MR. LYALL ON MORALITY AND THEOLOGY.
TILE most remarkable paper in the new number of the
n ht ly is that of Mr. Lyall,—that most vigilant and sardonic critic of Oriental religions, and indirectly of all religions,—on the dangers which the British Government is India is incurring by its cold enforcement of secular moralities, without securing the appearance of any theo- logical sanction or authority for those secular moralities. In Europe, if we understand Mr. Lynn's drift aright, this may be all very well. " It may be well enough, in Europe, for morality to be thrusting theology altogether outside the sphere of political and social administration, and to be relegating it to cloudland. There we have just seen the spectacle of morality and theology about to dissolve their long partnership, and already disputing which put in the original capital, and to whom is due the credit of floating the great enterprise of the civilisation of mankind. Theology is undoubtedly the senior partner, and may be right in maintaining that the affairs of the world can never go on when her name shall have been entirely withdrawn from the direction ; but as a matter of fact, theology in Europe has abstained of late from interference with the visible world, and drawn mainly upon the bank of the future. It is at least possible in Europe that morality may take up the position and responsibilities for temporal affairs which theology has very nearly relinquished, and manage to go forward upon her own score and venture ; but even with the aid of British penal codes this would be a very perilous venture in India. In Asia, prescriptive authority, which necessarily means divine authority, is the only explanation upon which the Ilindoo mind, so primitive, yet so restlessly inquiring, can find repose ; and morality must still be content with playing a secondary role, underneath the religious beliefs." The British Government has been rash, says Mr. Lyall, in not sheltering itself and its new rules to some extent behind the authority of the native priest- hoods. By refusing to avail itself of these "lightning-conduc- tors,"—which are the conventional Eastern resources for explain- ing away great national calamities, without confessing incapacity on the part of the supreme secular authority to do its work well,—the British Government, he says, has become, in the eyes of the natives, more or less responsible for such calamities. The Hindoo, looking always for " the supreme, irresistible power in temporal matters," is quite willing to accept the British Government as that supreme, irresistible power ; only, when it has done so, it begins to think it responsible not only for what it does, but for what it fails to do. Hence " cholera, famine, and great sea-inundations, when they are not made the text of invec- tives against the British Government, do at least in some con- fused way bring upon it great discredit, not apparently from the idea that the gods are angry with the Government which has ignored them so persistently as to have pretty well established its independence of them, but upon the dim feeling that the Govern- ment has undertaken the gods' business, and is breaking down." What Mr. Lyall would have desired, if we understand his paper aright, is that the British Government should have introduced its moral reforms under the sanction, to softie extent, of the native priesthood, leaving them to find their own way of so modifying the old mythological stories as to adapt them to the new principles of action. lie would have induced the reigning religions to adopt the British morality as their own, reconciling it with the traditions of the past as best they could, so that the gods might still have the discredit, if discredit it had been in that case held to be, for all the physical calamities which devastate India, as well as the credit, if credit it was, for the better morality of the new legisla- tion. Mr. Lyall, as a statesman, thinks it safer to prompt the Hindoo gods to adopt an improved code,—the British prompter still keeping off the stage, so as to be visible and audible only to
the few who are in the secret of the stage arrangements,—than to avow our responsibility for so much which we do, as to be credited with a great deal more than we are justly chargeable with, for that which we fail to do. Ile would have us mould the theology and let the theology mould the people, thereby escaping all re- sponsibility for the disasters we cannot stave off, and getting the sanction of time-honoured institutions for the decencies on which we insist. But he does not write, we take it, chiefly for the sake of criticising a mode of procedure which, as he is perfectly well aware, is not in the least likely to be exchanged for an alliance with Brahminism,—in other words, for a con- version of the British Government to a good understanding with the idolatry it intends to improve. His drift, if we read him rightly, is rather to get a backhanded hit at all theologies, and to hint that even the Christian theology survives only by astutely adopting the moral developments' which are obtained without its help, and even against its will. Ile wishes to represent the various great steps in civilisation as sanctioned by the prudent after-thought of religious beliefs which, late in the day, have become reluctantly aware that, unless they change their stand-point, they must be swept away by the advancing tide of moral improvement,—to strike a blow, in short, which may hasten that dissolution of partner- ship in Europe between morality and theology, which Mr. Lyall makes it his chief theme to deplore as premature in India. We gather this from the following passage, which is as clear in drift and tendency as it is dubious and hesitating in its practical recommendations :—
