But to return to the teaching of the philosopher of ethics, I must remind my readers again that I am unable to do more than sketch the outlines of the great ethical system which he gave to the world. More than that will not be needed for the moment. But before undertaking even a synoptical account of the transcendental ethic, I think it advisable to remark that Kant's title to philosophical immortality rests upon his constructive work as an ethicist, and not on his critical work as a speculative thinker. It is well known that the two philosophies of Kant are not prima facie harmonious, that he finds himself compelled to deny as a critic that of which he is most certain as a moralist. Thus the great facts of theism, immortality and the autonomy or freedom of the will, he professes himself unable to know save as revelations of the moral order. His mind, or pure reason, can know nothing of them; it is his will or practical reason which discerns them as plain deductions from the overwhelming fact of the moral law. This fact has led some critics to describe Kant as a sceptic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We might almost quote of him what Browning wrote of Voltaire:—

Crowned by prose and verse, and wielding with wit's bauble learning's rod, He at least believes in soul and is very sure of God.

No one more so; yet as a thinker he professed himself unable to demonstrate these high truths. In that sense Kant's famous Critique of the Pure Reason may be described as the forerunner of the systematic agnosticism which is set forth in the First Principles of Mr. Spencer. But there is this immense difference, that Kant was convinced of the reality of that which the mind of man could not demonstrate. The great facts were existent indeed, but he was powerless to reach them with the instruments at his command. In consequence, he laid it down as a principle that man must ever act as though it were actually demonstrated that we were free, our innermost being imperishable, and a supreme judge and dispenser of justice to administer the moral laws which are the guide of life. It would be out of place to state the arguments whereby Kant justified his belief in a controlling mind in the universe and in the spiritual nature of man, while avowing his inability to demonstrate those truths. It must suffice to state here that the truths which lie at the foundation of religion were a matter of profound conviction with the sage of Koenigsberg, all the deeper perhaps because he would not claim to subject them to an intellectual dissection or to be able to measure out heaven and earth in the exiguous terms of human thought.

But as soon as he leaves the plane of the pure or speculative reason and rises to the level of the practical reason or the will, then the full truth bursts upon his astonished gaze, clearer than the meridian light. He sees no more "half shade, half shine," but the truth pours itself "upon the new sense it now trusts with all its plenitude of power". It is the will, not the mind, which discloses the full revelation to Immanuel Kant, and makes him the deeply-reverent, religious man he ever was, the convinced theist, the believer in his power to control his acts by the independence of his will, and in the possibility, or rather the certainty, of his being one day morally perfect—not indeed within the limits of the life which now is, but in a future life of unlimited duration. That which to Wordsworth was an intimation was to Kant an intuition after the vision of the glory of the moral law had flooded his innermost soul.

And this we may, perhaps, briefly show before bringing the chapter to an end.

The fundamental principle of the Kantian system is the primacy of the will. The key to the mystery of man's being Kant finds, not in the marvellous faculty of intelligence, but in that power of self-movement, that capacity for self-originated energy which we call the will. Reason is "regulative," he said, but not "creative" and "constitutive," like the will. It is the latter faculty which makes us what we are, determines our life, fixes our character, and decides our destiny. As you act, so you are. This principle once conceded, the majestic system at once takes shape. What is it that governs the world of phenomena outside us? Physical laws, and supreme amongst these laws, that of equilibrium or gravitation. What is it that governs the reason? The laws of thought, those aboriginal rules, none of man's creation, but the essentially necessary guides which he was bound to discover and to follow if he is to think accurately, that is, if his thoughts are to be in conformity with fact. And what is it which governs the will of man? "Do you tell me," the master would urge, "that the inert masses of the spheres have each their own movements regulated for them, that nothing from a stone to a star is shaped or moved without the intervention of eternal laws; that the lispings of children no less than the meditations of a philosopher must conform to law, and that the will of man, whereby he makes himself to be what he is, shapes his character, influences his surroundings, and fixes his destiny—do you venture to say that that is lawless in a world where all is law? No," he proclaims in words which burn conviction into his soul: "it, too, has its laws, the highest, holiest thing in all this universe, the law of laws which confronts man wherever he goes, fills all his sublimest thoughts, subdues his soul to the most reverent worship, and is the holiest inspiration of his religion. It is the moral law, the supreme concern of the will of man, a revelation to man alone of his own unspeakable dignity, the norm or standard whereby he is to regulate his life—this it is which is the law of his will. As gravitation rules the stars, so the moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between right and wrong, controls the will, not compulsorily, not arbitrarily, as though it could by any possibility be otherwise, but freely. So sovereign is its power, so authentic are its claims, that if it had might as it has right, it would rule the world." It is, therefore, to use Kant's own language, a categorical imperative, that is, an unconditional command. "Thou canst, and therefore thou must." By the very manhood you possess you are bound wholly to surrender yourself in submission to what you know to be the right for the right's sake alone. You must make it your own law, and obey it as inflexibly as the stars keep their courses in the everlasting way.

