MISS BEVINGTON ON MORALITY AN.D THEO LO GY.
THE remarkable paper in the October number of the Nine. toenth Cont ray, to which we drew attention last week, by Miss L. S. Bevington, is, in the frankness and the firmness of its view, a very singular and painful sign of the times. She writes throughout as if, in denial of God, she had got her feet firmly on the rock of naked truth, and intended there to hold them, let the world Say or think what it might of her for her defiance of all its most cherished be- liefs and hopes. No oue can say that she seems to hesitate for a moment in the depth of her conviction that the essence of morality has nothing on earth to do with God or the belief in him,—that it is man's morality which has commonly taught" his gods how to rule him," not God who has given us his own law ;—and that when the belief in God goes, as go it will, though there may be a great temporary dis- turbance due to this disappearance of one of the most effective of the ideal sanctions of morality, the result will show that morality, being rooted deep in those causes without which man's prolonged social existence on earth would not have been possible, will soon assert itself as strongly as ever, and will, indeed, obtain, on its own sole merits, a recognition and triumph proving that it was the truth of its morality which gave so much plausibility to the Christian theology, not the truth of the Christian theology which gave so wide an ac- ceptance to the Christian morality. The equanimity and even insouciance with which Miss Bevington declares and illustrates these principles, are certainly very remarkable proofs that the old feeling of recoil from the very name of Atheism is passing away, and thatthe undoubting confidence which the atheistic form of the principles of Evolution have inspired, is almost
of the kind which a mathematical demonstration, or at least a thoroughly verified scientific law, properly inspires. When this point has been reached, a very important stage in the great controversy is certainly attained. When a young lady of no small ability, who evidently knows what close thinking means, and apparently, if we may judge by some of her poems, knows also what strong feeling means, can overcome all the natural shrinking from the public profession of such a creed as this, and eau overcome it, moreover, with hardly any evidence of effort or passion, it is a very great indication that, for the think- ing and reading portion of the public at least, a critical moment has arrived. No time, then, could be more opportune for ex- amining with the anxious sense of responsibility suitable to such a crisis as this, the admissions made by one of the ablest of the Atheistic party as to the moral conditions of human life as she understands them, and for considering what light these admis- sions throw on the great denial which they thus calmly, and even regretfully, imply. We are not going over the ground of Miss Bevington's essay. We are only going to array carefully a few of her leading positions,—especially those where she tries to soften the contrast between Christian and Positivist morality,— and to indicate the points where she softens away real and vital differences, and also, we may add, some of the great facts of life.
First, assuming that there is no God and no immortality for man, it is yet a great mistake, Miss Bevington teaches us, to identify morality with expediency, at least with expediency in any sense in which it could be understood by the individual man, or measured by his own private desires. Morality, in the belief of the extreme evolutionists, consists, "in the last resort, of that mass of conduct-conditions upon which, for the time being, as many of us as live, can, with a minimum Of fric- tion and a maximum of comfort to every one concerned, con- tinue to live and to leave a survivable posterity." (p. 597.) But what these conduct-conditions are, no man can judge by mere individual experience. "Thanks to the myriad generations that have evolved us by, and from out of, our existing circumstances, and by the help of religion, and many other things, fostered our budding sympathies, for our own perpetuation and well-being, we cannot, for the life of us, escape the destiny which we inherit along with the instincts which command it ; we cannot escape the fact, for all our argu- ments, that every natural force which has direct relation to man at his present stand-point, is on the side of his continuance and prosperity, exactly in proportion to the delicacy, the accuracy, and the sensitiveness of his 'conscience.'" (p. 6004 And further, the morality thus developed by these laws of evolu- tion, that is, by the selection of the fittest, is so near the Christian morality, that "after some possible tacking, moral opinion will eventually sot sail in a direction HO nearly parallel with Christ- ianity, that the divergence towards a still more social standard will, generations to come, be scarcely perceptible." (p. 591.) Such at least is one expression of Miss Bevington's personal opinion, though we shall soon see that she lays down some propositions as clearly established, which are not at all consistent with this view.
