Part 3 (2/2)
No ”last judgment,” then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should transgress his path, they would punish him.
This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the inspiration without which the world would never have known the Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, ”their heads tied together,” and Hegel define it as ”the other half of sin,”
while Emerson shows that ”crime and punishment grow out of one stem.
Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of pleasure which concealed it.” They are linked together inexorably, as cause and effect, and no G.o.d can dispense in this law, because the law itself is G.o.d.
Hence, there can be no such thing as ”forgiveness of sin”. An act once done is irreparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human pa.s.sions, ready, at the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we recognise--oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have known--that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the universe to all time!
Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of h.e.l.l and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history than that fear of h.e.l.l fire never yet made man moral. It could not keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and its supreme pontiffs--numbers of them--even decent living men, to say nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;--an insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what _will_ hold a man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment p.r.o.nounced _by himself_ directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.
And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not ”against G.o.d,” who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured by man's misdeeds, being wholly dest.i.tute of human pa.s.sions and emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.
One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come.
If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds of the Churches falsely proclaim--”the forgiveness of sin”--that one only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the anguish of an unavailing remorse!
Must this false teaching indeed go on for ever? Will it never dawn upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools, that G.o.d bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crus.h.i.+ng burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-G.o.d in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the Churches can pa.s.s you, will ever be able to efface.
How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures--quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal law--can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that board and thanked an Almighty G.o.d for the exceptional favours he had been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless h.e.l.l has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to a.s.sociate them with G.o.d. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that--
All on earth he has made his own Floating in air or pent in stone, Will rive the hills, the sea will swim, And like his shadow follow him.
[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great ”Essay on Compensation”.
VI.
CONSCIENCE THE VOICE OF G.o.d AND THE VOICE OF MAN.
We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That, likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better ill.u.s.tration of this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral life of man.
In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; ”the hand of G.o.d” was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting--in all the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned.
Those were naturally the days of the ”Divine right of kings,” when all civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate utterance of G.o.d. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical sentiment of the hour.
Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as ”a worm” and an outcast, or avowing himself ”a miserable sinner” and a limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatural power began to be seriously curtailed. ”The Divine right of kings” went its way with other archaisms into the limbo of oblivion, from which the reigning monarch in Prussia would appear to be vainly endeavouring to rescue it, while man began to realise that the causes of natural and human phenomena were to be sought in nature and in man. As a consequence of this, a new theory of conscience began to take shape, which was ultimately described by one of the boldest of later English philosophical writers, the late Professor Clifford, as ”the voice of man commanding us to live for the right”.[1]
In these definitions of conscience, as ”the voice of G.o.d” and ”the voice of man,” we have an instance of propositions which in logic are called _contraries_. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, ”all men are white” and ”no men are white” are contraries, but they are both false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be p.r.o.nounced on these two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks to determine.
But, before going any farther, we must get a clear idea of what we mean by conscience. In a general way, of course, we all know what is meant by the word: an appeal to conscience would be intelligible by every one. We understand it to be a faculty which decides on a definite course of action when alternatives of good and evil are before us. We look upon it as an instinct, magnetic in its power, incessantly prompting us towards the fulfilment of duty, and gravely reproaching us on its dereliction. We recognise it as the sweetest and most troublesome of visitants; sweetest when the peace unspeakable sinks into our souls, most troublesome when we have been guilty of a great betrayal. So delicate is that voice that nothing is easier than to stifle it; so clear is it that no one by any possibility can mistake it.
Thus, in general terms, we may describe conscience. Coming now more closely to a philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the conception, we shall find therein much enlightenment for the purposes of our present investigation. In the first place, the word is of comparatively late origin. It does not occur in the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament.
Its earliest appearance is in the Book of Wisdom, the work of a h.e.l.lenistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels, except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to condemn--a history which, though profoundly in accord with the sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St.
Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we may a.s.sume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised throughout the world.
But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We shall find etymology of great a.s.sistance in giving precision to our thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin, _conscientia_, knowledge with, or together. Now, _scientia_ is the simple knowledge of things by the reason, while _conscientia_ is the knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of one's selfhood--the realisation of the _ichkeit des ego_, as the very expressive German phrase has it, ”the selfhood of the I”. In English philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer consciousness, but _conscience_. Putting it technically, consciousness is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.
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