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

We may see now how Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental realities—"the land which is very far off"—which the pure and critical reason could never behold. But though the eyes of the mind were holden, the intuition of the will enables him to gaze direct into the unseen and discern freedom, soul, immortality and God as eternal facts. For whence this sublime law of life unless we conceive mind, not blind chance, as the arbiter of things? Whence this constraining power within me, exerting itself to the uttermost to win my allegiance to the right, unless I am free to obey or disobey? How is not the very conception of morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain persuade man that because he is in the world he must needs be of it, and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power? We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel Kant.

And, finally, the awful question of the future Kant solves in the light of the same sublime principle. "That law," he urges, "which is the essential law binding humanity must one day be fulfilled in every one of us. There is a moral as well as a physical evolution which you try in vain to confine to the limits of the life which now is. There is no argument known to science justifying such an attempt." Kant believes in the Eternities, because every man born of woman is destined to be at last in absolute conformity with that law of everlasting righteousness which is for us what the law of balance is to the infinite worlds. All life, that which now is and whatever is to be in the hereafter, is simply a never-ending progress towards an ideal whose dignity is infinite. Hence the command of Jesus, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is also perfect," would be endorsed by Kant as in strict harmony with the philosophy which does not teach that the physical act of dissolution called death fixes the moral state of man for ever, but that all life, whatsoever it may be and wheresoever it may be lived, is but an approach towards a goal of infinite value, the will of man absolutely conformed to justice, or the moral law.

As Kepler described the philosopher and the scientist as "thinking again the thoughts of God," even so does the Kantian ethic aspire to absolute conformity of will with that Will which is supreme and eternal, the moral order itself personified. This is immortality: this is everlasting life, even as the Christian disciple and philosopher describes it: "This world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth for ever". The phenomenal world is a pageant, a scene. Only "the good will" (Kant's constant expression) in absolute harmony with the Supreme Will is real and eternal.



[1] Philosophical Classics, p. 85.



V.

THE ETHICAL DOCTRINE OF COMPENSATION.

I suppose there is no teaching more frequently insisted upon in the Old and in the New Testament as the truth of a judgment, now, or in the future, upon the misdeeds or sins of men. Let criticism prune and cut as it will, while it exhibits the deplorably low standard of morality once prevalent among the Hebrew peoples, and therefore prevalent among their Gods, their Elohim, Adonai and Jahveh, one thing, at least, is undeniable—that that which is recognised as immoral is reprobated and forthwith visited with condign punishment. Doubtless, acts which to us are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and the methods and practices he was supposed to favour. But what should be carefully noted is, that nothing is adjudged immoral but is forthwith sternly reprobated and condemned to a fitting retribution. "The way of transgressors is hard" was a conviction with the race. In the same way, the ethical note rings out in the New Testament, that right and wrong are eternally dissevered, sheep ever separated from goats; that virtue must be rewarded and vice be condemned and punished.

Now, this teaching of the judgment to come, the bare announcement of which by Paul filled Felix, the Roman governor, with such dire consternation, is the subject of which we propose to set forth the philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly developed age has surrounded it and discover the true raison d'etre of that doctrine which "the Bible Christian" confesses under the aspect of the "Last Judgment".

Now, I take it that no educated man believes in the drama, or rather, the panorama, of the "last judgment"; the vision of Jesus sitting in the clouds, with every human being that ever was or shall be gathered before his throne to hear definite sentence pronounced upon them. The mise-en-scene demands of course the presence of bodies, and I suppose it is needless to point out the dogma of the resurrection of the body, insisted upon by all the Christian Churches, is a blank impossibility. We may acquire other bodies in that unknown state, should we stand in need of such appurtenances—a fact which we may wholly disbelieve—but of one thing we may rest assured, that these identical bodies in which we die can by no possibility conceivable to us be brought back.

