excellence in its every phase is
unselfish love, the principle of vice, selfishness.
So far our enquiry was preliminary. The next
stage in it was to test the moral teaching of the
Gospel by this rule, classifying our desires, as they
find their gratification in the pleasures of sense, in
the exercise of power over others, or in the pure con
sciousness of superiority. Lastly, I called your at
tention to the breadth and elasticity of the evangelic
morality, and essayed to reply to some noteworthy
objections to it, as defective and faulty. I think
I am not overstating the case in favour of Chris
tianity, nor doing injustice to other types of moral
excellence, if I say, that we find a purity, a tender
ness, an integrity in Christian morals, in one word,
an unselfishness, which we seek in vain elsewhere.
Are we to stop here? If, indeed, we are per
suaded that Christ Jesus inculcated a holier rule of
conduct than any other teacher, while by His life
and death He gave to the world an example of entire
self-sacrifice such as it has never seen before or since,
can we stop short of the irresistible conclusion, that
the Teacher and the Teaching are divine? Can we
refrain from exclaiming with the eyewitness of His
sufferings on the Cross, " Truly this was the Son of
God ?" In these sublime precepts, in this reproach-
less life of untiring beneficence, in this unfalter
ing self-devotion from the cradle at Bethlehem to
the Cross on Calvary, have we not found what the

VIII.] SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 101
sceptic defies us to find — I borrow his words — " One
who dwarfs all others before and after Him, one
to whose high sympathy sages and prophets must
bowa," One — will you not add with me? — who wins
our love, as the Son of Man, who claims our adora
tion, as the Son of God most high ?
Let it be remembered, that the moral teaching
of Christianity and the great fundamental doctrines
of the Christian faith, are very closely linked to
gether. For reasons given in an earlier Lecture, to
avoid complicating our enquiry, or seeming to antici
pate our conclusion, I have purposely refrained from
mixing theology with morality. And yet I have felt
all along, as doubtless you have felt with me, and
I have not hesitated to give expression to the feeling,
that whatever there is of best and noblest in the
morality of the Gospel, flows as of necessity from the
great facts of theology which the Gospel reveals.
Love or unselfishness, it matters not which name we
choose, is, if we have reasoned rightly, that which
sums up in itself the characteristics of Christian
practice. And what else than love is the substance
and the purport of a Creed, which tells us of a Father
of all, who "spared not His Only Son for menb;"
of a Saviour, who left heaven to save the helpless;
of a Holy Spirit, ever aiding the vacillating wills of
men to reject the evil and to choose the good?
Why there should be evil in the universe, why man,
above other creatures, should be invested with this

a F. "W. Newman, Against Hero-making in Religion, p. :
b Eom. viii. 32.

102 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. [Lect.
awful prerogative of being free to choose good or evil,
life or death, is not our question. The existence of
evil is a fact, which must be accepted as a starting-
point in all our surmisings. But so much as this
at least must be allowed. Granted, that evil is, and
must be by the conditions of our nature, no system of
philosophy or of theology throws so strong a light on
the disciplinary character of evil, or supplies to men
so strong a motive for overcoming it, as the Creed
of Christendom in its purest, simplest form.
In our attempt to form a just estimate of Christian
morality, reference has been made to results ; for,
if discriminated fairly, its results tell strongly for
or against a creed. But, after all, "it is a shallow
philosophy" — I borrow, again, the words of an op
ponent of Christianity-^" to measure a hero not by
what he is, but by what he' has done c." It is well
said. For the hindrances in the way of those who
desire to do good service to the Truth are great and
manifold. If the amount of good done by Chris
tianity in the world seems far less than was to be
expected, I pray you to listen to the words, as wise
as they are eloquent, which we owe to the pen of
one whom this University numbers with pride among
her sons, words written of the apparently very par
tial success which attended the labours of an eminent
Church reformer in the eleventh century, but which
are true also of the apparently inadequate success of
Christianity in its attempt to regenerate the world:
"What are all reforms, restorations, victories of
c F. "W. Newman, Against Hero-making in Religion, p. 7.

