OBEDIENCE.
THE controversy now raging in ecclesiastical circles as to the question of obedience to the Episcopate suggests some reflections as to the nature and value of obedience, its necessity and its limits. Like many other of the great words used by men, obedience may be interpreted in different ways; and according as the way is, so may the attitude of the mind which is expressed by obedience become a virtue or a vice. According to Carlyle, obedience is at all times and under all conditions a virtue in the State. Find out your able man and then obey him implicitly was Carlyle's whole conception of politics. On the other hand, Mill's advice was to obey as little as you can. Mill's reading of history had impressed him with the belief that no man was really good enough to be entrusted with the fate of a fellow, man; and therein he was more in accord with the ethical tradition of the best part of mankind than was Carlyle. While Christianity has never favoured violent insurrection against authority, it has undoubtedly been a force making for individual freedom :—" The Kings of the Gentiles exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you." Buddhism is really anarchical in theory, positing as it does the freedom of the individual as a final fact. The influence of Socrates was so evidently directed against authority that the State of Athens put him to death. The writings of such moralists as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, Milton and Spinoza, make for individual liberty and against any collec- tive authority. Yet, on the other hand, there stands the great inevitable institution which we know as the State, claiming the allegiance of its subjects on distinctly moral grounds, and there is no sign apparently that either the
claim it makes, or the area of life over which its influence extends, is lessening. On the contrary, both appear to grow year by year, and a large and, for the time at any rate, growing European party proposes to make collective authority almost coextensive with the whole field of human life.
Obviously the question at issue is not an easy one, and it cannot be solved by any simple formula. At one end of the eternal controversy is an attitude of mind which cannot be distinguished from abject slavery; on the other is the nomad liberty of the wild tribes of the desert, knowing no restraint, and between these violent extremes are all manner of opinions founded either on mere compromise or some attempt at a guiding principle of action. We have little doubt that the higher politics of the world will, for generations to come, range round the two great theories of collectivism and leaving alone, one or the other gaining temporary prevalence until some ground of rational equilibrium is reached. Meanwhile, what can we say as to the duty of obedience ? We can say, perchance, little or nothing that has not been said before, but we think we can point out one or two principles which ought to guide us in this great controversy.
Ultimately, it is not a question of obedience as against no obedience, for every man obeys some principle of conduct. The early Christians had to face the issue of obedience to the commando of both the Jewish and Roman States. They did not face or solve it by proclaiming no rule of conduct at all, but a higher rule,—" Whether we should obey God rather than man, judge ye." The command to sacrifice to the Emperors was met, not by a negation, but by the assertion of a Power above all earthly power, to which alone allegiance was due. The refusal of the early Quakers to obey the temporal government in certain important affairs of life was due to no lawlessness, for Quakerism as a whole was incapable of any such frame of mind. It was because the earthly laws were in such complete disaccord with the laws of heaven that these brave men refused to consider Charles II. and his Court the embodiment of any kind of divine order. Socrates himself, while dying as a martyr of intellectual freedom, held forth in his cell on the respect due to the State, and his last act was to offer up a sacrifice to the State religion which had condemned him to death. It may be said, in a word, that we all recognise authority and the duty of obedience to that authority, but that the great clash in human life arises out of the problem as to where authority is to be found, and consequently how obedience is to be exercised. Nobody is for disobedience as such, nobody is for it as a positive principle of action, but most men, in the Western world at least, are against the idea of mere obedi- ence to an external command as a virtue. Indeed, obedience may easily become the most deadly and fatal vice of the soul.
So far as obedience is to be a source of virtue and health, we must eliminate from it the conception of obedience of one man to another as such, either in regard to thought or action. The active principle of the Reformation was that no human power could, or should, dictate to the individual soul, and that is a principle by which the world must stand if it is not to be entangled again in the yoke of bondage. Since you cannot by any possibility enter within the charmed circle in which my soul resides, and cannot therefore know it as it is known by God, you can have no authority over my soul, to whatever mere external coercion you may resort. My ultimate concerns are mine alone, not yours, nor yet the Pope's or the Archbishop's. But it may be thought by some who concede the idea that the soul is free, that at least in the sphere of action one man may, and even must, obey another. The State is sovereign, she commands, and the man in blue compels us to obey. But we do not obey him as a man. Constable 999X, or even the ermined Judge on the Bench, commands no power over us as a mere indi- vidual; we do not obey the man, but we obey the State through him, and as an individual he is nothing to us. In the affairs of business, it might be thought that a workman was compelled to obey implicitly the commands of his em- ployer. But, putting aside the point that in modern industry, with its huge, clashing forces, many of the rules are joint rules in which both sides have a voice, it is clear that the rules of business are not arbitrary commands like the edicts of Haroun-al-Raechid, but expressions of general reason which it would be idle not to adopt if industry is to be
carried on successfully. So with the laws of the State. If there can be said to be any clear law of progress, it is surely this,—that the lives of the citizens are to be more and more guided by rational principles, that the element of arbitrary caprice is to be supplanted by that of rational law. An Eastern potentate would cut off the head of his most illus- trious subject without rhyme or reason, to gratify, it might be, the wish of a woman of his harem, or because the said subject possessed a precious jewel which his Monarch coveted. To-day we surround even the meanest criminal with the safe- guards of justice, and we do this not because we love crime more than the capricious potentate, but because we have subjected the arbitrary to the rational.
No doubt the whole question of obedience, with all its nice casuistry, would cease to trouble us if life could become completely reasonable, and the law we recognise in society identical with the law of the universe. Those majestic words of Hooker regarding divine law—" Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world "—express the real authority which in our hearts we all recognise, however differ- ently we may interpret the idea of the Being in whom all law is rooted. The many conflicts between authority and the individual, that is, between the conventional morality and routine custom of the period and the inspired man in whose mind a higher law was already taking form, have been due not to mere disobedience, but to the fact that obedience was pledged elsewhere, and that, therefore, the lower human law had ceased to be moral and obligatory on the conscience. Before formal slavery was abolished, good men had abolished the very concept of slavery in their own hearts. Some day, perhaps, war will cease because men will not, as Hamlet has it, be pipes for passion to play upon. Politics will, must, conform -(slowly it may be, and with many a step backward) to the moral law which is being revealed to man in the expansion of society, and the consequent moral demands which men every- where are making upon one another. It has been in the clash between the spirit of obedience and that of authority that the human conscience has been awakened ; but we may surely look for an epoch of harmony when this conflict will be no longer essential to human growth. We conclude, therefore, not that obedience will be done away with, but that it will become more rational and universal, being directed to a Power without, which ie also felt to be the informing and guiding principle within.
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