The Christian method of ethics

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CHAPTER. PAGE

I. The Ideal and the Ideals 9

II. The Ultimate Ethical Ideal 31

II

The fundamental reason for the common lack of adequate equipment on the ethical side lies in the fact that the Christian's ethical programme is not sought for in the right way. The ethical or practical side of the Christian's life is looked upon as a thing detached; and it is not perceived that Christian practical ideals are rightly formulated only when they are translations into terms of practical life on the one religious ideal — that they ought to be, in fact, the one religious ideal dressed to play its part upon the practical stage. What we want is a unifying of our ideals — a unifying of them for the intellect, first, and thereafter, of course, an application of the all-inclusive ideal to each ethical problem as it comes up. We want to understand how one ideal includes all — how all ideals flow from one. We want to get at the varied processes of self-adjustment to practical problems, as the Christian man should practise those processes, by realising how they are inevitably implied in the conception of the main spiritual process, and how they really involve precisely the same movement of the soul. We want to see how the religious self-adjustment which Christianity calls for suggests and includes within itself all the minor self-adjustments required as experience passes on. The minor self-adjustments, they are advisedly termed; for minor, in the sense of being merely adjuncts to the larger and dominating self-adjustment, they would, in a true view of things, at once declare themselves to be. We want, at any rate, to understand that in addressing ourselves to the ethical question we are really addressing ourselves to the religious question — that the solution of the first is to be sought with the solution of the second kept in view — that the two questions are not two, but one. The ethical movement in any given case must be conceived as a special movement within a religious movement which covers all cases, a movement bracketed, as it were, within the larger whole. The true bearing of the Christian man among all the practical problems of his life is discovered only when we seek it away from the practical problems themselves, in the one spiritual ideal which the Christian gospel holds up. The ethical ideals should not need, for their investigation, a fresh start: they should be reached by a translation into appropriate terms of the religious ideal already apprehended. We need to perceive the ethical programme bound up with the religious, and the religious suggesting the ethical; and the mind should be conscious, in passing to and fro between the two, that it is but flitting

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from one apartment to another in the same house. W e are on the wrong track so long as we merely try to carry over from religion into the ethical investigation some new spirit, some new mental or moral equipment, which will assist us, we hope, to carry the investigation through with success. All ideals are to be but translations or applications of the one ideal.

It is important that this should be understood. It is not, let it be emphasised, simply a matter of finding the practical consequences of Christian doctrine. To put it that way still leaves a break between the doctrine and the practical programme — a point at which the mind comes to the close of one investigation and takes up the next — indeed, the Yery statement of the problem in these terms implies that the bridging of a gulf between two separated things is the aim in view. And it is because this position is accepted that the ethical ideals of Christian men remain hazy, and ethical investigations are too frequently unsatisfying in their results. Whsit is needed is not an acceptance of a gulf between the religious programme and the practical programme, followed by an attempt to bridge it, but an appreciation of the fact that gulf there is none. A study of the ethical side of life, from the Christian point of view, must start from the conviction that an ethical programme is reached, not by a process of more or less uncertain

THE IDEAL ANT) THE IDEALS 19

inference, but by a completer unfolding of the religious programme and its significance, and by a taking into the practical field of what that programme prescribes. The spiritual ideal and the ethical ideals should be given together for the inquiring mind. We want an extension of the field of the primary spiritual dynamic : at any rate, we want to see how the primary spiritual dynamic can be and was meant to be extended, so as to cover the entire ethical field.

It is clear that if this were accomplished there would be left nothing even apparently arbitrary in the Christian ordering of life. There would be an organic whole. Life would be no longer a set of unrelated activities, but would resemble a cluster of branches from the same stem. All the lines of action would be radii starting from a common centre: every programme of conduct, through whatever fields it might project itself forward, would run back for its justification to the same fundamental idea, and only as it proved able to 'do so would be declared correct: the many departments of activity, with all their differences, would be worked according to the same formula, and would fall into lines as parts of a harmonious whole. There would be no sense of disjointedness or jerk in passing from one practical question to another; no feeling that one is being transported into a strange land where the language previously spoken becomes unintelligible, and where the coin hitherto current will no longer pass. There would remain only different parts of one empire, the fundamental law of one being the fundamental law of all. Or, to change the figure, in the various sections of life's practice one would only be working different sums of the same order, employing all through the same method and rule. Nothing would be left to guesswork, nothing to experiment or hypothesis, nothing to hazardous ventures whereof the end cannot be discerned. Between all parts of life there would be a real relation.