For, secondly, Miss Bevingtou admits that the gradual obliteration of religious belief must reduce many pseudo- virtuous acts to the category of "difficult, but obviously useless" acts, after which they will inevitably cease to be prized as virtuous. In other words, the Christian standard of virtue will be seriously modified. And again, a still wider divergence from the Christian view of morality is implied in the following striking passage :—
"Possibly, here and there, a man or a woman, in flinging aside the thraldom of an out-worn creed, will fling away with it the principles he or she has mistakenly held to be one with it, and doomed to4lie with its death. Then comes a non-moral episode in any such life, when conscience falls numb and apparently lifeless, and with the force of a reaction the passions assert themaelves violently. Happiness is wildly sought, pleasure greedily seized, under a per. fectly genuine temporary conviction that good and evil are fiction% so far as they profess to mean more than personal joy, of the means of obtaining which last each person may best judge for himself. A character, however, which thus becomes reckless, or even vicious, so and which allowed no rebellious symptoms so speak upon rcelliZInis°,m'philosophical, or any received standard of conduct remained unimpaired, is in no danger whatever of becoming permanently selfish. Its conscientiousness will not allow it to do PAl. An infinity of suffering and effort may be required of it in its slow return through time devastation it outbreak has made, to walk once more, even though blindly, in the old paths, or so far in them as they tally with the ineradicable sympathetic tendencies of such a character. But more or less tardily such a return is assured. Suck a temporary lapse, however, occurring in perhaps thousands of iso-
lated lives, in just the very section of society upon whose word, whose influence, and whose example, the rest depend for their rule of life, may—mast produce a moro or less wide-spread disturbance of moral opinion, looking for the time like an anarchy of principle. But though such may come, it will not stay : it shall work its own cure, and issue finally in a reformed moral order—an order, I confid- ently believe, in which equity shall be counted supreme among the virtues, and in which personal sincerity and self-restraint, covering as these do the whole area of men's conduct, shall be recognised as equity's twin manifestations." (pp. 602a)
From this passage it is clear that though Miss Bevington formally ignores the point, she really accepts the logic of her own theory of morality, and that in accepting it, she is at least not unconscious of one most important and inevitable line of divergence between the Christian morality and the Positivist morality, a divergence which must affect, sooner or later, the very heart of moral feeling. The morality which represents merely tendencies engendered by the sum-total of conduct-conditions favourable to human life, human society, and the produc- tion of a "survivable posterity," is not, and cannot be, a, mysterious imperative, the due submission to which is followed by ineffable peace, the rebellion against it by profound remorse.
It is, on the contrary, a mere more or less urgent craving, due mostly to inherited instincts, and partly to personal experience, which, if it fails to carry the conduct with it, will, of course, survive in the form of a certain amount of restlessness, just as any other mortified tendency of sufficient urgency would do, but leaving just as little room for just self-reproach as there is when an empty larder compels you to go to bed hungry, or a wounded affection or passion frets under its lacerations. If the " conduct-conditions " transmitted to you by your an- cestors, and fortified by your own experience, are sufficient to keep you right, well and good ; if not, so much the worse ; but in the latter case, the fault clearly is not with you, but with the insufficiency of the tendencies transmitted to you. Miss Bevington sees this, and to this is due the calmness with which she assures us that if the only cause of a sin is the
sudden collapse of an erroneous intellectual belief on which you had rested too much before, the sinner is quite certain to come round again, and to answer to the real springs of his conscience as steadily as before. She rests this conviction, of course, simply on the view on which she insists so often,—that the religious and
