Ethical religion

Preface

IT is only fair to any one who may take up this book, to say that it is made up of lectures given, for the most part, before the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago. It is due to my colleagues in the Ethical Movement to say tliat they are not responsible for the views here expressed, that the book nowise claims to represent the Movement, but simply reflects my own attitude of mind upon the various topics treated. Even in discussing " The Basis of the Ethical Movement," I but give my own interpretation of it. The bond of union between the lecturers, as between the members, of Ethical Societies is not a speculative but a moral one. I must add, however, that my own intellectual indebtedness to Professor Adler is so great that it would be difficult to measure it. Many of the thoughts in this volume — probably the best ones — are really his thoughts ; he has given me, or at least quickened in my mind, ideas that will never go from me, that are a part of my better self. As I have gone over the proof-sheets of ii PEEFACE.

these pages, I have felt afresh how deep and constant are my obligations to him.

An occasional criticism which a German translation of some of these lectures ^ received, leads me at the outset to disclaim for this volume any scientific pretensions. It is not even a connected series of discourses ; there are repetitions in it. These lectures were not written in the first place for piiblication at all, but to quicken, if they might, the thoughts and lives of those to whom they were orally addressed. There is possibly one lecture, " What is a Moral Action ?" which, as an attempt to analyze and fix a conception, may be thought to have some scientific worth. After writing it, I was gratified to learn that Aristotle had made a somewhat similar analysis, — though the master says in a few words what I spread out in as many pages.2 But had I attempted to write a philosophical treatise, the whole method would have been different. I should then perhaps have been able to clear up some of the confusion and inconsistencies with which my thoughts may seem to be involved. For example, I should have attempted to explain

1 Published under the title, " Die Religion der IMoral," translated by [Professor Dr.] Georg von Gizycki, Leipzig and Berlin, Wilhelm Friedrich, 1885. A Dutch translation of the same, by the hand of the Rev. P. H. Hugenholtz, Jr., of Amsterdam, appeared in 1888 under the title, " Zedelijke Religie," Amsterdam, Tj. van Holkema.

'^ See the Nicomachean Ethics, ii. 4, § 3.

PREFACE. Ill

my inability to assent either to theism on the one hand or to positivism on the other ; I should have sought to reconcile varying points of view in speaking of religion, God, ethics, Christianity ; I should have attempted particularly to develop my own theory of ethics, which I cannot call either Utilitarian or Intuitional. I say " attempted," for I do not assume that my intellectual positions are necessarily final and complete ; speaking from my own brief experience, the intellectual life is one of change and progress, and it is possible that in attempting to state my views philosophically, I should be led somewhat to modify and enlarge them.

My purpose in allowing this book to come before the public is not intellectual, but practical and moral. I do not ask scholars to read it, but men and women who are in the midst of the stress of life. My only fear is that it may be too scholastic for the latter class, as I know it lacks too much in thoroughness and precision to satisfy the former. But if it should by chance refresh or invigorate, or help to refine, the moral life of any one who reads it ; if it should stir in any one a divine discontent with himself and the state of society about him ; if it should give any one courage to fight with the evil and contend for the good in the world ; if it should nourish any one's secret hope that there is but one outcome of the course and evolution of things, namely, the victory of the good, — if it iv PREFACE.

should thus make any one more gladly co-operate with the Deep Tendency of Things, then I should count myself happy indeed.

I wish to thank Mr. A. W. Stevens, of Camhridge, for valuable counsels and assistance as the book was passing through the press.

W. M. S.

Chicago, March, 1889.

Contents

Page

I. Ethical Religion 7

II. The Ideal Element in IMorality ... 22

I. Ethical Religion

THE moral nature is that by which we transcend ourselves and enter into an ideal region. Science, with its methods of observation and experiment, is limited to the world as it is. Ethics is essentially the thought of what ought to be. It is not an account of man as he is, nor is it a transcript and summary abstract of the facts of society ; it declares the law after which man should act, and in obedience to which society should be constituted. Ethics, in a word, holds up the picture of our ideal selves, and gives us back society transfigured. For man has two sides to his nature, — one looking out on what is, the other on the better that might be. It is a meritorious task to analyze the body and brain and mind of man ; to explore conscientiously and classify systematically the facts of human society. But psychology and sociology do not take the place of ethics, nor even give its indispensable foundation. In the strict sense of the word, science — the science of man as truly as any other — knows nothing of right and wrong, but only of what is ; of facts, and the law of their connection.

