DUTY AS DEITY.
WE ventured a fortnight since to warn the Archbishop of Canterbury that in denouncing Theism, which he con- founded with Deism, as a spreading creed, he was wasting energy in air. The Theism of to-day is not the Deism of the last cen- tury, is an imperfect rather than an evil creed, and is not spreading fast. Those who have abandoned the old lines in- cline to completer negation, and the truest spiritual danger of the hour is an enlightened agnosticism. The words had scarcely appeared, when we received from Messrs. Began Paul and Co. a pamphlet which, as far as it goes—and we do not wish to exaggerate its importance—is an unexpectedly complete confirmation of this view. The writer, Mr. George Clifford Whitworth, holds some position at Bombay, he does not say what, but he calls himself an unlearned man, and we have a fancy, possibly inaccurate, that he is a contractor or engineer on the railway, and builds brickwork. His illus- trations are taken from that occupation. Be he who he may, he has made an effort not usual in print, to state without argument what his personal faith really is. "I speak," he says, " not as an advocate, but as a witness," and his speech certainly conveys to us the impression of entire truthfulness. He wants to say what he is saying, not to per- made anybody, but to relieve his own mind, which seems to him tainted with insincerity, while he refrains from open profession of his belief or disbelief, and to induce others to inquire what they actually do believe, and so be true. There is no story in his pamphlet, and in spite of the lucidity of the writing, little literary art, unless it be literary art which enables the author to write on such a subject with so little deference for opinion, yet with so little appearance of vanity and so little wish to offend. The total of it all is simple,— that all religion, in any sense whatever comprehended by theo- logians, should be abandoned, and superseded by the single idea, of Duty. Mr. Whitworth has so been forced to clear his mind:— " I believe that it is every man's duty to do what he can to make the world better and happier. That is the whole of my creed. I aim at no precision of language. Many other formulas would do as well. So to live that the world may be better for my having lived in it is the one most familiar to my thoughts. The meaning is plain, and there is nothing new in it. Most religions, I suppose, teach it ; but they teach it with a great deal more. Out of all that I was taught as a member of the Church of England I have not by any process of conscious selection chosen this out as the best thing ; but it is the one thing which has stood the test of life and has never failed me, and which, I am sure, never will fail me, experienced though I am in the loss one after another of different articles of belief. To me it seems absurd to attempt to devise a creed, or even to take, with any fixed resolution of keeping it, a ready-made one. What a man finds in the actual experience of his life to be good, that is what he must believe. I can see no room for argument on this question. I can- not myself quarrel with any man for what he believes, or dictate to any man what he should believe. The world, as I see it, imposes on me a duty, and my experience teaches me that the most powerful and the only permanent cause of happiness is consciousness that I am trying to do that duty."
That sounds, of course, in one sense, almost Christian; but Mr. Whitworth has lost the belief in Christ, except as a human teacher of wisdom to whom a supernatural character was attri- buted by his followers, in a future state, and even in a God, though, unlike the scientific agnostics, he does not quite deny the possibility of either :—
" Do you believe in a future life ? is another question beyond my power to give a distinct reply to. I hope we may live after the death of the body, but I do not personally feel that conviction which, I understand, many persons do. I am not conscious of anything in myself that is too good to be entirely spent in this world. The little that I can do seems quite a sufficient reason for the existence of the whole of my being. And I do not see why the greater work that a greater man can do is not equally sufficient for him : and so on to the greatest that ever lived or is to live. Even assuming that the elements of which our minds are made are to be used again, it does not follow that they will be so combined as to maintain per- sonal identity. Analogy points rather the other way. And might not new combinations produce better results ? Do you believe in God ? Now I wish to be perfectly frank, but it is beyond my power to answer this question clearly. I certainly did until within a few years believe in God, but then I had a particular conception of him—namely, the being known as God the Father in tha Church of England. Now, I am sore we are not warranted in holding that conception, and I have formed no other distinct con- ception of God. I cannot say I believe in God when the word con- veys no distinct meaning to me ; I cannot say I do not believe in Him, when my thoughts seem sometimes to require the use of the name. Perhaps that impression is due only to old habit. We hear it said that the existence of God is proved by the manifest design of the uni- verse. Bat what sort of God ? Surely one of finite, not of infinite power. The world is very wonderful ; but how can we call it a perfect work ? There are some terrible things in it. Perhaps it will be perfect, but time cannot be necessary to infinite power. I heard a preacher once expatiate on God's power and love as shown in the structure of an animal. He took the mole as an example, and ex- plained how its every part was perfectly adapted to the peculiar manner of its life. But what if a ploughman kills the mole ? Care- fully provided as all its properties were, they have all failed. Then the preacher spoke of the wonderful providence by which some plants are made to purify pestilential air. But we in India know that other plants by their natural decay poison instead of purifying the air. So, what do such examples prove ?"