spiritual sanctions which we assign for our moral feelings are not their true cause at all, but at most adventitious aids to thorn ; and though when they fail they may cause a temporary perturbation of feeling fatal to immediate rectitude, the o]l hereditary tendencies must assert themselves again as surely as Spring will bring back leaves to the trees, or its inherent stability will right the ship which a merely accidental squall had overact. But that implies,—necessarily implies,—that our moral equilibrium depends wholly, not on the volition of the present, but on the accumulated inheritance of the past ; that the power of momentary volition is a fiction ; that every one's character is really morally, or immorally, stable, and will follow the bias of its inherited tendencies and acquired habits. The ship that does not right itself after the squall strikes it, is an un- seaworthy ship. It is not the squall, but the bad build and
rotten timbers which wreck it. Conscience, on Miss Beving- ton's principles, is either a tendency of our nature strong enough to assert itself, or else a half-evolved tendency destined to teaze without ultimately saving its possessor, who will inevitably deteriorate, himself, and if he leaves a posterity at all, leave one less likely to survive. Naturally, then, the important point in connection with moral failure is simply this,—whether it is due to causes likely to gain, or likely to lose, ground in the nature of him who suffers it. If the former, the case is hopeless ; it can- not be, in Miss Bevington's mind, any collapse of spiritual faith or righteous will which caused it; it must be the weakness of the only true springs of right conduct, i.e., the inherited ten- dencies identifying the needs and wishes of the individual with the needs and wishes of his race. If the latter, then the fall is of no consequence,—the true stability of the moral character will soon reassert itself, and the consequence of the momentary yielding to a fitful and momentary shock, will soon be cancelled and disappear. In fact, the word " sin " has no proper mean- ing, on such a view. He who has not inherited the proper conditions urging him to rectitude, is not responsible for what he did not cause. And he who did inherit them, but succumbed to a purely casual combination of unfortunate conditions, will swing back into his virtuous habits, and swing back, not, indeed, without regret, but certainly without remorse ; for it is regret,
and not remorse, with which we contemplate a catastrophe which we could not have prevented.
Is it not obvious to Miss Bevington how enormous a divergence between the Christian and the Positivist morality this passage in itself implies P To the Christian, when the will yields once to evil which he believed that it had full power to resist, there is and can be no confidence that it will not yield again, for the second fall is always easier than the first. To the Positivist, on the other hand, as the issue depends, not on the will, but on the strength of old and deep-rooted tendencies, which must reassert themselves if they be ols.1 enough and deep-rooted enough, it is a mere problem in moral dynamics, the solution of which is abso- lutely determinate beforehand, though upon it depends whether the subject of it belongs to the improving class, who will trans- mit a "survivable posterity," or to the deteriorating class, which is to be improved away. How is it possible, with such a theory, that the old type of moral emotions can remain at all P To the believer in such a theory, remorse becomes a folly, indignation an injustice, and repentance a mistake. What Christians call repentanc, is to the Positivist the mere re- assertion of the inherent stability of implanted instincts after their temporary defeat by an accidental conjunction of unfavourable influences,—like the devastation caused by a completely exceptional spring-tide, Which is not likely to repeat itself for decades, or even centuries. The earth, how- ever, does not repent of her devastating spring-tides. It is idle to suppose that, with such a theory, the results of Christian and Positivist moral feeling are likely to run parallel. They will diverge from the very first, and run wider and wider of each other every year. Miss Bevington herself indicates this, when she speaks of equity as, in her belief, destined to be "supreme among the virtues." Equity is a great virtue, but it is one which, more than any other, depends on wide knowledge and large sympathies. No wonder that the sociological view of morality wishes to make it supreme, To the Christian, the love of God, and the humility, the craving for purity, which that love involves, must always be the first condition even of a true equity ; while we should suppose that to the Positivist, a great part of all we refer to when we speak thus, will be classed among "those pseudo- virtuous acts and forbearances," the explosion of which with the explosion of Christianity "it would be idle to deny." We quite agree. But then we think it also idle to deny that with Christianity, the Christian morality will disappear also, and scarcely less rapidly and fatally than the faith itself.
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