To the pure understandingj virtue and vice do not exist. These notions arise in virtue of our judgment upon facts ; and the organ of that judgment is other than that by which we learn of and explain the facts themselves : men call it Conscience. It pronounces upon the worth of facts ; for they may sometimes seem as firm as the earth and as constant as day and night, and yet have no moral right to be. Such are injustice, unscrupulous self-assertion, wrong, — though they may be continuous with the course of history ; and all the laws and institutions created under their influence are without binding force or obligation.

The safety and sanity of life consist in keeping in mind the higher ends and laws of our existence. For man is not only to know, but to do and to achieve. Strange, is it not, that man should not be content with what he sees ; that he should turn his back on the known and familiar in search of something better ; that he should stake his life sometimes on a hope or dream of his mind ? Yet this, too, belongs to man : it is the ideal ends of human life calling on him for their accomplishment j and he, simple and loyal, does not fail to hear.

Ethical religion would turn men's thoughts this way. It would inspire to a new confidence in ideas. It would be essentially a practical religion, — not practical and ideal, but practical because ideal. It would lay on men a burden, assign to them a task, — a burden the only relief from which is in action; a task which is unescapable till it be accomplished. Like an architect's plan, an idea means nothing in itself: it proposes a new form of life, as the plan involves a new structure. For as the artist, whose soul images some form of the beautiful, seizes the brush or the chisel to portray it ; as the thinker's burning thoughts drive him to utterance, — so in the truly moral nature every idea of the good becomes a necessity, every thought of the higher a command ; all that we dream of and that seems so far away becomes an end and goal for our action and our life. Yet how rarely is the full practical significance of the ideal side of human nature realized ! In what illusions do men permit themselves in thinking of the ideal !

First, there is the aesthetic or sentimental mistake. Men wander into an ideal region to luxuriate there. The good is an object of delight ; they contemplate it, love it, worship it, they say, — do everything but obey it. Much of the religion of our day, orthodox and other, is but a kind of spiritual revelling, wherein men allow themselves the use of all kinds of fine sentiments and phrases, yet after which life is as flat as ever. This is unpractical id-ealism, but only because it is false idealism. That ideas are but the pattern after which we are to fashion our lives is not realized ; the element of respect for them is wanting. If a man is not in the mood to act, if he will not become better, let him not think the ideas of the better at all. It is a kind of profaning of them to face them, and not begin to act as they command.

Closely akin to this aesthetic or sentimental mistake is the philosophical mistake of regarding the ideal as another world alongside of the actual world. It is so easy to those who are accustomed to deal with ideas to think of them as real, substantial things. They become so familiar with them that the natural order of human thought is inverted ; and the ideas are spoken of as real, and the actual world as an appearance. This seems to have been the Platonic view. Goodness, justice, — moral ideas, as well as all others, Plato looked at as self-existent, independent entities. The ideal world was another literal world like our own, only more perfect. If this were so, what should we have to do but to lift our thoughts to that ideal world, and there find the rest and peace that are denied to us here ?

That might be one kind of religion ; but surely it would not be a practical religion. And what is more, it would be an illusory religion ; for there is no such ideal world as Plato pictures. The Platonic world in its moral aspect is nothing more than the world as we should like to see it, the world as it ought to be. It is in truth nothing but an ideal for our world ; and to transform this actual order of our human life into an image of it would be the task of a practical religion. The truest word that could be addressed to us is, If thou wilt ever see the perfect, thou must create it ; till that time, thou rangest over the earth or through the heavens in vain ! The idea only of perfection is in us ; the perfect itself is to be. Men ask. Can we be satisfied with such a view ; can we be content to regard all that is higher and better only as a thought of our minds ? But a noble mind does not first ask, What is satisfactory ? but, What is true ? And I am sure that one who has been caught up by the thought of the higher, and felt that the burden and the glory of accomplishing it rested upon him, would feel the richest satisfactions denied him if told that the higher was already real, and he had only to open some