Mr. Whitworth declares that this "terribly bare" creed is always present to him, that it influences him alike in an act of
charity or a game of tennis, and that it has created in him " a greater love of the human race than he had when he was a Christian " :—" When I thought there was virtue in prayer and religions services, and that my first duty was to save my own soul, my sense of the duty of rendering service to men, and my sense of pleasure at the thought of par- ticular services done to particular persons, whether friends or strangers, were certainly less than they are now." The creed has certainly taught him charity, for almost alone among such writers he has no bitterness against the clergy, rather likes them, and maintains, as we understand the only indistinct passage in the pamphlet, that religion is a genuine thing with them, because it has become their life-work. It is not an artificial addition to their belief, as it is in the case of brickmakers, but part of their lives, and comes within the general conception of duty. And finally, becoming for a moment argumentative, he thus sums up the " advantages " of his faith :—
" This religion has agai n this advantage, that it allows you no rest or permanent happiness except with a sense of duty done. It knows nothing of idle drawing nearer to God.' Your duty is with man. What have you done to-day ? What are you going to do ? What is the use of it ? That house you built—was it well built ? That book you wrote—was it done with a good purpose ? Those goods you supplied—were they of the quality you pretended ? All that talk you had—did you do any good by it, or get any good from it, or were you only showing off your wit or your knowledge ? And your casual intercourse with acquaintances or strangers—has it been marked with kindness ? Has it. tended to make those you have met feel that there is a general friendliness between man and man, as well as a closer friendship between particular men ? And besides what you have failed to do of good, what about the positive harm you have done ? You must not speak of leaving with meekness your sins to your Saviour.' Your sins are your own, and you cannot leave them to any one. The best you can do is to outweigh them with good, but get rid of them you cannot. There is no absolution. Think of that when you are disposed to do a bad deed again. If you do it, it will remain for ever. The balance of good, if even you get a balance of good, will be finally less by reason of that bad deed."
We take this pamphlet—not twenty pages in all—to be, on the whole, the best expression we have ever seen of the belief to which an average Englishman with good instincts and a strong value for his work in life, indeed a true fidelity to it, turns of himself, when he has abandoned all belief in the supernatural. It is secularism in its best working form, ignoring all but what is evident, but acknowledging—rather foolishly from an intellectual point of view—an impulse indistinguishable from conscience, and governed by " duty " in a degree which most secularists would not speculatively allow. It is a fine form of negation, free from the rancour which underlies much of ordinary Atheism, and devoid of that tendency to delight in artificial superstition which we, at least, see in the teaching of the Comtists. It is a faith in consonance with many English tendencies, and with the English defect of imagination, and the Archbishop of Canterbury may rely upon it that it is much more widely held and is indefinitely more dangerous than Theism, whether Theism is the cold creed he conceives it to be, or the domineering and relentless faith which, as we hold, it would speedily become.
And yet what a dreary creed it is, this of Mr. Whitworth's, and what a useless one ! The man who believes it stands to himself visibly alone in the universe, unhelped, nay, indeed, un- protected, to do badly what he finds to do day by day for a few years, and then die like a flower, all that he has done to make himself nobler or greater, or more competent being useless, five-sixths of it totally wasted, being within himself and confined to himself, and the remainder being use- ful only to a wretched race who never do and never will do any- thing perfectly, who cannot even be happy as some creatures can, and who, when the world has done cooling, will pass away as forgotten as the ephemerides of a summer day. Space has unclosed itself for humanity and closed again, and there is space once more. He has not even the pleasure of the highest intellectual interests, for it is waste and folly for him to study things not visible, or speculate on anything outside the material world around him ; while he has, nevertheless, bound himself by a self-derived obligation to do he cannot define what.