I once read a highly imaginative article in a religious magazine which attempted to solve the unsolvable by suggesting that after men's bodies had been buried in sufficient numbers, the whole soil of our planet would consist of nothing but the substance of the bodies of the dead, and that when that momentous epoch arrived, the Almighty would give the order for the sounding of the final trump, and the whole solid globe would be forthwith transmuted, or rather re-transmuted, into human bodies—in what condition it was not stated—for the countless myriads of "souls" ready to take possession of them. Probably, this pious romance was woven in the days before cremation, and as the next century will not be very old before we shall be compelled to resort to that method of disposal of the dead, at all events in our larger cities, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend how men of the future, to say nothing of the past, are going to be provided with their own bodies so as to put in an appearance at the great assize.

We may rightly wonder how men and women of the nineteenth century can still believe in the Churches and Chapels which teach such deplorable absurdities as the revelation of God, and how it happens that when religion appears upon the scene of their daily life, their common sense can so totally desert them. One need say nothing of the inadequacy of the judgment pronounced, the summary classification of the myriads of humanity as white sheep or black goats, or the character of the rewards and punishments allotted. The one redeeming point in the narrative is that whatever judgment is pronounced is decided, not on doctrinal grounds, about which no two of Christ's followers can be got to agree, but on ethical grounds, on character manifesting itself in public spirit and care for the unfortunate—the bruised reeds and smoking flax—of our communities. It would seem impossible to maintain after this final scene that creeds and faiths have any decisive influence on our status here or hereafter.

But though now seen to be no more than a variant upon the apocalyptic tradition and literature which represented that Jesus was to return speedily to earth and rule among his saints for a thousand years—a delusion which apparently possessed even the trained intellect of Paul, and subsequently led to the pseudo-Peter explaining that his fellow-Christians must not be in too great a hurry, because "a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years in the sight of the Lord"—it has done an incalculable amount of harm in the past. It has shut men's eyes to the awful fact of retribution, administered here and now, and prevented their realising any punishment other than the savage, barbarous and wholly vindictive punishment of torturing eternally by fire. It shuts men's minds to the operation of moral laws, to the fact that judgment is executed instantaneously upon the commission of wrong. It has, and it does, to the serious detriment of moral development, lead man to put off until late in life, sometimes to the very hour of death itself, restorative work which should have been undertaken immediately on the recognition or conviction of misdeeds. The notion that he is not to be called up for judgment until he is rendered incapable by death of doing any further mischief, has been a moral obstacle in the path of man, and therefore of the race, wholly beyond the power of calculation. Foolish priests once thought that by the invention of the dogma of hell they could terrorise men into morality, and so they preached their Divinity, the magnified copy of a fiend, who would have cheerfully created humanity out of nothing and damned them everlastingly, had not he himself, in the shape of his son, who is one in being with him, decided to appear upon earth and atone to himself for the mischief, which presumably he could have very well foreseen, perpetrated by man.

And what has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly inflicting on mankind, who could raise a protest against them? Shall man be juster than his God? This perverse Christian morality is responsible for the worst cruelties which have tormented the human race since the days of ecclesiastical domination. If the Deity is inhuman, why should man be otherwise? Therefore, inhuman tortures will be inflicted on prisoners. The rack and thumb-screw will be used to extract secrets. Men will be immured alive within narrow walls and allowed to perish by inches. The Austrian prisons in the northern Italian provinces will be so constructed that the miserable victim can neither sit nor lie down nor see the light of day. Floggings and scourgings will be universal, lettres de cachet an institution. Why not? Where the god has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The god does worse than all this. He keeps his victims alive for the sole purpose of glutting his ire and satiating his insatiable vengeance. Nay, things are so ordered that the very happiness of the elect is enhanced, not only by the knowledge, but by the sight, of the appalling, unavailing anguish of the lost, and we have seen such a philosopher as Aquinas representing the Deity as conducting the "elect" in troops and droves to the heavenly shores and giving them "a glimpse of hell" by way of stimulating their enjoyment of the celestial beatitude. Why not? I ask again. My only wonderment is how we ever got rid of it. Picture the world under the universal dominion of this foul superstition. It reigns on the thrones of kings, in the cabinets of statesmen, it is preached in the pulpits, taught in the schools, it is the earliest lesson that trembles on the lips of innocent children. The most ingenious, subtly contrived, widespread and all-pervading influence is especially created to propagate it everywhere in the shape of the Christian Church—a Divine institution, possessed of the keys of life and death, of heaven and hell—the sole representative of the Deity on earth. How, we ask, in wondering gratitude, did the world ever escape the tyranny of such superstition? This fact alone—this deliverance—is enough to make one believe that there is a "Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," that the course of human events is never wholly retrograde.