ETHICAL RELIGION. H fancied spiritual eyes to discern it. What meaning, what significance, would there be in our lives, with grand thought and purpose stirred, to learn that that which we were to do is already accomplished ? " Certainly, cousin," said the gallant Earl of Pembroke, on coming up to the Earl of Derby before Auberoche, and finding the battle already won, " you have neither been courteous nor behaved honorably to fight my enemies without waiting for me, seeing that you had sent for me." That is an unsatisfactory view of life which leaves us nothing to do, which fixes on us no great responsibilities, which encircles us with no grand trusts. In truth, in our heart of hearts, we want to do, we want to dare ; we do not care even to be assured of victory : there is a profound something in us which disdains the need of such assurances.

And as the philosophical mistake is to the highest type of mind not only untrue and delusive, but unsatisfactory rather than satisfactory, so is the theological mistake. Theology gathers all our thoughts of the higher and better together, and conceives them in the form of a perfect person who rules and guides the world. There is a noble side to theology : I mean, of course, not as savages or narrow bigots, but as pure and lofty souls have conceived it. God is the perfect ; there are no limitations, no failings there, — measureless goodness, infinite justice, make up that image of the mind. And if the only alternative were between the world as it is, with no thought of anything above it by which to try it, and this lofty ideal of excellence which might be ever kept in mind, I do not see how we could hesitate in pronouncing which would be the better. We must look on all that is

12 ETHICAL EELIGION.

from some ideal stand-point ; we must keep in our minds some high and unfailing standard of excellence ; and until provision is made for this in the new order of things, the old belief will remain, and deserve to remain. For man has these two sides to his nature, of which I have spoken, and the most perfect knowledge of what is will not take the place of the thought of what ought to be. But the noble side of theology is easily disengaged from theology itself. When one ceases to believe in God in the ordinary sense, one does not need to drop flat to the world and life as we see them and know them. All that made that image admirable remains, — all those higher qualities that we instinctively call divine and that mankind instinctively worships, wherever any hint or suggestion of them appears in human form, — goodness, pity, boundless charity, unfailing justice.

We do not find these in the world, we do not see them in ourselves ; and so, foolish creatures that we are, we jump to the conclusion that they are in another world, that they belong to God. And here is the ignoble side to theology ; for not only is the personal Deity of theology illusory, but by gathering the divine qualities into a form outside of man, it allows us to forget that they are qualities for man, and religion becomes the worship of something already existing, instead of the sense of a burden and a task. We are to become divine : we are to make this world a scene of justice. All that men have gathered into the form of a God is but the image of our possible selves. We make a myth of love and justice, when we say that they are actually ruling in the world, as Christian believers hold; or as Emerson says, that "though ministers of justice fail, justice never," and that the ethical laws are self-executing, instantaneous.^ Justice is forever failing in the world. Whenever ministers of justice fail, it fails ; for it acquires a real existence only in those who execute it. Aside from them, it is only what ought to be, nothing that is. There are no self-executing, instantaneous, ethical laws; though one might well, when one thinks of all the unrequited wrong there is in the world, wish to heaven that there were. The laws are over us, but they wait for us to execute them : they are shorn of their intent, as our lives are of their significance, if we do not execute them. We can only say that the ethical laws should rule in all our lives, that justice forever calls for ministers ; and of love, not that it is supreme in the world, but let love, as Buddha said, even the love that fills the mother's heart as she watches over an only child, animate all. For the ideal itself of the old religions is not essentially different from that of the new. The old however say, The ideal does rule : the new will say, Let it rule ! The old religions appear to open to ns the secrets of what lies behind the veil : the new will take those august secrets, and make them in all their grandeur the aim and the rule of human life. The old religions leave us on our knees in rapt contemplation and worship : the new will summon us to stand erect, and to believe that all that men have worshipped, all that they have dreamed of, air that has seemed so far above them and beyond them, men and women in the future are to become and to realize.

But why, if man's ideals do not reveal anything

1 The Preacher.

outside ourselves, but only indicate what we ourselves should be and do, — why do we speak of devotion to them as religion at all ? I do not covet that word, and disbelieve in all the prevailing forms of religion. I do not begin with any attempt to compromise with them. And yet I am driven to speak of religion, — not indeed in the common way, as of something additional to morality, but of morality as religion.