VIII.] SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 103
truth, but protests of a minority; efforts, clogged
and incomplete, of the good and brave ; just enough
in their own day -to stop instant ruin, the appointed
means to save what is to be saved, but in themselves
failures. Good men work and suffer, and bad men
enjoy their labours and spoil them ; a step is made
in advance — evil rolled back and kept in check for
a time, only to return perhaps the stronger. But
thus, and thus only, is truth passed on, and the
world preserved from utter corruption d." Why this
should be, why decay and corruption should thus
impress their seal, as on all forms of outward beauty,
so on all that is fairest and noblest morally, — why,
with efforts so strenuous, so unremitting in every
age on the part of the brave and true to force back
the tide of evil, its crested waves seem ever and anon
as though they would submerge the earth, — this we
ask in vain. But let me ask of you two questions,
which are not beyond our scope to answer, — What
other force is there in the world which makes even
an attempt to contend with evil, moral and physical,
as Christianity does ? And what would our life,
our collective life, the life of each one singly, be,
if the light of love which the Gospel sheds upon it
were, indeed, quenched and gone, if the Sun of Eight-
eousness were blotted out of our firmament, if the
salt of Christian holiness were, indeed, to lose its
savour ?
There are some, not a few, especially among the
educated and the intellectual, who put questions like
d E. W. Church, St. Anselm, p. 294.

104 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. [Lect.
these aside, as if no answer need be given one way
or the other. When Agrippa was told of " one Jesus,
which was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive,"
his reply was this, "I would hear the man myself6."
He would not prejudge a question so startling and
so momentous, without at any rate hearing what Paul
had to say about it. But now, when we are told that
He who died on Calvary is "risen indeed'," and
"lives for evermore8," and "holds the keys of hell
and death h," and is "mighty to save1," not a few
turn away with an indifference which cares neither
to affirm nor to deny, as if the convictions, which
changed the whole life-course of a man like Saul
of Tarsus, were not worth a moment's consideration.
We, in our day, seem so far removed from the events
of the Gospel history : the Voice of which those who
heard it said, "He speaks as never man spake j,"
reaches our ears faintly and from far away, through
the intervening centuries; it is well-nigh lost amid
the angry recriminations of our controversies. Like the
Israelites waiting for the return of their leader from
the summit of Sinai, men are tempted to say in their
hearts, "We wot not what is become of Himk" who
promised to return so speedily. Men ask, longingly
or in scorn, " Why tarry the wheels of His chariot ?"
why sleeps that trumpet of the Archangel which is
to wake the dead to meet the Advent of their Lord ?
Nay, Christians, let us look back through the mist of
years, and see in thought the gracious form of the
e Acts xxv. 22. f St. Luke xxiv. 24. e Eev. i. 18.
h Ibid. ' Isa. lxiii. 1. ¦> St. John vii. 46. k Acts vii. 40.

VIII.] SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 105
Son of Man, as He " went about doing good V Let
us listen eagerly, amid the harsher sounds of earth,
for the Voice which says, " Come unto Me, all ye
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you
restm." Let us believe Him, as He invites us to do,
"for His works' sake11." If we believe that Jesus
taught, lived, died, as the Gospels pourtray Him
teaching, living, dying, then to believe that He
worked miracles, rose from the grave, went up into
heaven, follows as of course. " 0 ! Arm of the Lord,
art thou not it that hath cut Eahab, and wounded
the dragon ? Art thou not it, which hath dried the
sea, the waters of the great deep ; that hath made
the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to
pass over ° ? " 0 ! Arm of Christ our Lord, art Thou
not it, which overcame Sin and Death on the Cross,
which made a way for His redeemed to pass through
the waters of death safely ?
To wait, in suspense, in uncertainty, is in one sense
the attitude of a believer in Christ Jesus. For we
" know not the day, nor the hour of His coming ;"
and till He comes, our clearest vision only sees
"through a glass darkly," our largest knowledge
only "knows in partp." If faith were certainty, it
would cease to be a probation. If it could be demon
strated to the intellect, it would cease to appeal, as
it does, to our appreciation of right and wrong
morally ; would cease to be a criterion, whether we
love self best, or something worthier. In this sense
1 Acts x. 38. m St. Matt. xi. 28. n St. John xiv. 11.
0 Isa. Ii. 9. p 1 Cor- xiii- 13-

