THE SERVICE OF MAN v. THE SERVICE OF GOD.
MR. COTTER MORISON has published a very vigorous book on "The Service of Man," which will make a sensation, and a sensation of a highly complicated kind. Its object is to preach the service of man, and to abolish the ser- vice of God as obsolete. Mr. Morison runs down Christianity, but patronises the Christian saints. He ridicules theology, but recognises with gratitude the service which the false hypothesis of a God rendered to humanity after the fall of the Roman Empire, and even reproves Gibbon for making light of the consubstantiality of the divine Son. He tells more unpleasant stories than were at all necessary for his purpose, of the dissoluteness of the Christian clergy in various periods of the Church, but he balances them by stories of ascetic saintliness which are not to his purpose at all, except so far as it may be part of his purpose to concentrate a strong light on Positivist candour at the cost of Positivist teaching. Indeed, the book, which contains in its preface a high compliment to Mr. Bradlaugh for his proclamation of the necessity of checking the increase of population, is a curious compound of excerpts re- minding us of "The Convent Exposed," with excerpts reminding us of the "Lives of the Saints," and excerpts reminding us of the National Reformer, or some other publication meant to bring all theology into contempt. The result is a book which produces, in Christians at least, a certain creeping sensation like that excited by a vivisector's dissertation on the gratitude which he feels to the dog to which he owes the success of a painful experi- ment on its vitals, or by one of Robespierre's skilful preparations of the minds of his audience for the proposal of a fresh batch of massacres. Mr. Cotter Morison will probably say that it is not his fault that in attempting to demolish a complex system like Christianity, in which the most various threads of what he holds to be true and false sentiment are inextricably inter- woven, he excites the most painfully discordant feelings in those who believe in that which he would like to sweep away. Nor do we deny that this plea is fair enough. Only we think that he might reasonably have spared us a little of the unction with which he has enlarged on the character of the saints, and which, coming where it does, affects us rather as a pressing offer of pork-chops affects a sea-sick person. It was to his purpose, no doubt, to show that he could appreciate what
Christianity had done to introduce a nobler element into human society. But his whole book shows that it was not to his pur- pose,—that it was, indeed, absolutely inconsistent with his purpose,—to give credit to any influence whatever for filling human hearts with passionate hatred of their own sins, as dis- tinguished from strong dissatisfaction at the mischiefs those sins might have caused to others and the desire never to be the cause of such mischiefs again. Mr. Morison regards as a grave and grievous waste of power that sense of responsibility for evil- doing of which he encourages us to rid ourselves as soon as we can, though that feeling was at the very core of the passionate self-reproach and contrition in which the heart of the Christian saint expressed itself most vividly. He does not, of course, morally condemn it, for he wishes to rid human society of the idea of moral condemnation altogether. He thinks that the saint was no more responsible for the waste of power in which he delighted, than is the criminal for his lusts and crimes. But as he regards all that side of the saint's character as part of the necessary moral waste in the process of evolution, we think that he might have spared us so many unctuous references to that world of interior passion ; for they add much to the disagreeableness of the complicated emotions excited by his book. We do full justice to the sense of fair- ness which leads Mr. Cotter Morison to express his high appre- ciation of the disinterestedness, or, as he and his school prefer to call it, barbarous as the phrase is, the altruism,' which the true Christian saint has so gloriously displayed. But since he does not approve, nay, cordially disapproves of the waste, on penitence, of power which he thinks ought all to be directed into the forma- tion of better habits, we do think that he might have suppressed the pages in which he gloats over the spiritual experience of saints. Holding their misapplied meditations and emotions to be instruments as clumsy and inferior for the production of
altruism, compared with the true Positivist's teaching, as the savage's clumsy and often abortive method of obtaining fire is inferior to a modern safety-match, he need not, we think, have withdrawn the veil from experiences which he must deem so unedifying.