This may be made evident in two ways. Eeligion from the purely human side might be defined as man's supreme interest : whoever has an absorbing concern may be said to have a religion. We often hear persons spoken of as religiously devoted to some object, religiously faithful in some attention, some regard, some affection. There are those who have memories that are to them a religion, — statesmen to whom the service of their country has been a religion, reformers who give their lives and fortunes in religious devotion to the service of some idea. Those who care for no one thing more than another, who have no enthusiasm, who are listless and cannot be conceived as rising to any height of self-devotion, — these are properly the irreligious people of any time. In vain would the most perfect theory of life and the universe be called a religion, if it could not stir the souls of men, if it -could not take hold of life and mould it into higher forms. If morality then, — if the thought of the goodbecomes supreme over all other thoughts in the minds of any, if it enlists their feelings and masters their life, it is their religion. I believe, indeed, that there is no other thought that wins so instinctive a reverence as this of the good ; that conceptions of the Deity and plans for a truer society take deep hold of men only as they in some sense image or embody it. The question whether morality can become a religion for men in general, is the question whether men in general are capable of unselfish admiration ; whether they can love the good unmoved by personal fears and hopes, because it is the good, and has an intrinsic charm for them. I do not doubt it. I believe we ordinarily think too meanly of man. The higher nature is in us all : it is not often appealed to, and it is perhaps for this very reason that human life remains on so low a level. Let a new religion arise which should dare to take man at his best, which should summon him to justice and generosity and all nobleness, solely because these are his true and proper life, and I believe the world would be astonished at the answer.

But religion may also be defined from the objective side. In this aspect, it is man's relation with what is ultimate and supreme in the world. The truest religion would be that one in which the supreme interest gathers about that which is really supreme and ultimate in the world. Now, morality, truly interpreted, does bring man into contact with the final nature of things. Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty, — that there is a right and a wrong ; that the right obliges me, that I ought to do it. It makes no difference that I have learned this law, that others have learned it before, that I know little more about it than I have received or been taught ; it makes no difference that I do not know it now perfectly, that I may err sometimes in my judgments about it. Still, I am sure, as Dorothea in the story was,^ that there is

1 Middlemarcli.

a perfect right if I could only find it. Sometimes I wish to do the right ; and sometimes, again, it seems hard, forbidding, and I do not wish to do it. But the right itself does not change with my wishes and wants. I might unlearn it; I might, under the solicitations of some desire or passion, juggle myself into the belief that it no longer existed. Yet the right would not itself cease because my thought of it ceased. I might die and others take my place, yet the right would exist for them as truly as it had existed for me. Whenever, wherever, two persons arise and look into each other's faces, the law of mutual reverence and respect — the law of justice we call it — obtains. If they do not own it, it is the law all the same ; if they act contrary to it, and defy every prescription of it, it is the law all the same. Plainly, men do not make this law, but simply find it. If there are other rational beings than men, it applies to them just as truly ; the law is a universal law for all rational intelligence. As little do the earth and the stars make the law of gravitation which they obey, as does man or the combined host of rational beings throughout the universe make the law of duty. And though no God were, as God is ordinarily conceived, the law would not cease to be. It is not made, and cannot be changed by God or man ; it belongs to the nature of things. Yes, more truly than the law of gravitation does it belong there. I can see no necessity in the law of gravitation ; I can conceive that there might be a different law than this according to which bodies attract one another directly as their mass and inversely as the square of their distance from one another. But no other law is conceivable for rational beings than that of justice, of mutual reverence and respect ; never conceivably could it become right to think liglitly of another human or any rational being. And yet men have failed in. reverence, in respect, for others ; have unblushingly used others, are so failing and using them to-day. How rarely has the law been obeyed I The law is over all, though it were never obeyed.