106 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. [Lect.
a Christian waits, with a lifelong waiting, for the so
lution of the insoluble, for the attainment of what is
here beyond attainment ; waits, well content to leave
many a question unanswered in this life, that he
would fain have answered, if it were possible. In
this sense, to "wait" is the Christian's watchword
amid his perplexities.
But in another sense, to wait, undecided and inert,
to sit on the bank, counting the ripples of Time's
stream as it glides past, while we ought to be borne
onward on its waters to fresh hopes and fresh ex
ertions, to stand " idle in the market-place" while the
others are "bearing the heat and burden of the day"
is folly and ingratitude. It is folly, if, while in other
matters we are daily, hourly acting on what is mere
probability*1, we turn away from the Christ till we
can have proof positive that He is what He claims to
be. It is ingratitude of the basest, if the trouble and
the responsibility of enquiry deter us from facing the
question, — Is it or is it not the truth, that this All-
holy Being lived and died for me ? 0 ! you who have
yet your lives before you, whose future has as yet
no wasted past to sigh for, believe me, to put off the
earnest consideration of these things, is not only to
let slip time which can never be recalled, it is to
weave round yourselves a tangled mesh of habit
which will take years to unravel ; it is to sully the
crystal of your souls with a stain, which some day
you shall be fain to wash away, if it may be, with
tears. "How long halt ye between two opinions?"
q Cf. Bishop Butler's Analogy.

VIII.] SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 107
If Christ be God, then follow Him. If the blind
forces of a material mechanism be God,  but I will
not finish the sentence. " Blessed is he that wait
eth1," so the exiled seer comforted his soul in the
dark days of the captivity, — " Blessed is he that
waiteth," not holding back his hand from the work
that cries out to be done, — the work to which our Lord
leads us on, — the work of undoing, day by day, the
works of darkness — till every subtle question that can
be devised has been laid to rest ; but working on, in
faith, in patience — even with but a scanty light on his
endeavours. Blessed they, who shall be able to say
at last, " This is our God, we have waited for Him,
and He will save us8;" for, while we saw Him not,
" His statutes have been our song in the house of
our pilgrimage V
r Dan. xii. 12. * Isa. xxv. 9. ' Ps. cxix. 54.

APPENDIX.

NOTE A.
See Lecture I., p. 12.
It seems difficult, even for those most conversant with
the Talmud, to pronounce positively, how far its loftiest
flights of morality are really independent of Christianity.
" We do not believe," says a recent learned writer on the
Talmud, "that we have it" (the Mishna) "in its original
shape."— Quarterly Review, ccxlvi. p. 442. "They" (the
MSS.) " are only fragmentary for the most part," p. 421.
" The Canonical books" (of Buddhism) belong " to a much
later period " (than 550 b.c.) — M. Miiller, Buddhism, p. 4.
How far the philosophy of Imperial Rome was affected
by the new religion emanating from Judaea, and making
its converts in the first century there, as elsewhere, is dis
cussed by Mr. Lecky in his interesting History of European-
Morals (i. 361, 2). "The greatest moralists of the Roman
Empire never mentioned Christianity, or mentioned it with
contempt ; they habitually disregarded the many religions
that had arisen among the ignorant ; and we have no direct
evidence of the slightest value of their having come into
contact with, or favoured the Christians." Still, even grant
ing this, it does not follow that the leavening influence of
Christianity was not silently at work in the schools of
philosophy as in the court of the Caesars, (cf. Philippians
iv. 22.) Mr. G. Long (M. Aurelius Antoninus, p. 22) thinks
that "the Emperor knew nothing of Christianity." On
the other hand, see II Christianesimo nascente (by II Conte
Tullio Dandolo) ; Champagny, Les Antonins ; Tillemont,
Histoire des Empereurs (torn, ii.) and Memoires (torn. ii. art.
ii.) ; Allies, The Formation of Christendom ; Fleury, Les