And, now, what is the truth about the "judgment to come"? What is the ethical equivalent of "hell fire"? In the first place, we refuse to believe in a "last judgment" because we know that judgment is not only pronounced but executed instantaneously, automatically, I would say, on the commission of wrong. There is no need to wait for the day of judgment or even for the hour of death. If a man has done wrong he sits condemned that self-same moment. Illo nocens se damnat quo peccat die. There is no need of God, angel or devil, to announce the fact or deliver judgment; the man has pronounced his own sentence, executed judgment on himself. This is, in essence, the ethical doctrine of compensation, that this universe is so woven, that the nature of things is such that "things are what they are, that the consequences of things will be what they will be," that we can no more hope to avert them by crying out for help to man, saint or God, than we can hope to hurl back the waves that dash upon the strand at flood tide. Our view is that moral laws are as irresistible as physical, and admit of no more dispensation than the everlasting order of Nature. One of our main reasons for repudiating the conception of the miraculous is that it involves a violation of eternal order and therefore of eternal reason, and if freely admitted in the physical, would doubtless be speedily introduced into the moral order, to the destruction of civilised society. We believe that this universe is "so magically woven" that it is absolutely impossible to escape the consequences of our deeds, and if the Buddhist doctrine of Karma represents that teaching, then we are among its most enthusiastic adherents, because it is absolutely true to fact.

But let us look at the matter more closely.[1]

Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double, one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." Thus—spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; action, rest; yea, nay. "All things are double, one against the other."

All the woes of existence arise from our deliberate resistance to the law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature. We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other, and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our unspeakable ennui. We would have the half, while Nature planned the whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse which can never die—an immense despair for which there is no relief.

Life is full of distressing illustrations of this ethical law. A man who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next, and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of compensation.

But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation, we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. "The soul says eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have power over things to its own individual ends."

Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand. You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract, and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.

Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see God omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction. We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have. "How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires," quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.

No "last judgment," then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should transgress his path, they would punish him.

This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the inspiration without which the world would never have known the Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin," while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of pleasure which concealed it." They are linked together inexorably, as cause and effect, and no god can dispense in this law, because the law itself is God.

Hence, there can be no such thing as "forgiveness of sin". An act once done is irreparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human passions, ready, at the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we recognise—oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have known—that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the universe to all time!

Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of hell and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history than that fear of hell fire never yet made man moral. It could not keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and its supreme pontiffs—numbers of them—even decent living men, to say nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;—an insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what will hold a man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment pronounced by himself directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.

And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not "against God," who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured by man's misdeeds, being wholly destitute of human passions and emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.

One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come. If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds of the Churches falsely proclaim—"the forgiveness of sin"—that one only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the anguish of an unavailing remorse!

Must this false teaching indeed go on for ever? Will it never dawn upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools, that God bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the Churches can pass you, will ever be able to efface.

How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures—quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal law—can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that board and thanked an Almighty God for the exceptional favours he had been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that—

All on earth he has made his own Floating in air or pent in stone, Will rive the hills, the sea will swim, And like his shadow follow him.



[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great "Essay on Compensation".



VI.

CONSCIENCE THE VOICE OF GOD AND THE VOICE OF MAN.

We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That, likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better illustration of this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral life of man.

In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting—in all the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned. Those were naturally the days of the "Divine right of kings," when all civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate utterance of God. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical sentiment of the hour.

Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as "a worm" and an outcast, or avowing himself "a miserable sinner" and a limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatural power began to be seriously curtailed. "The Divine right of kings" went its way with other archaisms into the limbo of oblivion, from which the reigning monarch in Prussia would appear to be vainly endeavouring to rescue it, while man began to realise that the causes of natural and human phenomena were to be sought in nature and in man. As a consequence of this, a new theory of conscience began to take shape, which was ultimately described by one of the boldest of later English philosophical writers, the late Professor Clifford, as "the voice of man commanding us to live for the right".[1]

In these definitions of conscience, as "the voice of God" and "the voice of man," we have an instance of propositions which in logic are called contraries. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, "all men are white" and "no men are white" are contraries, but they are both false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be pronounced on these two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks to determine.