His creed is that he is bound by duty to do what duty dictates. It is at these two points that the reasoning powers of men like Mr. Whitworth always appear to us to give way. He rejects Christ as a gradually accreted myth—for that is what he means, though he wisely avoids those fine words— and God and futurity as baseless assumptions, and then
makes for himself the colossal assumptions that he is to do his duty, and that he knows what it is. Supposing he knows it, why is he to do it? Mr. Whitworth says he is working at his business out there iu Bombay, and we have no doubt, on the evidence of his published thoughts, that he works to purpose, though it is hot, and that his bricks, if he makes bricks, stand the rain ; but what does he do it for P Where is the evidence on his theory that he is not a fool for working himself out, and doing disagreeable things strenuously, when he might conceivably live in a cool land, and do agreeable things instead P What a strange superstition it is that binds him,—him a mere animal, who must perish directly, to care whether his house or bridge is built well or ill, when it would be pleasanter to be careless about it ! He says explicitly that he is not to wish to draw nearer to God, and not to imitate Christ, and not to con- tinue after he is dead ; and why, then, is he not to do as he likes ? It is a pure assumption that he owes friendly duty to his kind, and an assumption not fortified by either analogy or reason, most things having for their duty destruction, and the most rational theory of life being that the harder life is, and the less help anybody gives anybody else, the more cer- tain is the survival of the fittest. His duty to build good drains ! Why, if there were none, a race would arise impervious to miasma, as is, we believe, to a strange degree the case with European Jews, bred for a thousand years in the filth of the Ghettos. Mr. Whitworth in building drains is only impeding a natural process, which would do its work much better and more completely than he can. It is a mere superstition, on his theory, that enthronisation of Duty as Deity, and as base- less as any other. It is no more an intuition than the sense of the supernatural is an intuition, and if it were, why is he to obey his intuitions P There is no reason, without God or a future, except that he wishes to, and it must be remembered that the immense majority, say all Chinamen, will not wish. For those who do not wish, where is the im- pelling power, when they once recognise that this planet is cer- tain to cease to be a human abode ? And then, as to the line of duty, Mr. Whitworth assumes that he knows it ; but if he strips his mind as clear of his social teaching as he has done of his religions teaching, he will find himself not quite so con- fident. His duty, as he conceives it, is to obey the Christian ethics without the Christian faith, but is not that a supersti- tion, too ? Is it not at least as probable that the first duty of man to man is to make him a little more competent, and, as he must perish so quickly, to lose no time about it. Could duty to man be better done than by compelling all China- men, by bayonet and shell, to bring up their children in all secular knowledge, or in killing down half of that over- numerous people, till there was room for the remainder to be intelligent and happy. Their great powers are all lost in the endless struggle to keep alive, which Nature corrects by gigantic famines. Why should not man help Nature by slaughter, as well as by teaching ? He does not hesitate to thin-out deer ; and wherein do men, on the theory, differ from deer ? Everybody is reading this week of the glories of nature in Brazil, and of the marvellous country owned by Brazilians of all colours, and of the way they waste it. Why is it not the duty of Germans to kill out the Brazilians, who have failed and will fail, and themselves fill up that magnificent division of the world ? That would appreciably add to the happiness of humanity, and its prospects for the future. One of the best men we ever knew, who had lost his faith as Mr. Whitworth has, and held exactly his creed, always maintained, in no spirit of jesting, that the most neglected duty of the progressive races of men was the extermination of the non-progressive peoples, who were futilely consuming the limited natural resources of the world. Where was he wrong, if Duty is to be the sole Deity, and the future of the world the only futurity ? So far as we can see, if Christ was wrong, and we are not to draw nearer to God, the true line of duty has been wretchedly mistaken, and would, when discovered, enforce on the higher races a vast task of destruction, and not of repara- tion and improvement. At all events, that view, the scientific one, is at least as probable as the other, or social one ; and Mr. -Whitworth's creed, which he thinks so kindly, ends in this,—that man, abandoning a supernatural deity, sets up a natural one, who by possibility may teach slaughter as his first work.
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