112 NOTE B.
Mceurs des Chritiens ; Mamachi, Costumi dei primitivi Chris-
tiani; Dollinger, Introduction to History of Christianity ;
Turretin, Traiti de la Veriti de la Religion Chritienne ; and
the BiUiotheque Saerie, by the Dominicans, Richard and
Geraud (s. v. Religion). For these references, I am in
debted to the learned Rev. J. Skinner, M.A., Vicar of
Newland.

NOTE B.
See Lecture IL, p. 22.

MOKAL AVERAGES.
It is sometimes argued that the existence of Free-will
in man is inconsistent with statistical results, which, it is
said, shew, or tend to shew, that his actions may be reduced
to fixed or slightly-varying averages, and are therefore, it
is argued, governed, like other natural phenomena, by fixed,
invariable, inevitable laws.
Assuming, for the moment, that the uniformity of such
averages is truly stated, it may be answered, —
(1.) So far as they relate to acts which result from the
physical condition of man, they prove nothing as to the
freedom of the Will. Even as regards moral action, so
far as other than moral causes intervene, these may disturb
the result, and the apparent constancy of the average may
only shew that the Will has to work with implements and
under conditions which limit its freedom, and give a fixity
to its operations which does not belong to the Will itself.
(2.) Free-agency is not the same thing as mere lawless
caprice of Will3. Independently of circumstances which
rouse the moral sense into action, either in the individual
or in masses of people, a sudden change for better or worse
is not to be expected. It is enough for the advocate of free-
agency if such a change follows the infusion into society of
fresh moral elements, such, for instance, as a Christian be
lieves to have been revealed in the Person and teaching
of Christ.
» Religion and Science alike recognise Law in Nature; the Law, to many
minds, implying a Lawgiver. 1

114 NOTE B.
But it may be questioned whether any such fixed average
of moral action can be shewn to exist as is required to
support even a probable argument against the freedom of
the WiU.
To take for illustration a single class of crimes committed
in this country, it appears from the last published Judicial
Statistics h of England and Wales that the total number of
murders reported by the police in the year 1870-1 was 130
as against 101 in 1869-70 ; or, allowing for the increase of
population, 1 in 174,647 for the year 1870-1, against 1 in
218,714 for the year 1869-70 ; 1 in 144,831 for the year
1868-9 ; 1 in 167,824 for 1867-8 ; and 1 in 158,737 for
1866-7 ; numbers which are only slightly altered, not re
duced to any regular average, by including the attempts
to murder also. Thus in 1870-1 the attempts to murder
were 51, as against 52 in 1869-70, the proportion of such
offences to the population being —
For the year 1870-1, 1 to 445,178.
„ 1869-70, 1 to 424,810.
,, 1868-9, 1 to 358,515.
„ 1867-8, 1 to 354,907.
„ 1866-7, 1 to 476,211.
So, again, the total number of persons summarily pro
ceeded against for drunkenness, or as being drunk or dis
orderly, for each year from 1866-7 to 1870-1 is returned
as follows c : —
1870-1. 1869-70, 1868-9. 1867-8. 1866-7,
142,343 131,870 122,310. 111,465. 100,357.
Once more, it has been stated d that the number of sen
tences of penal servitude, which in the year 1830 had been
b Judicial Statistics, 1871, England and Wales, Part I., p. xiv.
c Ibid., p. xviii. These figures I owe to my brother, John George Smith,
M.A., Barrister-at-Law.
d By the Home Secretary, Mr. Bruce, in moving the Second Beading of the
Prevention of Crime Bill, Feb., 1873, as reported in the Times, Feb. 21.

