Part 3 (1/2)

[1] _Philosophical Cla.s.sics_, p. 85.

V.

THE ETHICAL DOCTRINE OF COMPENSATION.

I suppose there is no teaching more frequently insisted upon in the Old and in the New Testament as the truth of a judgment, now, or in the future, upon the misdeeds or sins of men. Let criticism prune and cut as it will, while it exhibits the deplorably low standard of morality once prevalent among the Hebrew peoples, and therefore prevalent among their G.o.ds, their Elohim, Adonai and Jahveh, one thing, at least, is undeniable--that that which is recognised as immoral is reprobated and forthwith visited with condign punishment. Doubtless, acts which to us are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and the methods and practices he was supposed to favour. But what should be carefully noted is, that nothing is adjudged immoral but is forthwith sternly reprobated and condemned to a fitting retribution.

”The way of transgressors is hard” was a conviction with the race. In the same way, the ethical note rings out in the New Testament, that right and wrong are eternally dissevered, sheep ever separated from goats; that virtue must be rewarded and vice be condemned and punished.

Now, this teaching of the judgment to come, the bare announcement of which by Paul filled Felix, the Roman governor, with such dire consternation, is the subject of which we propose to set forth the philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly developed age has surrounded it and discover the true _raison d'etre_ of that doctrine which ”the Bible Christian” confesses under the aspect of the ”Last Judgment”.

Now, I take it that no educated man believes in the drama, or rather, the panorama, of the ”last judgment”; the vision of Jesus sitting in the clouds, with every human being that ever was or shall be gathered before his throne to hear definite sentence p.r.o.nounced upon them. The _mise-en-scene_ demands of course the presence of bodies, and I suppose it is needless to point out the dogma of the resurrection of the body, insisted upon by all the Christian Churches, is a blank impossibility.

We may acquire other bodies in that unknown state, should we stand in need of such appurtenances--a fact which we may wholly disbelieve--but of one thing we may rest a.s.sured, that these identical bodies in which we die can by no possibility conceivable to us be brought back.

I once read a highly imaginative article in a religious magazine which attempted to solve the unsolvable by suggesting that after men's bodies had been buried in sufficient numbers, the whole soil of our planet would consist of nothing but the substance of the bodies of the dead, and that when that momentous epoch arrived, the Almighty would give the order for the sounding of the final trump, and the whole solid globe would be forthwith trans.m.u.ted, or rather re-trans.m.u.ted, into human bodies--in what condition it was not stated--for the countless myriads of ”souls” ready to take possession of them. Probably, this pious romance was woven in the days before cremation, and as the next century will not be very old before we shall be compelled to resort to that method of disposal of the dead, at all events in our larger cities, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend how men of the future, to say nothing of the past, are going to be provided with their own bodies so as to put in an appearance at the great a.s.size.

We may rightly wonder how men and women of the nineteenth century can still believe in the Churches and Chapels which teach such deplorable absurdities as the revelation of G.o.d, and how it happens that when religion appears upon the scene of their daily life, their common sense can so totally desert them. One need say nothing of the inadequacy of the judgment p.r.o.nounced, the summary cla.s.sification of the myriads of humanity as white sheep or black goats, or the character of the rewards and punishments allotted. The one redeeming point in the narrative is that whatever judgment is p.r.o.nounced is decided, not on doctrinal grounds, about which no two of Christ's followers can be got to agree, but on ethical grounds, on character manifesting itself in public spirit and care for the unfortunate--the bruised reeds and smoking flax--of our communities. It would seem impossible to maintain after this final scene that creeds and faiths have any decisive influence on our status here or hereafter.

But though now seen to be no more than a variant upon the apocalyptic tradition and literature which represented that Jesus was to return speedily to earth and rule among his saints for a thousand years--a delusion which apparently possessed even the trained intellect of Paul, and subsequently led to the pseudo-Peter explaining that his fellow-Christians must not be in too great a hurry, because ”a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years in the sight of the Lord”--it has done an incalculable amount of harm in the past. It has shut men's eyes to the awful fact of retribution, administered here and now, and prevented their realising any punishment other than the savage, barbarous and wholly vindictive punishment of torturing eternally by fire. It shuts men's minds to the operation of moral laws, to the fact that judgment is executed instantaneously upon the commission of wrong. It has, and it does, to the serious detriment of moral development, lead man to put off until late in life, sometimes to the very hour of death itself, restorative work which should have been undertaken immediately on the recognition or conviction of misdeeds.