Back in the one ideal whereof all the subordinate ideals are but reduced, or particularised, expressions, would be the root out of which all the flowers and fruits of action grow. At all times, and under all emergencies, he who is striving for a right ordering and control of his life would have firm ground beneath his feet : no leap in the dark would he ever need to take: standing at the one central place, he would from there be able to touch the entire circumference of things. He would work with one tool instead of many. Instead of a number of lessons, he would have but a single lesson to learn. And not even under the most novel and startling questions which the sphinx of experience might propound would he be at a loss; for he would only have to fall back upon the primary formula out of which all subsidiary formulae are to come, and could then, having discovered the word the moment calls for, pass safely on his way. With the ideals related to the ideal, discerned as specialised adaptations of the ideal, there would be unity through all the range of practical life; and that sense of coming as an uninstructed novice or an unarmed soldier to one ethical problem after another, whereby even the Christian man is too often beset, would give place to a sense that every problem is solved even before it marshals its perplexities, and conquered even before it throws down its gage. He who realises that every ethical rule is to be only a version, adapted to the occasion, of that highest rule in which the supreme spiritual adjustment of his nature is prescribed, will have this advantage over others — that while they must for each new crisis improvise a new programme, he has but to use the one programme, as giving the answer to the question of the new hour. For him the practical spheres of life are not elements in a disconnected series, but parts of an organic whole.

It may be objected that this is, in effect, the extinction of a Christian ethical system as a separate theme of study altogether, and that all thought about it becomes in consequence a futile thing. If all the practical ideals are given in the one spiritual ideal, it is upon that spiritual ideal alone that >the mind should be concentrated. Why waste time in examining the outlying sections of life, when all their secrets can be read by reading the secret at the one central place ?

As a matter of fact, a perfect spiritual adjustment of man's nature — a perfect ordering of life on the religious side — would, were it accomplished, make any study of practical problems unnecessary ; and, as will presently be seen, the first thing to be said about a right management of existence is that on the Christian view there should be no necessity to take thought about it at all. Since the ideals are given in the ideal, an experience perfect in regard to the ideal must involve an experience perfect in regard to the ideals. The ultimate Christian conception is not that a man should know how to bear himself in any crisis of experience, and should act out his knowledge, but that he should bear himself rightly without thinking about it — almost as if he could not help it. There should be no need to particularise : the entire process of self-adjustment among practical concerns should be an automatic and unconscious thing. But, precisely because the spiritual adjustment is not perfectly made, the practical problems — which will not wait until the spiritual adjustment is consummated, but, pressing as they do, must be dealt with at once — ' ^

THE IDEAL AKD THE IDEALS 23

emerge into the field of thought again. Somehow they must be faced and conquered even while the soul is passing through all the intermediate spiritual stages towards the perfect thing. And hence comes the necessity of making a definite study of the ethical applications of the Christian ideal. The Christian man wants to put himself, at each recurrence of life's questions, into the attitude which he would have taken up automatically if the perfect spiritual condition had been reached." Only, in order to do this it is not enough to fix attention upon the perfect spiritual condition itself; for that condition, however clearly apprehended by the intellect, will not work out the practical consequences which it would bring about if it existed as an actual fact; and the Christian man must therefore take up the practical problems as they stand — remembering, of course, that the necessity of doing so is thrust upon him by the imperfection of his spiritual adjustments, and indeed finding in this very fact the way in which the problems ought to be solved. He may know that a right spiritual adjustment would result in an automatic right self-adjustment among all the practical difficulties of his days. But in actual experience no such automatic sequence is known, since its first term is not there. And it becomes the Christian man's duty, therefore, to discern with the mind what he cannot in its fulness prove in experience, and to ascertain how among life's practical spheres the perfect spiritual condition would be worked out. In the absence of a complete spiritual self -adjustment the Christian man can at least ask himself, face to face with all the various ethical questions of Hfe, " What attitude, j in this matter and in this, would the complete./ spiritual self-adjustment cause me to take up?*'? He must make two questions out of what is really one. He must do in intellect what, in a perfect ordering of things, would be done in experience without the intervention of intellect at all. He must make the transition in mind, since experience does not make it for itself, from the complete spiritual ideal to the ethical question of the moment, and must attack the second in the fashion which the mind has decided upon as being consonant with the first. And so we come back to what was previously stated as the main requirement in a study of Christian practical life. The ideals must be viewed as organically related with the ideal.