NOTE B. 115
upwards of 4,100, fell, in 1869, to 2,006; in 1870, to
1,788 ; in 1871, to 1,628 ; and in 1872, to 1,494, shew
ing in the last four years, with an increasing population,
a reduction of 25 per cent.
These numbers may, of course, have been largely affected
by legislation, police administration, and innumerable other
causes ; but it should be remembered that legislative Acts
are in great measure an embodiment of the moral feeling of
the community. At any rate, the wide variation in the
number of crimes committed from year to year tends to
shew that no such regularity of average has been estab
lished as will avail for logical proof.
Moreover, if we take a wider view over a longer course
of time, is it not an acknowledged fact, that the moral cha
racteristics of the same nation have varied; that one kind
of vice prevails in one age, another in another ; that the
moral habits of a community are inextricably interwoven
with social customs and positive laws, which again are the
combined product of moral and material causes ; that the
very frequency and excess of a particular crime or vice in
one age may lead to its mitigation or repression by the
force of public opinion, acting through positive law or
social custom, in another ?
Also, the moral state of a community is dependent, more
or less directly, upon material conditions, such as war and
peace, plentiful or deficient harvests, prosperity or depres
sion of trade, &c.
All this, of course, is not any proof that the Will is free,
but it seems to be destructive of the argument against its
freedom derived from the supposed constancy of averages.
But perhaps it may be said, abandoning the argument
from the constancy or regularity of averages, that the fact
that moral acts and habits are dependent upon these various
influences, social, legislative, and material, is the very proof
required that they are no more the result of free agency

116 NOTE B.
than any other facts of human nature ; and that, although
by a sort of transmutation of moral forces (like that result
ing from the "correlation" of physical forces in natural
science) morality assumes different phases in different pe
riods, one kind of vice or habit passing into another, and
so on, there exists from first to last a constant, invariable
quantity, or force, of so-called moral evil, which the so-
called Will is powerless to destroy or eliminate.
But it seems enough to answer, that this is a theory too
vague and impalpable to admit of any scientific test; al
though on a general view, e.g. of the state of Europe before
and after the diffusion of Christianity, the moral difference
may to an unbiassed mind be amply apparent.
In fact, it would seem to be a hopeless attempt to prove
or disprove the freedom of the Will, by registering the out
ward acts of men taken in the mass. Is it not the more
scientific course to study the operations of the Will, not
where they are complicated a thousand-fold with motives
and causes which affect its action, and yet cannot by any
analysis be eliminated, but rather, after the old ethical
method, where it may be examined in its simplest and
purest form, in the inward workings of the consciousness
of each man, and in the outward experiences of individual
istic action? For such purposes there is little likelihood
that the old science of Ethics will ever be superseded by
Sociology.

NOTE C.
See Lecture VI., p. 78.
Self-murder has been dignified with the euphemistic
title of Euthanasia. The question of it being right or
wrong, speaking generally and without reference to parti
cular instances, turns on the same hinge as the whole argu
ment of these Lectures. Is a man's life his own property, or
is it a trust in his keeping for his God and his fellows ? In
the one case, he can fairly ask, "May I not do what I will
with mine own ?" In the other case, the responsibility of
abruptly terminating it by his own act can only, if ever,
be justified by very extreme circumstances.