44 The argument from the analogy of Nature which Butler applied so unanswerably to the deism of his time is as effective when used by Hinduism against the optimistic speculations of India ; indeed in India the deist is very much more puzzled than in England to explain upon his theory the condition and prospects of mankind ; for if the visible world is directed by the divinities, as both sides agree, there can be no doubt that in Asia the system and purpose are at least very incompre- hensible. And between the two explanations offered, of terrible and capricious or of just and benevolent deities, the probabilities to simple folk appear very much on the side of the former ; so that we begin to see that Butler's famous argument from the analogy of nature is really connected with the ideas that lie at the roots of all religions which have grown up out of this very analogy, that is, of all natural religions. He revived in logical form the unconscious train of thought out of which all beliefs are more or leas evolved ; he proved that the incomprehensible and pitiless working of natural laws warranted the inference of any degree of stern severity in the character of the administrator ; and it is precisely in this demonstration that the strength of all natural religion lies. Butler set this out for the first time forcibly and scien- tifically, and the position is doubly impregnable when held by those who are not concerned, as Butler was, to prove that a moral and beneficent government of the world is nevertheless credible. Wherever morality and the refinements of an improved state of life begin to press in upon the older and rougher conceptions of divinity, we shall always find theology entrenched behind the undeniable concordance of what is recorded about the gods with what is seen of their doings in the visible world—so long, that is, as they are allowed to be responsible for what is done. Morality can carry this entrenchment either by relieving them of this responsibility or by dissolving connection with them, both very perilous mano3uvres for morality to attempt in almost every part of the world as it now is, and certain to be ruinous in Asia. On the other band, theology, if not openly bombarded, is accessible to terms, com- promises, and propositions for an alliance, and will even consent to march several stages on the same road with morality, provided that theology has nominal command of the whole force."
But Mr. Lyall forgets that though morality has, from the earliest ages, found it an insurmountable difficulty to account for cosmic laws on the principles of the moral code as that code applies to man, the failure of any attempt to account for morality by referring it as a natural product to the same cosmic laws, has been complete, and is a failure which is now visibly going on before our eyes. Mr. Lyall is candid enough to admit that Judaism as a religion founded itself on "righteousness," and indeed on so searching and profound a morality of spirit and motive, that it was in itself equivalent to an intensely personal religion, one which could only exist by refer- ring thelaw of righteousness to the ever-present agency of a spiritual being. Once let this theology and morality " dissolve partner- ship," and to whichever of the two may have been mistakenly assigned " the credit of floating the great enterprise of the civili- sation of mankind," the blunder of assigning it to either, inde- pendently of the other, will immediately become evident. The morality which divests itself of the spiritual affec- tions and motives, and of the immense stimulus of believing that it lives under the perpetual scrutiny and guidance of an infinite Being possessed by those affections and motives, soon becomes superficial, inefficient, and extinct ; while the theology which affects, as it has so often affected, to exer- cise a dispensing power over morality, soon falls into the sere and yellow leaf of Pharisaic= and superstition. Nothing seems to us more contrary to fact than to say that in modern Europe theology is virtually " retiring from interference with the visible I world, and drawing upon the bank of the future." Mr. Lyall refers, we suppose, to such movements as those which have sepa- rated, or attempted to separate, Church and State in so many lands. In fact, however, one of the greatest forces pressing for that sepa- ration has been, not secularism, but theology itself. Ultramon-
tanism in Rome, for instance, has been one of the greatest of these forces, not, of course, because it desired the separation, but
because it desired a freedom of action which could not be obtained without that separation. Dissent, in various fervid forms, has been another of those forces. And such Dissent has always had for its motive the desire to carry out the dictates of a scrupu- lous religious conscience more freely than, according to the Dissenter's idea, it can be carried out when trammelled by State interference. To say that the partial secularisation of the govern- ment of so many States has implied the retirement of theology from the direction of public affairs, is a monstrous blunder. No- where has that secularisation occurred so completely as it has where it has been due not to the dwindling away of religious motives, but to the paramount sway of religious motives—claiming to operate, however, not through a Government which could only recognise a caplet mortuum of religion common to all its most widely separated citizens, but rather to operate separately, through the individual consciences of each member of the State. If the Government can no longer avow specific theological motives for what it does, it is because there is much more, not much less, of theological motive in the minds of the people who control the Government.
