DR. MARTINEAU ON " IDEAL SUBSTITUTES FOR G OD."
DR. MARTINEAU'S fine lecture on "Ideal Substitutes for God," gives us, as Dr. Martineau's writings on these sub- jects are apt to do, an exceedingly able statement, not only of his own faith, but of the nature of the negative opinion to which he desires to
give an answer. We are told on every side that the true subject matter of religion, is ideal morality,—" morality touched with emotion," as Mr. Arnold puts it,—and that the only fitting end of worship is to encourage each other in the fostering of noble feelings and of right action. M. Renan states the same thing, with the usual French paradox, when he says that the higher thought of the day, after organising society, must proceed " to organise God,"--by which he means, to organise that body of high feeling and right conduct which is the only equivalent within the unbeliever's horizon for the divine Being of Christianity and the older Theism. Professor Clifford tells us that right and wrong are ideas evolved slowly out of the ex- perience of the conduct which tends to make a society prosper and grow strong, and that ideal morality means the happy discrimination of those tendencies which will further improve social cohesion and social well-being, and which will discourage by every means in human power those which tend to its decom- position. And now Dr. Martineau adds that in Holland the same disposition to substitute a subjective glorification of morality for religion, is even more in the ascendent, and he refers to a number of theologians who wish to have worship without metaphysics, by which they mean the culture of the moral affections of human beings without relation to the supposed existence and character of any infinite Being for whose sake these moral affections are fostered, on whom they are fixed, and in whom they originate. It would seem, then, that the application of the methods of physical science to the purpose of dissolving all religious faith, is making rapid way on the Continent, as well as in England, and no time could be more opportune for asking both what moral idealism would become, if theology were given its euthanasia, and also whether the facts of man's moral life (to say nothing of Revelation, which necessarily assumes those facts), can ever be adequately recognised, without a simultaneous recognition of a supreme Being to whom they bear positive witness.
Now, in the first place, as Dr. Martineau finely puts it, it is not any ideal at all which exercises positive authority over the human conscience, though ideals exercise much over the fancy and the artistic conceptions of our nature. An ideal in a poem or a picture gratifies and widens our msthetie nature, but leaves us just as much inclined to ignore it in our own lives as before.
We regard the ideal life as appropriate to the circumstances out of which it was moulded, and are quite as ready to admire it at a distance, as we are to admire at a distance the grace
or force of a Greek statue, without making any effort to transfer either to our own bodies. It is only a realised ideal which
exercises moral authority over us, and makes us ashamed, in its presence, of being what we are :—
" When I am awed and subdued before the grace and grandeur of a moral superior, it is not because he suggests, but because he realises, a higher conception of excellence ; it is as a living agent, as a personal embodiment, of righteousness, that he wields authority over my con- science. Take away this element, tear the picture out of the volume of true history and cast it to the transient winds of imagination, and all is immediately changed. Tho image remaining the same, I may still admire ; but no longer in grave silence,—rather with outspoken praise ; of
* Williams and Norgate.
my compunction I am relieved; the strength of resolution is relaxed; the lifting power' of a devout enthusiasm is gone; and if I have gained any new variety of thought, it is simply added to my culture, but does not transform my life. A conception which reports itself as empty of reality, even if it startles us into a momentary awe, can no more re- ceive our reverent embrace than the shade of a departed ancestor or guide ;— Frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, Far levibus centis, colucrique slml1liwu sounuo: There is nothing to sustain the worshipful influence of its presence ; we cannot venerate our own idea. here it is that ' Moral Idealism' falls short of the conditions of Religion ; not because it is ethical, while religion is something else ; not because it works among finite relations, while religion is concerned only with the infinite, bat because its ideal perfection is known to bo only in our heads, while the ideal of religion must be also real. Strauss himself makes the memor- able confession that none but a book-student could over imagine that a creation of the brain, woven of poetry and philosophy, can take the place of real Religion.' " Let us add to this criticism of Dr. Martineau's another of our own, —that even if moral idealism could exercise, what it cannot, the influence over us of a real being who corresponds to that ideal, there would inevitably be this new weakness about it, that instead of taking us upwards towards one perfect character, it would immediately break asunder into a hundred different types, and we should soon find that there were fifty idealist schools of wholly divergent and not unfrequently opposite moral tendencies, instead of a number of converging schools, all tending to meet in the same divine character. We see this already amongst those who have thrown off what they regard as the theological superstition. Not to touch living instances, where can we find a higher or more exalted type of moral idealism, divorced from all belief in a real divine ruler, than Shelley's'? There you have a real passion of as- piration, and one glowing with a heat far above the reach of ordinary natures. There you have the genuine enthusiasm of the most eager idealist of any age ;—and you have it in a mau in whom thought and feeling were almost one, who no sooner conceived a beautiful action than ho tried to live it,—who would sell his last and dearest scientific acquisition to relieve distress,--who would hazard his life, as if it were a mere coin at his own disposal, for the service of another. But where did Shelley's idealism lead him ?