NOTE D.
See Lecture VII., p. 91.
" Of no idea is it so generally known that it is indefinite,
ambiguous, liable to the greatest misconstructions, and, in
reality, consequently subjected to them, than of the idea
of free-will, and none is in current use, with so little in
telligence. But, as we may express ourselves, the free spirit
being the actual existent spirit, or the spirit that actually
prevails in human affairs being the spirit of free-will, mis
constructions in regard to it are of the most enormous con
sequence. For when persons and peoples are once for all
possessed by the abstract notion of freedom as such, freedom
on its own account, no other has such irresistible power,
and just because it is the very inmost being of spirit, its
very actuality and self. Entire quarters of the globe, Africa,
and the East, have never had, and have not yet this idea.
The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics,
had it not. On the contrary, they conceived only that a man
by his birth (as Athenian or Spartan citizen, &c), or by
strength of character, by education, by philosophy (the wise
man is free even when a slave or in chains), only so did
they conceive a man to be free. This idea came into the
world through Christianity, in which it is that the indi
vidual, as such, has an infinite worth, as being aim and
object of the love of God, and destined, consequently, to
have his absolute relation to God as spirit, to have this
spirit dwelling in him. Christianity it was, namely, that
revealed man in himself to be destined to supreme freedom.
.... This idea, then, is the very actuality of man, and
not that he has it, but that he is it.

NOTE D. 119
" Christianity has made it the very actuality of its ad
herents, — the very actuality of its adherents, — not to be
a slave, for example. If reduced to slavery, if the control
over their property is to depend on caprice, and not on laws
and courts of justice, then they find the very substance of
their being violated. This volition of freedom is no longer
an impulse, an instinct that demands its gratification ; it is
now a character, — a spiritual consciousness that is above
impulse, that is above instinct. But this freedom, this
free-will, and free-agency, that possesses such implement,
such filling, such aims and ends, cannot remain as notion
only, as mere principle of the mind or the heart. It must
unclose itself into objectivity — into an organic actuality,
legal, moral, political, and religious." — Hegel, Philosophie
des Geistes, p. 374 ; quoted by J. H. Stirling, Lectures on
the Philosophy of Law, pp. 27, 28.

NOTE E.
See Lecture VII., p. 96.
" To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make
the deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as
dead beliefs, without being ever realized in the imagination,
the feelings, or the understanding, is exemplified by the
manner in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines
of Christianity. By Christianity I here mean what is ac
counted such by all churches and sects, — the maxims and
precepts contained in the New Testament. These are con
sidered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing
Christians. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not
one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his individual
conduct by reference to those laws. The standard, to which
he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his
religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a col
lection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been
vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his
government; and on the other, a set of every-day judg
ments and practices, which go a certain length with some
of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand
in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a com
promise between the Christian creed and the interests and
suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards
he gives his homage ; to the other his real allegiance. All
Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble,
and those who are ill-used by the world ; that it is easier
for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven ; that they
should judge not, lest they be judged ; that they should
swear not at all ; that they should love their neighbour as

NOTE E. 121
themselves ; that if one take their cloak, they should give
him their coat also; that they should take no thought for
the morrow ; that if they would be perfect, they should sell
all that they have and give it to the poor. They are not
insincere when they say that they believe these things ;
they do believe them, as people believe what they have al
ways heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense
of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe
these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to
act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are service
able to pelt adversaries with ; and it is understood that they
are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for
whatever people do. that they think laudable. But any one
who reminded them that the maxims require an infinity
of things which they never even think of doing, would gain
nothing but to be classed among those very unpopular cha
racters who affect to be better than other people. The doc
trines have no hold on ordinary believers, — are not a power
in their minds. They have an habitual respect for the
sound of them, but no feeling which spreads from the words
to the things signified, and forces the mind to take them in,
and make them conform to the formula. Whenever conduct
is concerned, they look round for Mr. A. and B. to direct
them how far to go in obeying Christ." — J. S. Mill, On
Liberty, p. 24.
All this is indeed indisputable, as against the incon
sistencies of Christians ; but it is beside the question of the
excellence or faultiness of Christian morality.

K

NOTE F.
See Lecture VIII., p. 99.
It is to be noted throughout these Lectures, in regard
to the character and influence of motives in morality, that
a motive, whether selfish or unselfish, may be real and
efficacious, without any consciousness of it or direct refer
ence to it in each particular instance. Indeed, it is a
healthier habit, morally and physically, as a rule, to act
rightly and yet unconsciously.

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