Governments are less religious because peoples are more so, but in ways so diverse that they cannot make Governments their organs, cannot, indeed, find any common organ for all their differing views. And though this is a frank admission that theology is so divided against herself, that no one theology can in any sense be said to have command of the Christian morality of Europe, it is very far indeed from an admission that morality is dispensing with theology altogether, in the sense which Mr. Lyall's language requires. On the contrary, there never, we believe, was a time when popular morality was so inward as it is now, so much guided by the belief in divine sanctions, so persuaded that there is some personal and spiritual lead- ing at the bottom of all the political and social questions of the day,—a leading which men claim, indeed, the liberty to determine for themselves, but once so determined, think it sin and shame not to follow. Christianity, in becoming more of a life, has undoubtedly become less of a doctrine, but the very fact that it has become more of a life means that, so far as regards that doctrine of divine love and care for human morality on which it stands or falls, it has lost no power even as a doctrine. Even the physical sceptics,—who are a mere handful in most of the Euro- pean nations,—have been forced to admit that however little the natural laws of the universe, which often seem to crush out so indifferently hosts of created beings,—the types as well as the individuals,—appear to conform themselves to human ideas of morality, yet by far the greatest result those natural laws have achieved, has been that human morality, —in other words, righteousness,—once understood, becomes the purpose and driving force of the human world in a far deeper sense than any of its physical forces. And this admission is so remarkable, that even mere evolutionists find it difficult to deny that there must have been a moral purpose secreted in a creative force that has evolved' human morality as its best and highest feat. Well may Mr. Lyall say that " we may, after all, find morality in India, as elsewhere, looking dubiously at the ladder she has kicked down, and seriously alarmed at the decline of religious beliefs which has been the necessary consequence of her own rise." But it would have been better, perhaps, had he used the expression ' irreligious beliefs,' than 'religious beliefs.' Morality may look dubiously even at the decline of the irreligiousbeliefs which served to satisfy the mysterious hunger of the human spirit for some ultimate power to rest on, so long as it provides nothing in their place. But no true morality worthy of the name can help putting some- thing in their place. The very scrutiny of self needed to understand the words " righteousness " and " unrighteousness," " good " and " evil," becomes religious, by virtue of being thorough. What Mr. Lyall finely calls the " quicksand" of Asia, is the quicksand it is, for want of this. The Jews became a rock upraised in the midst of the Asiatic quicksand, because in morality they recognised the "1 am that I am" as a centre of everlasting strength. No mere justice in external things can bring it home to the Asiatic mind. But once brought home, the quicksand ceases to be a quicksand ; the quaking ground becomes firm ; the universe is so far explained that its greatest purpose is clear ; the speculative pantheisms
and idolatries cease ; the solid order begins. In Europe, at all events, no morality that has advanced the world a step has been divorced from religion ; and no religion that has not forced the world back a step, has been divorced from morality.
Previous page