The notion that he is not to be called up for judgment until he is rendered incapable by death of doing any further mischief, has been a moral obstacle in the path of man, and therefore of the race, wholly beyond the power of calculation. Foolish priests once thought that by the invention of the dogma of h.e.l.l they could terrorise men into morality, and so they preached their Divinity, the magnified copy of a fiend, who would have cheerfully created humanity out of nothing and d.a.m.ned them everlastingly, had not he himself, in the shape of his son, who is one in being with him, decided to appear upon earth and atone to himself for the mischief, which presumably he could have very well foreseen, perpetrated by man.

And what has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church wors.h.i.+pped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly inflicting on mankind, who could raise a protest against them? Shall man be juster than his G.o.d? This perverse Christian morality is responsible for the worst cruelties which have tormented the human race since the days of ecclesiastical domination. If the Deity is inhuman, why should man be otherwise? Therefore, inhuman tortures will be inflicted on prisoners. The rack and thumb-screw will be used to extract secrets. Men will be immured alive within narrow walls and allowed to perish by inches. The Austrian prisons in the northern Italian provinces will be so constructed that the miserable victim can neither sit nor lie down nor see the light of day. Floggings and scourgings will be universal, _lettres de cachet_ an inst.i.tution. Why not? Where the G.o.d has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The G.o.d does worse than all this. He keeps his victims alive for the sole purpose of glutting his ire and satiating his insatiable vengeance. Nay, things are so ordered that the very happiness of the elect is enhanced, not only by the knowledge, but by the sight, of the appalling, unavailing anguish of the lost, and we have seen such a philosopher as Aquinas representing the Deity as conducting the ”elect” in troops and droves to the heavenly sh.o.r.es and giving them ”a glimpse of h.e.l.l” by way of stimulating their enjoyment of the celestial beat.i.tude. Why not? I ask again. My only wonderment is how we ever got rid of it. Picture the world under the universal dominion of this foul superst.i.tion. It reigns on the thrones of kings, in the cabinets of statesmen, it is preached in the pulpits, taught in the schools, it is the earliest lesson that trembles on the lips of innocent children. The most ingenious, subtly contrived, widespread and all-pervading influence is especially created to propagate it everywhere in the shape of the Christian Church--a Divine inst.i.tution, possessed of the keys of life and death, of heaven and h.e.l.l--the sole representative of the Deity on earth. How, we ask, in wondering grat.i.tude, did the world ever escape the tyranny of such superst.i.tion? This fact alone--this deliverance--is enough to make one believe that there is a ”Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that the course of human events is never wholly retrograde.

And, now, what is the truth about the ”judgment to come”? What is the ethical equivalent of ”h.e.l.l fire”? In the first place, we refuse to believe in a ”last judgment” because we know that judgment is not only p.r.o.nounced but executed instantaneously, automatically, I would say, on the commission of wrong. There is no need to wait for the day of judgment or even for the hour of death. If a man has done wrong he sits condemned that self-same moment. _Illo nocens se d.a.m.nat quo peccat die_. There is no need of G.o.d, angel or devil, to announce the fact or deliver judgment; the man has p.r.o.nounced his own sentence, executed judgment on himself. This is, in essence, the ethical doctrine of compensation, that this universe is so woven, that the nature of things is such that ”things are what they are, that the consequences of things will be what they will be,” that we can no more hope to avert them by crying out for help to man, saint or G.o.d, than we can hope to hurl back the waves that dash upon the strand at flood tide. Our view is that moral laws are as irresistible as physical, and admit of no more dispensation than the everlasting order of Nature.

One of our main reasons for repudiating the conception of the miraculous is that it involves a violation of eternal order and therefore of eternal reason, and if freely admitted in the physical, would doubtless be speedily introduced into the moral order, to the destruction of civilised society. We believe that this universe is ”so magically woven” that it is absolutely impossible to escape the consequences of our deeds, and if the Buddhist doctrine of Karma represents that teaching, then we are among its most enthusiastic adherents, because it is absolutely true to fact.

But let us look at the matter more closely.[1]

Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that ”all things are double, one against the other,” in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. ”An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole.” Thus--spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; action, rest; yea, nay. ”All things are double, one against the other.”

All the woes of existence arise from our deliberate resistance to the law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature.

We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other, and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our unspeakable _ennui_. We would have the half, while Nature planned the whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse which can never die--an immense despair for which there is no relief.

Life is full of distressing ill.u.s.trations of this ethical law. A man who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next, and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of compensation.

But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation, we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. ”The soul says eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have power over things to its own individual ends.”

Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand.

You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract, and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.

Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see G.o.d omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction.

We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have.

”How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires,”

quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.