Part 11 (2/2)

A man belongs to his family, he clings to it; he is not an individual, but part of an organism.

And although in law it is the father who is the head, it is the father who is the lawgiver, the ruler, is it really he who is that centre, that lode-star, that holds the family together? I think it is not so. It is the mother who is the centre of that affection which is stronger than gravity. We laugh when a Frenchman swears by his mother. But he is swearing by all that he holds most sacred. No Latin would laugh at such a matter. Because he could understand, and we do not. To everyone of Latin race there comes next to G.o.d his mother, next to Christ the Madonna, who is the emblem of motherhood.

The Latins do not emigrate. They hate to leave their country. And if they do, if necessity drive them forth, are they ever happy, ever at rest till they can see their way to return? The Americans tell us that Italians are the worst immigrants because they will not settle; because they send their pay to their parents in the old country, and are never happy till they themselves can return. We call it nostalgia, we say it is a longing for their country. It is that and more. It is a longing for their family, their blood. They cling together in a way we have no idea of.

Does an Englishman ever swear by his mother, does he yearn after her as the Latins do from a far country? Does the fear of separation keep our young men at home? It is always the reverse. They want to get away. The home nest tires them, and they would go; and once gone they care not to return, they can be happy far away. The ties of relations.h.i.+p are light and are easily shaken off, they are quickly forgotten.

Italian labourers and servants give some of their pay always as a matter of course to their parents. It is a natural duty. And in Latin countries there are no poorhouses. They could not abide such a theory any more than could the Indians. It would seem to a Latin an impossibility that any child would leave his parents in a workhouse.

Poor as they might be they would keep together. The great bond that holds a family together is the mother, always the mother. We can see this in England too, even with our weaker instinct. The mother makes the home and not the father.

And now are we not finding that sanction we were searching for? If the Madonna, the type of motherhood, appeals to all the people, men and women, is there not a reason? It is an instinct. These images and pictures of the Madonna sound on their heart-strings a chord that is perhaps the loudest and sweetest; if second to any, second only to that of G.o.d. G.o.d as father, G.o.d as mother, G.o.d as son and sacrifice, here is the threefold real G.o.dhead of the Latins.

But with us the family tie is slight, the mother wors.h.i.+p is faint. Our Teutonic Trinity is G.o.d the Father, G.o.d the Son, and now later G.o.d the Law. These are the realities.

For with us conduct is more and emotion is less than with the peoples of the South.

CHAPTER XXI.

CONDUCT.

Of all aspects of religion none is so difficult to understand as the relation of religion and conduct. It is ever varying. There seems to be nothing fixed about it. What does conduct arise from? It takes its origin in an instinct, and this instinct is so strong, so imperious, so almost personal, that of all the instincts it alone has a name. It is conscience.

By conscience our acts are directed.

There are scientific men who tell us that our consciences are the result of experience, partly our own, but princ.i.p.ally inherited. That if conscience warns us against any course of action it is because that has been experienced to result in misfortune. It is an unconscious memory of past experiences. Conscience is instinctive, and not affected by teaching to any great extent; and that conscience is the main guide of life no one will deny.

But do the voices of conscience and of G.o.d, as stated in the sacred books, agree?

When the savage sees a G.o.d in the precipice and is afraid of him, there is no question of right or wrong. Not that the savage has no code of morals. He has a very elaborate one. But it is usually distinct from his religion. What virtue did Odin teach? None but courage in war. Yet the Northmen had codes of conduct fitted to their stage of civilisation. The Greeks had many G.o.ds. They had also codes of morals and an extensive philosophy, but practically there was no connection. In fact, the G.o.ds were examples not of morality but of immorality. It was the same with the Latins and with all the Celts. Their religions were emotional religions, their codes of conduct were apart, although even here you see now and then an attempt to connect them. And when the Latin people took Christianity and formed it, they put into their creeds no question of conduct. You believed, and therefore you were a Christian. The results of bad conduct would be annulled by confession, and the sinner would receive absolution. To a Latin Christian a righteous unbeliever who had never done anything but good would in the end be d.a.m.ned, whereas the murderer who repented at the last would be saved. ”There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.”

Is the inference that the Latin peoples were wickeder than others? I doubt it. They initiated all European civilisation, and trade and commerce, and law and justice. Probably the highest examples of conduct the world has known have been Latins. They had and have the instinct of conduct, they had and have consciences as good as other people, but only they do not so much connect conduct and religion. You can be saved without conduct.

The Jews, on the contrary, had no instinct of conduct apart from religion. In the Ten Commandments conduct, if it have the second place, has yet the larger share. Righteousness was the keynote of their belief, and if the only righteousness they knew was little better than a n.o.ble savagery, it was the best they could do. They included every form of conduct in their religion--sanitary matters, caste observances, and business rules. The Hindu goes even further in the same line. Everything in life is included in his religion.

When in the Reformation the Teutonic people threw off the yoke of Rome, a yoke which was not only religious but political and social, one of their princ.i.p.al arguments against Roman Catholicism was the abominations that had crept in. I think it would be difficult to a.s.sert that the people who revolted were in morals generally any better than those they seceded from. Good men in the Latin Church saw equally the necessity for reformation. But bad morals did not seem to them so destructive to faith as it did to the Teutons. There was this difference, that whereas the Latin could and did conceive of religion apart from conduct, the Teuton, like the Jew, could not do so. With the Latin they were distinct emotions, with the Teuton they were connected.

One of the princ.i.p.al aspects of the Reformation is the restoration of morality to religion, the abolition of indulgences, of confession and absolution, the insistence on conduct in religious teachers.

The morality of Christ?

The remarkable fact is that it was not the morality of Christ at all.

The Reformation was never in any way a revival of the code of the Sermon on the Mount or the imitation of Christ. To a certain extent it went further away from Christ than the Latins. For instance, the Latin priests imitate Christ in being unmarried, the Protestant pastors married. When Calvin burnt Servetus he was not returning to the tenets of the New Testament, and what thought had the Puritans or the French Huguenots, the most masterful of men, of turning the other cheek?

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