Ill

It may fairly be said that Christian ethical systems are not usually constructed on these lines. The ethical conception is not actually developed out of the religious conception, except perhaps in the sense of being reached by a process of intellectual inference therefrom — which, of course, means only that there is a passage for the mind from one to the other, not that the two are really one. The moral ideals are not organically connected with the spiritual ideal: there is no real identity (and it is no less than this for which we have been contending) between the adjustment of nature required from the Christian man in order to qualify him for the Christian name, and the ethical adjustments required of him as he deals with the practical problems of life. The majority of Christian ethical systems, while they may find in the main spiritual movement called for by Christianity a reason for the moral movements and attitudes they prescribe, do not treat these latter as being even ideally included in the first. They are not based on the idea that if the spiritual adjustment be fully and finally made, the ethical adjustments are ipso facto completed too, and that in so far as an examination of the\ ethical adjustments is still necessary it is necessary only because there is something lacking in 1 the spiritual adjustment, and because man has/ consequently to do with two strokes what ought y properly to be accomplished with one. The dual-/ ism which (it has been admitted) is temporarily inevitable is accepted as if it were not temporary, but were permanently inherent in the nature of the case. Generally, a system of Christian ethics

26 THE CHEISTIAi^ METHOD OE ETHICS

takes this, or something Hke this, for its task — to find an answer to the question, What, if Christian doctrine be true, and the general principles inculcated by Jesus Christ be admitted, must be the conduct of a Christian man under the different moral problems of ordinary life ? And this, it will at once be seen, is to perpetuate that severance, against which we have been protesting, between the religious and the ethical spheres, even though an inquirer is allowed or commanded to carry with him, as he enters upon the second field, a torch which he has kindled in the first. The whole thing becomes merely a matter of finding the practical consequences of Christian doctrine — which, as previously stated, is an inadequate method of regarding the task to be performed. The method assumes that, after the religious problem has been settled, the attack upon the moral problem has to be begun as something new. Ordinarily, the large generalisations of Jesus or of the New Testament writers are taken and applied, so far as they can be, to given practical questions; a bridge is built from certain Scripture utterances to precepts which (assuming the bridge to be soundly constructed) will be regnant over conduct in its various spheres; and by an extensive process of inference from Christian truth and from Christian revelation about the character of God, and about His relations with man, the entire field of human activity is supposed to be covered at last, and a sufficient rule provided for every emergency that may arise.

But of course the further this process is carried the greater becomes the liability to error, — at any rate, the greater becomes the consciousness that absolute certainty is being left behind. For in this matter of inferring a detailed ethical programme, applicable in this instance and in that, from a general Christian law, it is not, be it remembered, simply a logical unfolding of terms that is being performed. If that were all, no difficulty would arise. But what is being done is an applying of general and abstract principles to concrete situations ; and inasmuch as the concrete situations are almost always complex, composed, so to say, of subsidiary situations each one of which is capable of having a separate general law applied to it, the final mental act can hardly be called an inference at all. It is rather a balancing of diverse, if not opposing, inferences. Indeed, amid the complexity of life this process of inferring a programme of action from general Christian principles becomes not so much a process of reasoning as a process of guess. The guess may be plausible — may, as a matter of fact, come very near the mark. But it is a guess notwithstanding. And in a system of ethics so built up the final justification will be lacking for the mind; and it will be too much a matter of mere probability to give rest. It will be felt that upon the winding stairway down which inference has tried to find its road there are many loopholes at which error may have come in, and that what emerges at the bottom may perchance be error masquerading in the dress of inference, and not genuine inference at all. A system constructed in this way is insufficiently guaranteed to be relied upon with confidence quite unalloyed.