In this way morality becomes religion. He alone does a genuinely moral act who does it because he must, because the nature of things bears down upon him to do it. For the crystal, religion would be to become a crystal ; to own the pressure that would yield the perfect form. For man, it can only be to be a man, to perform the human part of the universal task. Morality is simply one form of the universal law ; and in the yielding to its demands man is lifted out of himself, and as the tides of ocean throb " respondent to the far-off orbs," so do his pulses beat in unison with, the movement of the universe. Yet how little is the transcendent significance of morality realized in these days ! How often are divine and eternal things contrasted with it ! Ethics cover simply the equities and amenities of this world, it is sometimes said. But there is no equity of this world : there is only equity, as good, as commanding on any other shining planet as on this. " Beyond and above the moral virtues the soul needs a religious life, fed from above," — so reads a Unitarian tract. Whence come then the moral virtues ? From below, from prudence, from the sense of decency, from long-sighted selfishness ? They who think so never breathed the climate of morality. Channing, when a youth of nineteen, wrote : "All my sentiments and affections have lately changed.

I once considered mere moral attainments as the only object I had to pursue. I have now solemnly given myself up to God." This is an unmeaning antithesis, a part of the falsehood of the old religious culture, which he afterward himself detected; for twenty years later he wrote : *' The love of God is but another name for the love of essential benevolence and justice," and the object of religion is, not to " raise us to something higher than morality, for tl^at would be to raise us above God himself, but to give us sublime ideas of morality." Ethics is a pure concern of man with man, it is often said ; it is religion that binds us to a higher order of things. Yet ethics is nothing but the response which man and man make to the higher order of things ; for the reason of justice is, not that another wants it and I choose to give it, but that he ought to have it and I ought to give it. The duty is absolute, not conditioned on 6ur will or thought, but given to us in and by the nature of things. Ethics realized in its meaning is religion ; it is the only religion for the rational man. In my humblest human service, I may be conscious of owning the call which a higher — nay, the highest — makes upon me. Aspiration, reverence, awe, all those sentiments so often contrasted with morality, are but uncompleted morality ; and when the moral act is done, ecstasy is its sign, — ecstasy, which is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect good.

In speaking of an ethical, an essentially practical religion, I have not in mind simply a few superficial improvements on the old religions. I mean not simply a little more " practical work," a little more attention to the necessities of the poor, a little better education of the young among them, a making of their life a little cleaner, neater, healthier, more respectable. An etliical religion would mean this, but because it meant vastly more. It is nothing else than a changed thought of the nature of religion which I have in mind ; namely, that it can be no longer for rational men to-day to worship or pray, but to have the sense of a task, the sense of somewhat limitless to accomplish, and to accomplish it. The Christian Church sings in one of its hymns, —

" Oh, where are kings and empires now. Of old that went and came 1 But lioly Church is praying yet, A thousand years the same."

Might it not go on praying a thousand years more, and no better result come of it ? If we must pray, let us pray to men ; for there all the trouble lies. Could you, 0 Churches, but open the hearts of your worshippers, as you seek to move the heart of God, the need for all other prayer would soon be gone. Keligion is not seeing the evil and wrong in the world, and trusting that somehow in the counsels of God it is all for the best, but in confidentlv attacking: the evil and the wrong, and in leading on the good, as John Stuart Mill says, to its distant and yet not uncertain triumph. The truest revelation, the truest voice of the nature of things, is not in what we see, but in our thoughts of what ought to be. Trust thy dreams, 0 Reformer ! thou comest never so nigh to the heart and spirit of things as in them. This that thou seest, this that seems so strong, so secure, so impregnable, will after a time vanish away ; and what thou thinkest of, what thou art called visionary for daring to think of, will tlien be the real !

To the finest flower of New England culture, to Emerson, was given the insight into the essential identity between morals and religion.^ I scarcely know what true thought of mine the reader will not find, stripped of its imperfections of statement, in him. It was he who long ago spoke of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur that come alone out of the culture of the moral nature.^ Theology was to him the rhetoric of morals.^ " The mind of this age," he says, " has fallen away from theology to morals. I conceive it to be an advance." Unbelief to him was losing hold of the moral intuitions.* Religion was the practices, private and social, in honor of the moral sentiment.^ The commanding fact which he never lost sight of was the sufficiency of this sentiment.® He will not allow that ethics do not satisfy affection J or that they give only a rule, and not the spirit by which the rule is animated.^ All the religion we have, he says, is the ethics of one or another holy person.^ And whenever the sublimities of character are incarnated in a man, we may rely that awe and love and insatiable curiosity will follow in his steps. ^° "No man," he says, "can tell what religious revolutions await us in the next