Читать книгу Modern Substitutes for Christianity - Pearson M'Adam Muir - Страница 19

The most thoughtful of those who have lost faith in the Living God and in fellowship with Him hereafter, look on this life with a pessimistic eye. Without trust in the Unseen and Eternal, life is worthless, an idle dream. With its harassing cares, with its petty vexations, with its turbulence and strife, its sorrows, its breaking up of old associations, its quenching the light of our eyes, 'O dreary were this earth, if earth were all!' On the stage of the world, 'the play is the Tragedy Man, the hero the conqueror worm!'

We cannot but extend the deepest sympathy, the warmest admiration to those who, bereft of belief and of hope, yet cling tenaciously to moral goodness.[5] 'What is to become of us,' asks the pensive Amiel, 'when everything leaves us, health, joy, affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, capacity for work, when the sun seems to us to have lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charms? … There is but one answer, keep close to Duty. Be what you ought to be; the rest is God's affair. … And supposing there were no good and holy God, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the enigma, the pole star of a wandering humanity.'[6] Who does not see that it is the lingering faith in God which gives strength to this conviction and that, were the faith obliterated, the natural conclusion would be for the cultured, 'Vanity of vanities: all is vanity'; and for the multitudes, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' 'I remember how at Cambridge,' says Mr. F. W. H. Myers of George Eliot, 'I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity on an evening of rainy May: and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and uncompromising Law. I listened and night fell: her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the gloom, and it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.'[7]

Withdraw belief in a God above and in a life beyond, the only reason for obedience to Duty and Morality will be either our own pleasure, the doing what is most agreeable to ourselves; or sympathy, the bearing of others' burdens, in the hope that when we have passed away there may be some on earth who will reap the harvest which we have sown; or public opinion, the views which are prevalent in a particular time in a particular region; and these reasons are hardly likely to produce a morality which will be other than that of self-indulgence, of despair, or of conventionality.[8]

'We can get on very well without a religion,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'for though the view of life which Science is opening to us gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think that most men find no difficulty in turning their minds away from its transient character.' If it would only last! But it does not last: those dearer to us than ourselves are snatched away. Could anything be more selfish, more despicably base than to go about saying, All that is of no consequence, so long as I meet with pleasant people and have an infinite number of things to enjoy? It is true that an infinite number of my fellow-creatures may not be enjoying an infinite number of things, may have trouble in recalling almost anything worthy of the name of enjoyment, but why should I be depressed by that? I find no difficulty in turning away my mind from the misfortunes of others. 'We can get on very well without religion.' No doubt without it some of us can have agreeable society and a variety of pleasures more or less refined; but this does not prove that religion is no loss. On the same principle, we can get on very comfortably without honesty, without sobriety, without purity, without generosity. We can get on very comfortably indeed without anything except without a heart which is intent on self-gratification, and which excludes all thought of the wants and woes of the world. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' is the irresistible, though rather inconsistent, conclusion of that sublime austerity which so indignantly repudiates the merest hint of reward or hope within the veil, and which so sensitively shrinks from the mercenariness of the Religion of the Cross.

'The wages of sin is death:

if the wages of Virtue be dust,

Would she have heart to endure for the life

of the worm and the fly!'[9]

What are the facts? What is the growing tendency where men think themselves strong enough to do without religious beliefs, when they have been proclaiming that the suppression of Religion will be the exaltation of a purer Morality? There are plenty of indications that the laws of Morality are found to be as irksome as the dictates of Religion. The first step is to cry out for a higher Morality, to censure the Morality of the New Testament as imperfect and inadequate, as selfish and visionary. The next step is to question the restraints of Morality, to clamour for liberty in regard to matters on which the general voice of mankind has from the beginning given no uncertain verdict. The last step is to declare that Morality is variable and conventional, a mere arbitrary arrangement, which can be dispensed with by the emancipated soul. The literature which assumes that Religion is obsolete does not, as a rule, suffer itself to be much hampered by the fetters of Morality. The non-Religion of the Future is what, we are confidently told, increasing knowledge of the laws of Sociology will of necessity bring about. Should that day ever dawn, or rather let us say, should that night ever envelop us, it will mean the diffusion of non-Morality such as the world has never known.[10]

[1] Appendix.

[2] Appendix VI.

[3] Nineteenth Century, June 1884.

[4] Appendix VII.

[5] Appendix VIII.

[6] Journal Intime, ii.

[7] Modern Essays.

[8] Appendix IX.

[9] Tennyson, Wages.

[10] Appendix X.