Moreover, besides that loss of the sense of intellectual security, which this method of constructing a body of Christian ethics brings in its train, there arises a danger of over-emphasis on one special place, of wrong accent, of exaggeration. Even assuming the method to be essentially sound, it could only be satisfactorily worked if all the general Christian principles were kept in view, all the elements of the practical situation held separately present to the mind, and, lastly, an entirely impartial judgment brought to bear upon the final distribution of sovereign power between the various laws themselves. But these conditions can scarcely ever be fulfilled. As w^as said just now, the last act in the process becomes, not a simple inference, but a balancing of diverse inferences; and it must be added that a quite unbiassed balancing of these is hardly likely to take place. Some one general law, some one aspect of Christian teaching, is hkely to have, for the inquirer's mind, an authority or a magnetism over that of the rest ; and in his formulation of the practical programme of life this is bound to tell, so that he will apply that particular law in season and out of season to the exclusion of others, refuse to listen to any qualifying voices, and in his zeal for one virtue do injustice to the rest. His ethical programme will be apt to become a monotonous harping on one string. Yet it is one of the most important requisites for the ordering of life, that we should know where the limits of each particular duty lie, as well as the line at which each particular duty begins ; where one principle yields the sceptre, and another comes in to take the throne ; how we may achieve a harmonious blending of the virtues rather than a shapeless prominence or predominance of one. That every general principle is to have its rightful authority, but is not to usurp more than its due, is itself one of the primary principles of true living. But on the method of Christian ethics which simply infers the laws of conduct from certain outstanding New Testament utterances of a general order, favouritism is sure to creep in and destroy the symmetry and proportion which ought, in a rightly guided life, to be shown. It is perhaps one of the most striking, and at the same time one of the most lamentable, consequences of constructing moral programmes as though they had essentially a separate existence from religious programmes, that the part is often taken for the whole.

The purpose of the ensuing studies is to attempt an ethical construction on the lines previously indicated as being likely to lead to a satisfactory result. No exhaustive moral programme is aimed at: indeed, some topics ordinarily included in an ethical scheme will probably be found wanting, and others not ordinarily so included will be found taken up. But some effort is to be made in the direction of relating the ideals to the ideal.

II

IT may seem strange that the ultimate Christian ideal, in regard to the practical problems of life, should be the disappearance of those problems altogether, and that Christianity should look on those problems as being properly solved, not by direct dealing, but by their submersion in a larger thing. Yet the fact is so. The first thing to be said about the Christian ethical system is that, in its conception of the perfect ordering of life, it views man as not concerned with ethical questions at all, but as putting himself into such a spiritual adjustment that ethical questions settle themselves. It has already been stated that the New Testament, when it refers to the different crises of human experience, does so almost casually, as if considering that the Christian man's right bearing among them may be taken for granted. A perfect spiritual adjustment of man's nature would, were it accomplished, render unnecessary any study of practical questions : an experience perfect in regard to the supreme spiritual ideal would involve an experience perfeet also in regard to all the practical ideals. That this must be the case the next chapter will atteirpt to show. For the moment we may be content with a simple statement of the fact. And it is with an appreciation of this fact that any ■fruitful study of the Christian conduct of life must begin.

I

The supreme spiritual adjustment of man's nature is performed in conversion ; and to be converted is to be made out of the same moral material as God Himself, to be made of good. This conception of conversion has been elsewhere drawn out : ^ our present object is to realise what is involved herein on the practical side. Clearly there is involved in it an automatic right adjustment to every circumstance, an instinctive right bearing towards every question of duty and every temptation to wrong. " Instinctive " is perhaps scarcely the best word to employ, inasmuch as the automatic right attitude spoken of would result, not from the original endowment of man's nature, but from the working within him of that new nature acquired through the processes of spiritual experience from God and Christ. But, so long as it be thus guarded, the phrase may stand. To be made of good, just as it involves

1 The Philosophy of Christian Experience, chap. iii.

freedom from all struggle within/ involves also freedom from all ignorance and perplexity concerning right relations with that which is without ; and we are entitled to repeat that the ultimate Christian conception is not that a man should know how to hear himself in any crisis of experience, and should act out his knowledge, but that he should hear himself rightly without thinking ahout it — almost as if he could not help it. Just as, speaking after the manner of men, we may reverently say of God that He never needs to weigh and measure, to balance opposing considerations, to pause between thought and deed, so might one say of him by whom the perfect spiritual adjustment has been made, that he will under all conditions move straight upon the one perfect course, since it will be his nature so to do, and he cannot, consistently with the perfect spiritual adjustment he has gone through, do aught else. And the Christian ethical ideal lies in that automatic self-direction among all the practical matters of experience which would necessarily be performed by a nature made of good.