However, let us come to Mr. Morison's main end, which is to recommend his new religion, "the Service of Man," as well-nigh ripe for superseding the old religion of the service of God as manifested in Christ. His indictment against Christianity is, first, that it is neither true, nor even in modern times so much as believable; next, that it is not serviceable for the production of virtue in average men and women, though it has produced a very high kind of virtue in those few exceptional characters which reach or approach the saintly type. And on these assertions,—for his acceptance of which he gives a great variety of reasons,—he founds, of coarse, the inference that the time has come for getting rid of an obsolete creed which is no longer doing its work, and for setting up Positivism in its place. It is impossible to pass over in an article a surface of criticism which occupies a volume. We can only indicate the points at which we regard Mr. Cotter Munson's attack as break- ing down. With a great deal that he says as to the untenability of the old view of inspiration, we heartily agree. The Roman Church will find some day, we suspect, that the only way in which it can explain the words of the Vatican Council that the Scriptures have God for their author, habent Deum auctorent, will be tantamount to explaining them away, and making every wise Catholic regret that such words should ever have been used. But the real value of the Bible as the record of a race whose greatest rulers and most trusted guides were taught from above, and who recognised the influence of a higher nature on their own as the primary certainty of their life, is not affected by the recognition that its books are full of human elements, both good and ill. If we can read the Bible and believe that all who recognised the reality of this personal divine influence as acting upon them and leading them into the way of righteousness, were mistaken enthusiasts misled by the complexity of the human consciousness, we may acquiesce in Mr. Cotter Morison's view ; and if not, not. But those who utterly reject that view, have no reason in the world to burden themselves with the defence of all the defective science and defective history, and all the evidence of ordinary human passions, which the Bible, like all other human literatures, contains. If the central fact be trite, as we do not doubt for a moment, that the Bible contains in outline the history of a race guided into righteousness by an invisible divine person with whom the communion of all their greatest minds was constant and ardent, and that this communion reached its per-
!talon, its absolute climax, in our Lord's life and death, that is a fact the significance of which no evidence as to the errors and passions to which the human authors of the Bible were subject, can in the least tend to undermine. We are not even anxious to meet Mr. Cotter Morison's contention that Genesis is unscientific; and as for his position that the whole conception of original sin, of a transmitted taint which revealed religion was intended to help us to counteract, is morally false, we can only say that a more demonstrable moral truth is not to be found in the range even of Positivist dogmas. Their favourite doctrine as to the force of habit itself is not indeed more certain. When he speaks of the Fall as an evident falsehood, he uses the Fall in a sense in which no theologian ever yet understood it. It is childish to suppose that the doctrine of the intellectual degeneration of man,—of which there is no trace in Hebrew literature,— is so much as hinted at in Scripture. But that there is such a thing as sin in human nature, and that the tendency to sin is transmitted from father to son, is as conspicuous a truth to every one who believes in sin at all,—of course, Mr. Cotter Morison does not,—as the truth that physical characteristics are so transmitted. Naturally, if there be no sin, there is no transmission of sinfulness. It needs no Positivist to tell us that. But what in the world is the subject of the great literature of human remorse and contrition, if the notion be a pure chimera that sin is something as altogether different in kind from Faultiness, as is disobedience from misunderstanding ? Again, we have no occasion to meet Mr. Cotter Morison's perfectly true charge against theologians of almost all sects that they have preached about Hell in a way to malign God, and, as we believe, to travesty frightfully the teaching of Christ. None the less is it true that the worst fate which man can conceive, is the fate of those who, when they have the choice between the upward and the downward path in their moral life, choose the latter. Mr. Morison believes that there neither is nor can be any such choice for any man. And he is, of course, therefore logically quite right in regarding Christianity as a gigantic development of misleading error. That is no reason at all why those should be dismayed at his teaching who are a great deal surer that freedom, responsibility, and sin are realities and not dreams, than they are that the sun, the moon, and the earth are realities and not dreams.