But, before going any farther, we must get a clear idea of what we mean by conscience. In a general way, of course, we all know what is meant by the word: an appeal to conscience would be intelligible by every one. We understand it to be a faculty which decides on a definite course of action when alternatives of good and evil are before us. We look upon it as an instinct, magnetic in its power, incessantly prompting us towards the fulfilment of duty, and gravely reproaching us on its dereliction. We recognise it as the sweetest and most troublesome of visitants; sweetest when the peace unspeakable sinks into our souls, most troublesome when we have been guilty of a great betrayal. So delicate is that voice that nothing is easier than to stifle it; so clear is it that no one by any possibility can mistake it.

Thus, in general terms, we may describe conscience. Coming now more closely to a philosophical analysis of the conception, we shall find therein much enlightenment for the purposes of our present investigation. In the first place, the word is of comparatively late origin. It does not occur in the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament. Its earliest appearance is in the Book of Wisdom, the work of a Hellenistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels, except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to condemn—a history which, though profoundly in accord with the sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St. Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we may assume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised throughout the world.

But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We shall find etymology of great assistance in giving precision to our thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin, conscientia, knowledge with, or together. Now, scientia is the simple knowledge of things by the reason, while conscientia is the knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of one's selfhood—the realisation of the ichkeit des ego, as the very expressive German phrase has it, "the selfhood of the I". In English philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer consciousness, but conscience. Putting it technically, consciousness is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.

Nevertheless, it must be most carefully remembered that the two functions are performed by one and the same reason—immaterial and indivisible in us. Truly speaking, there is no real, but only a conceptual, distinction between the reason of a Darwin elaborating his famous law, realising his selfhood, and acknowledging his obligations to the eminent man—only less so than himself—who had simultaneously lighted on the great discovery of the age—the law of organic evolution. As Paul says of those manifold endowments of the earliest Christians, "A diversity of gifts and a diversity of graces, but in them all worketh the self-same spirit," so say we of the reason at the very heart of our being, the sole, self-sufficing explanation of the multitudinous phenomena of our mental life. Hence we arrive at a definition of conscience as "the practical dictate of the reason in us prescribing obedience to the good and avoidance of the evil". Two elements, therefore, are discernible in this definition: first, reason, as such, pointing out what is good and evil; and, secondly, reason, as conscience, ordaining that the good is to be done and the evil left undone—a distinction to be carefully borne in mind when the problem of conflicting consciences has to be faced; how it comes, for instance, that morality appears to differ in different countries, and even in the same individual at different periods of his life.

But of that nothing further need be said now, but we may immediately pass on to see in what sense conscience, thus explained, is, in the first place, to be accounted the voice of God.

Outside a philosophy avowedly atheist it seems difficult to understand how there can be any doubt that the eternal distinction between right and wrong betokens the presence in this world of men of a supreme power and a supreme mind. "How comes it," let us ask with Emerson, "that the universe is so constituted," that that which we instinctively recognise as good makes for the individual and the general welfare, and that which we must perforce reprobate as evil works uniformly disaster? We recognise that things are unalterably so ordered that by no possibility could lying, slander, malice and hatred be other than intrinsically evil, and their opposites be other than essentially good. But how is it that things are so ordered? Whence these uniformities of approbation and disapprobation? Is there any answer conceivable but that the power responsible for the world is a moral power? Whence is existence itself but from the subsistent source of all being? Whence is life but from one ever-lasting source? Whence is intelligence but from the world's Soul, which is the soul of men? And towering above being, above life and reason, is conscience, the supreme guide, the light enlightening every man that cometh into this world.

Luce intellettual, piena d'amore, Amor di vero ben pien di letizia, Letizia die trascende ogni dolzore.

