INSTINCTIVE GOODNESS.
THE railway accident at Welsh ampton on Friday week is in many ways one of the most distressing which have occurred in recent years. The number of the victims was, for an English accident, unusually large—eleven killed and twenty- five wounded—all of them persons of an unusually respectable kind, engaged in a function—a gathering of Sunday-school teachers — more directly religious than the charitable bazaar during which the sufferers in the Paris calamity were destroyed. The slaughter, too, was so unnecessary. There was no " accident " properly so-called, nothing which could not have been provided against, no sudden collapse of part of the machinery, no fault or breakdown of signallers or engine-drivers. The victims, it is reported in the Daily Chronicle, apparently on the authority of the official inspector, were sacrificed to some imperfection in the condition of the line, which had been left, by the neglect probably of some subordinate overseer, in a state in which it was unable to bear the passage of heavy engines. That report, of course, may be unfounded, but nothing is satisfactory about the narrative except the behaviour of the sufferers, many of whom, according to the detailed account in the Daily News, displayed a fortitude and a disregard of self that elevates one's conception of the virtues which may be hidden in ordinary human nature. Many of the victims, of course, shrieked and groaned, as the wounded do on a battlefield, but many more bore agony which
must have been terrible, in silence, while a few displayed a demeanour which makes one think that the old theologians who spoke so much of "prevenient grace," the gift of a good- ness which seems independent of any cause save the will of a merciful Creator, were at least familiar with some of the recesses of human nature. The man who for two hours held a candle aloft with one arm while his deliverers hacked at the woodwork crushing the other, was, perhaps, possessed of nothing better than stubborn pluck, though endurance of that kind involves such perfect self-con- trol as to be equivalent to a virtue ; but the girl who, with a leg broken and a thigh fractured, said gently, "Go and see to others," exhibited a charity such as we do not often find in the most devoted Christians, while the little boy of ten who cried for his mother, but begged that she might not know how badly he had been injured, showed how the quality of con- sideration, which we often think of as mere politeness, may be developed into a lofty virtue. Such instances make one re- consider one's conviction that human nature is bad,—and it is astonishing, under certain circumstances of suffering, how frequent they are. We hardly ever read an account of a grave mining accident, or a personal narrative of a battle, or a story of escapes from a great fire, without noting incidents in which persons, always ordinary and sometimes ruffianly, have dis- played what philosophers call "altruism," the power of post- poning self to others' welfare, in its most admirable degree. Contrast such stories with those of the mad selfishness and cruelty often developed by panic, and we get a new impression of the range of the moral qualities, their baseness in some, their nobility in others, which compels one to ask whether it is impossible that some natures may be possessed of moral gifts separating them from the ruck as completely as the gifts of genius or of special intellectual force separate a few from the majority. The idea of such inequalities is a strange one, almost impugning the fairness of God in his treatment of his creatures, but it is entirely in accord with all that we see in other departments of human life, and entirely in accord, too, with the Christian Revelation, throughout which runs the teaching that among -men there are those whose natures are fertile soil, and those whose souls are more or less rocky ground in which nothing that is good naturally takes root. A kind of "grace." to use the old and accurate theological term, seems inherent in some persons, independent of all teaching, and, as it were, outside the will, just as in others there is an instinct of pity, or of sympathy, or, and perhaps
this is the rarest of all, of justice, which no care for self, no prejudice, no intellectual pride even, seems able to warp. They must, as it were, realise to themselves the case of the wronged, or see the justice of the plea which seems upon the 13 nrfa,ce so futile or so false. There are those in the world who, speaking of them always in comparison with the average, cannot be greedy, or cruel, or impure, or even first in their own regard. A moral something is in them which is as definite and as operative as any other faculty, and sometimes as visible as insight, or imagination, or that faculty of com- bining evidence which gives to some reflective minds a power which, if it were but a little extended, would be the power of prophecy in its lower and more restricted sense. When the something covers much of the character, we talk of "the beauty of holiness ; " but there are cases in which, the some- thing being restricted to one side of the nature, we have no descriptive expression for it, and are sometimes even per- plexed by its existence, the thread of gold being, so to speak, so indistinct among the wool. We recognise it when it is useful to us or the world, as it is, for instance, in that variety of courage which is really supreme unselfishness, but we miss it when it does not specially benefit ourselves, as, for example, habitual justice need not necessarily do.
There is, however, little need for argument upon the point. We all recognise, though we do not all admit, the existence of "prevenient grace," and the only doubt is whether it should be counted to a man as a merit, or only as an attribute, like strength, or beauty, or keenness of thought. There is a ten- dency to deny the higher claim, to say that inherent goodness is of little value except in its results, and to argue, if we dis- cuss it, that of those to whom it is given, more will be required than of the remainder of mankind. It may be so; one does not know precisely what area the parable of the talents was intended to cover, bat it may also be that the denial is a product of instinctive jealousy. If there is one thing certain it is that in the works of creation there is no equality, and it is difficult to see why men should be equal in moral gifts any more than in intellectual, or why the possessor of such a one should not have the benefit of it, just as much as the possessor of an in- curably clean skin has the benefit of that source of healthiness and vitality. It would be unfair, you say, but why unfair any more than any other of the thousand inherent advantages which separate one human being from another. To bind the Creator not to create a man, or, as in the Oswestry example, a girl, with the instinct to cry amidst agony for help to some other person to her unknown, is to limit his freedom in a way which half deprives him of his attributes, and, we say it in all reverence, to compel him to work under something very like a destiny. Though there are limits to " omnipotence " that cannot be one of them, and it is hard to avoid the thought, far-reaching as its consequences may be, that there are, or at all events may be, whole classes of human beings with as decided a proclivity towards goodness as other classes certainly have a proclivity towards evil. If that is true, it is an antidote for pessimism which in a pessimistic age it is by no means wise even for the clergy to forget. There are degrees in "original sin," or whatever we like to call the tendency of mankind to reject or to neglect good.
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