Mr. Cotter Morison's proof that even if Christianity were true, it is not believable by the present generation, is open to a similar criticism. Of course, it is not believable by those who have borrowed for the moral and spiritual world the lessons of physical science, and imagine that by doing so they have ren- dered a service to humanity, instead of having led men off on a most misleading track. But the truth is, that even the devotees of science are beginning to be aware that they must shut their eyes very hard, if they are to deny phenomena utterly inexplicable by any of the physical sciences, if they are to deny, for instance, that" phantasms of the living" do appear at great distances from the living organisations to which they are due, and do convey impressions which turn out to be true impressions and utterly inexplicable by any physical science hitherto known. Mr. Morison refers to this subject with the usual sarcasm that it is the straw at which the supernaturalists catch, in the vain hope of sustaining their dying faith,—being quite unaware, we suppose, that some of the leading men in the Society which has got together this evidence are as sceptical as himself, and as well- disposed to turn the evidence,—as it may be turned,—against the Christian miracles, as to turn it,—as it maybe turned,—in their favour. But the truth certainly is that the longer the phenomena of mesmerism and trance and of the less ordinary psychical states are examined, the more certain it becomes, on evidence which no candid mind can reject, that even in this life there is some- thing in man which can occasionally pass far beyond the limits of sense, and that after death there are, in cases relatively rare, but collectively very numerous, phenomena which are not to be explained at all, unless they can be explained as mani- festations of a still existing personality. As for the plea that Christianity, even when earnestly believed, produces its effect only on a few sensitive minds, and not on any great number of minds, Mr. Morison does not bring any proof at all beyond the vague charge of rhetorical preachers. History and experience are dead against him. Of course, there have always been multitudes who, while professing to believe Christianity, paid no attention to its precepts. He himself admits,—too freely as we think, considering the very different ideals of Christianity and Positivism,—that there have always been a fair sprinkling of men of what even he regards as the most elevated type, produced by Christianity. But between these extremes, all who know anything of our Churches now, or knew anything of them at any time, have always discerned a very large number of men and women restrained from sins which they would otherwise have committed, and prompted to good works which they would otherwise have neglected, by the constant influence of a religion by which, nevertheless, they were only imperfectly penetrated. Will Positivists ever produce a result one-tenth part as satisfactory?
But the real drift of Mr. Cotter Morison's book is in his plea for a service of man as distinguished from the service of God ; and here, too, is its greatest weakness. His design is to show that in attempting to train men to be serviceable to each other, there is room for a religion free from superstition, which may yet become most potent,—as, indeed, it has, he thinks, already be- come potent,—and which will be involved in none of the difficulties of Christianity, though it will retain all that, for the purposes of this life, is useful in that great religion. But, as we said, it is the weakest part of his book. In his attack on Christianity, he often assails vigorously what is not of the essence of Christian teaching, but what has been unfortunately incor- porated with it. In his exposition of the " Service of Man" as a religion, he is not vigorous at all. In the first place, by giving up ostentatiously the reality of responsibility, and treating repentance as almost irrelevant, and as most ineffectual exactly where it is most needed, he falls back on training and habit as the only moral forces of the world. "By morality," he says, "is meant right conduct here on earth,—those outward acts and inward sentiments which, by the suppression of the selfish passions, conduce most to the public and the private well-being of the race." Very well, then, wherever those outward acts are absolutely wanting, and those inward sentiments do not exist, there is practically no hope. And that is precisely Mr. Mori- son's teaching. If we could but stop "the devastating torrent of children for a few years," he says, and organise on right lines the teaching necessary for the new generation, he thinks that all might be hopeful ; but in his view there is no hope for degraded adults, and still less for their degraded offspring, unless they can be wholly rescued from their parents' care. And there is a still more serious stumbling-block beyond. What is to be the ideal of man for teachers who do not believe in God's love and mercy P Altruism, they tell us. But what is altruism to mean ? Is it not in the highest degree altruistic for men who repudiate repentance and regeneration to extirpate a bad moral stock ? If self-reproach is to cease as a waste of power and an utter delusion, mast not the corrective system be indefinitely extended, and penalties attached at every step to human misdoings, not, of course, as punitive or retribu- tive, but as supplying motives not to go wrong again ? And on altruistic principles, must not a status of evil condition be recognised quite apart from any overt crime, placing all who belong to it under the strictest disability to marry, even if the stock is not to be absolutely exterminated. What a new ideal of moral conduct this implies,—what cultivated mercilessness, what inexorable hardness of heart, what rigidity of moral dog- matism, what indifference to repentance and remorse ! The longer Mr. Cotter Morison's ideal for the true "Service of Man" is contemplated, the more evident it will be that, if he is right, Christianity has not only missed the truth, but taught the most deadly falsehood, and that the Christian saint, so far from deserving Mr. Morison's kind patronage, will become to the new teachers who deny responsibility and ridicule repentance, the awful warning from whose example the new generation must be taught to recoil in horror. "Nothing is gained," says Mr. Morison, "by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart, and no substitute for a good one." Let that doctrine supersede the belief in God's grace, and we may con- fidently predict that the Positivists of the future will absolutely reverse Christian morality, and substitute for it a petrifying terror of their own,—a Medusa-head from which average men will start back in horror and dismay.
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