Why, to such a depreciation of all the self-restraints which a really divine faith would have placed on what he held to be the most beautiful of human emotions, that he wrecked himself and ruined another; while his principle and example were fatal to a third, if not a fourth, among those who were among his friends and
intimates ; and that certain portions of his poetry, —noble as much of it is,—have become the main-stay of a class of writers who have done more to corrupt English literature, than any number of moral idealisms of the highest kind can ever do to purify it. Once let men lose their faith that there is any true standard of character in the invisible world to which all human excellence must lead up, and one man will exaggerate the authority of one sort of emotion ; another of another ; a third will exalt policy above all emotion ; and a fourth, like Lord Beacons- field's " Alroy," will try to guide his career by the impulse of what he calls " the creative passions,"—that is, imaginative ambi- tion. Moral idealism, once set free from the restraints of an objective law, would soon dissolve in divergent showers of spray, and fall back into the fountain from which it sprang.
But after all, the Idealists will never be answered by showing them how little guarantee they can give for any secure and noble morality, any morality by which men will be actually guided. Some of them admit with regret that this may be so, but reply that a superstition is not the more credible because, when be- lieved, it was useful. If the facts of life do not attest a divine rule over man, the proof of mischief likely to result from the dispelling of that belief, will not restore it. Dr. Martineau recog- nises this fully, in the following fine passage :— " An undertone of pathetic regret may sometimes bo hoard in oven the most confident critics of Christian Theism ; as if, in substituting their abstractions, they were conscious in their hearts of administering a dangerous anmsthetic to Religion, which might leave it speechless and paralytic, if it even survived at all. They plead, however, that the risk must be run ; and that, to save any remnant of moral life, the organism of faith must suitor excision of some members which have hitherto been the seat of an intense vitality. Mon have always taken for granted that the Supreme Power thinks and loves ;' but the critics have now laid it down that these predicates cannot be verified,'—a dictum which, giving no account of itself, relies for its effect on more supercilious iteration. If, in Mr. Arnold's vocabulary, to 'verify' moans to 'test by experiment,' the complaint is true, but irrelevant : the inner attri- butes of tho Supremo Cause cannot be submitted to Baconian experi- ments, with registered results tabulated under ' Sic' and Non.' Yet their exemption from this criterion does not discredit their existence : for if a Divine Mind were really there, and in its essence were purely and only Thought and Love, it would equally transcend the interro- gations of our experience. It is not by such methods that spiritual truths can be extorted. Bat if ' to justify by sufficient reason,' is here them to God. In neither case have we any immediate apprehension of those invisible affections of mind : in that degree of closeness they are known only as exercised by ourselves: in others, wo read them only by having thus learned their signs; and precisely the signs which assure us that we are not in a mad-house, but among companions directed by intelligence and moved by sympathy, repeat themselves in the legible order, beauty, and tendencies of the world. So similar are the marks in the two instances, that if intellect and feeling are allowed their causality in the one, legitimate induction (as Mr. Mill himself insists) requires their admission in the other : they must operate in both, or else in neither. flow cogent this resemblance is, curiously appears from the fact that, with our modern mon of science, it has become usual to accept this dilemma ; and, as they will not admit Mind to be operative in Nature, they actually deny its efficiency in us. Both are automata alike ; and all would go on the same, mechanically unrolling the scenery of life and history, though the superfluous appendage of consciousness were cut off." and eve to our e ea -men a warran s our ascr p on o fellow-men than that which ti of It is indeed, as Dr. Martineau implies, a kind of ex absurd() de- monstration of the unreality of the atheistic view, that after exor- cising the divine character behind the order of external nature, it is compelled, by the logic of its own method, to exorcise also the human mind itself,—considered, at least, as an efficient agent in the story of the universe. Thus the method which begins by what it calls a system of idealism, ends by turning all idealism out-of-doors, and treating the mind as a merely incidental back-water in the current of human events,—a pic- turesque, but unimportant appendage to the chain of material causation.
But after all, the answer to those thinkers who find the essence of religion in a merely subjective moral idealism lies in this,—that no such idealism ever has really fastened its hold on the httman race, or exerted any greater influence than belongs to a reigning fashion in manners or a school of taste in art. As there is no remorse in an artist who cannot realise his idea of a face or a landscape, so there is no remorse in a man or woman solely because the life falls short of the liver's ideal. Every religion that the world has ever known,— except, perhaps, Buddhism,—has derived its power from a pro- found belief on the part of those who received it, that it represented the will or the deliberate purpose of a Power behind the veil, com- petent and willing to enable man, to do that will. Nor is it possible for abstract thinkers to disabuse men of this deeply-rooted belief that their life is guided by the volition of a righteous intelligence, which may, indeed, be resisted, but to resist which is, as the divine voice expressed it, a perpetual kicking "against the pricks." Moral idealism no more explains obligation, remorse, and penitence, than a horse's taste for high-stepping will explain the spur, the bridle, and the sense of masterdom. The power " that makes for righteousness " has laid its yoke upon us, and we know that the mind which wields that yoke is far higher and more constant than our own, just as well as we know that the power which guides the earth on its course is stronger and more constant than our own. Without the sense of an invisible and overruling divine purpose, there is no religion ; and with the sense of an in- visible and overruling divine purpose, moral idealism loses all its frivolous and fanciful freedom, and is merged in reverence for a higher law, and devotion to a living character of which that law is the issue and the faintly traced outline.
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