Christianity, in brief, sinks the conception of morality in that of sainthood. In the experience to which it looks forward as the highest there is little place for a mere resolve to do what is right and to avoid what is wrong; the Christian man ^ The Philosophy of Christian Experience, pp. 59-61.

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is not supposed to be drawing up schemes of virtuous living, ranking the various graces in their due order and apportioning to each one its rightful measure of care and zeal; he is looked upon, rather, as possessed by such high tides of spiritual passion, resulting from the inner condition to which he has attained, that the outward activities drop naturally into proper movement and shape. Christianity would have a man reach a stage of spiritual development at which it becomes unnecessary for him to concern himself with the character of the things he is going to do. The ethical requirement made by the Christian ideal goes far beyond a cold and commonplace morality, far beyond a mere assertion that the feet are not to slip aside from the path of virtue, nor the hands to give themselves to doing the tasks of sin. It asks for a permanent and passionate righteousness within, wherefrom a consistent righteousness without cannot choose but flow : it asks for such an established inner condition that all questions of conduct shall, by anticipation, be answered before they arise: it asks, so to say, that the potentiality of faultless action shall be ever present, guaranteed by the quality of the soul, and ready to be drawn upon whenever any crisis of circumstance presents its demand ; and it declares that all the external processes of life are to be governed, not directly, but by the running of irresistible impulses out from the enduring state of the soul. A perfect ethical ordering of life is to be attained, according to the Christian ideal, without any fresh interposition of the will between the appearance of an ethical problem and its solution by him to whom it is addressed. To put it another way, the soul is always to have ready within itself, whether for the moment there may be or may not be some temptation or some question that calls it out to the open battlefield, such reserves as will make the result of any suddenly arising conflict a foregone conclusion. The Christian man's faculty of instinctive recoil from the evil or inferior course, and of adherence to the true course, is to be as much a part of himself as his faculty of sight or taste or touch ; and the spirit of perfect readiness to move out upon the one right path is to be always alert behind the curtain which veils the secret of his personality from all save himself and God. The highest Christian ethical conception knows nothing of a constant choice, made with effort and perplexity, between alternative courses, nothing of a constant struggle in which the solicitation of baser methods is with difficulty resisted and the call of worthier methods halfreluctantly heard; and it knows nothing of a merely intermittent virtue which asserts itself at a moral crisis and then goes to sleep again till

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the warning trumpet of the sentinel conscience rouses it once more ; but it declares for such an abiding condition of the inner nature as shall automatically secure the rectitude of the external programmes, and make the practice of virtue an entirely natural function, needing, at any given moment, no fresh gathering together of the forces of mind and will. That is the ultimate Christian ideal.

A reference to ordinary experience, on its practical side, makes clearer, if only by force of contrast, how great and far-reaching the ideal really is. For from the majority of men (whether or no the experience of even the greatest saints has ever reached the required level need not be discussed) this constant potentiality of a perfect ethical performance is too sadly absent; and it is not with a permanent bent away from all things evil and towards all things good that their characters are shaped. For the most of us our right doing, even when we do the right, is not the outcome of an enduring condition, the revelation of an embedded quality within. It is an affair of the moment, — in many cases almost an accident, one might say. At any rate, there were practically equal chances the other way. If the ideal be that we should have no need to concern ourselves directly with the practical ordering of life, since a right practical ordering of life ought to be automatically attained, then the language of the ideal is for the majority a foreign tongue. We drop into goodness occasionally. We pick up some of the opportunities of good that we happen to come across — and do not always do even that without reluctance. It may be granted that we have no passion for evil ; but neither have we any abiding native passion for the best. Our natures, in regard to these things, are so largely neutral, colourless, indeterminate: we are midway between the passionate sinners and the passionate saints ; and in regard to the established condition of our souls, abhorrence of evil is too strong a phrase, cleaving to good too superlative an idea, to describe what we are. At the best, our worthy activities, as each one goes forth from us, are the result of calculations freshly made. They were not inevitable. Other possibilities were not ruled out. And it must be understood that the ultimate Christian ethical ideal contemplates something more than that we shall come out unharmed and undisgraced from each crisis of our moral life, vanquishing every temptation by a sudden girding up of our strength, obeying every command by making a new call upon our powers — that it contemplates the existence in us of an abiding condition of good, out of which the practice of good must instinctively and inevitably come. According to the loftiest Christian ethical conception, the moralist is lost in, and rendered superfluous by, the saint.