What is this "light intellectual," this "love of the true," so unutterably blissful as to quiet all pain and sorrow, but the radiance of the eternal falling athwart the shadows of this lower life? What is this miraculous monitor—this "man within the breast," as the Stoics called it—but the very articulate utterance of the supreme Reason bidding man to live for the right? No great son of earth ever interpreted it otherwise. From the days when Socrates scattered "the sophist clan" in Athens, and forced men by the irresistible majesty of his own moral elevation to believe in a morality which was more than a string of rules sanctioned by convention; from the hour when he refused to escape from prison because his conscience bade him submit to die;—from the days of the sublime martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus, the noble school of the Stoics, down to the philosophic Titans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, with the glorious sage of Koenigsberg at their head, there has been but one answer to the question, What is conscience? Conscience, they proclaimed, is the voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other voice can we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to live by a moral law? We are Divine by nature, by what other law of life should we live?

Or, how are we to explain the appearance of so strange a visitant in a universe which is dominated by the "struggle for existence"? The intellectual difficulty of atheism is so insuperable that we hear of it no more from men of science. I think Mr. Spencer's speculations have given it the coup de grace. But difficult as is the question of the origin of the cosmos, far more so is that of conscience. On what principles are we to explain how a world, evolving itself mechanically, cycle after cycle, has eventually produced an element so utterly at variance with itself, an element which puts right before might, self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a volta face in nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes—in other words, so completely at variance are the law of conscience and the law of evolution—that only by the triumph of the former over the latter is progress possible in the world. Again, I ask, since conscience is not the voice of Nature, of what is conscience the voice and witness if not of one of whom it is written, "In the beginning was Reason; in the beginning was Mind"?[3]

But there is another aspect of the question, and we must now pass on to inquire how far conscience is also "the voice of man commanding us to live for the right". Quite at the beginning of this ethical movement we protested, as plainly as words would allow, our entire allegiance to the teachings of physical science, and our readiness to abandon any doctrine of ethical religion which is disproved by experimental research. So convinced are we of the absolute unity of truth, because with Plato we believe in the unity of its source in the Divine intelligence, that to us it is inconceivable that there should be any fundamental contradiction in the orders of the real and the ideal. Things seen and unseen, the passing and the eternal, both ultimately take their origin in the same source, the Infinite. No finite thing can be the ultimate explanation of the universe, because it itself requires explanation. Hence, whatever science has to tell us about conscience will be enthusiastically acclaimed by us as true equally with what we learn from the masters of the higher experience, the philosophers who break unto us the bread of life.

Now what has experimental science to say about the conscience? It does not say that it is the voice of God—a fact by no means calculated to disturb those who remember that physical investigation is not concerned with such speculations. Half the mischief and misunderstandings which occur over these border questions, which are, so to speak, under two jurisdictions, arise from our forgetting in what capacity and by what principles certain well-known scientific men have made pronouncements on matters such as conscience, morality and religion. There are two sides to them, the physical and the hyper-physical or metaphysical. And here it may not be amiss to offer a suggestion that one should mistrust that parrot cry so often heard from men who speak most confidently about that which they know least, that metaphysic is synonymous with unreality, or in plainer words, moonshine. A very little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience—and that is all the word metaphysic means—it would be absolutely impossible to formulate a single scientific generalisation. What is the very concept of law, or system, but a metaphysical idea? To cease to be metaphysical would be to cease to be rational, to have no higher or wider conceptions than those of a dog. Hence, like M. Jourdain, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, some of our most daring anti-metaphysicians have been philosophising by the very method they had in their ignorance so contemptuously denounced.

Therefore, when we hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the Socratic conception of conscience "is part of an obsolete form of speculation," we know precisely what judgment to pass upon their assertions. They are speaking, one and all, of the historical growth or natural evolution of that rational faculty in man which they, equally with their opponents, describe as the conscience. And keeping within those limits they are strictly accurate in what they say. Who is there that does not know that time was when the inhabitants of Europe were as destitute of moral instincts, and therefore of a conscience, as the Tonga islanders? Who does not know that man, instead of beginning at the top and tumbling headlong to the bottom, really began at the bottom and learnt everything by a very severe discipline in the hardest of all schools, that of experience? Certainly, we are ignorant of none of those things, and therefore readily assent to Mr. Spencer's teaching that conscience is not a fixed criterion of morality, but a faculty in a ceaseless state of transformation, "in a perpetual state of becoming," that its dicta are, in a certain sense, constantly changing and improving with the progress and development of the race. Certainly, as scientists and anthropologists, we should say precisely the same thing. We should recognise the developed conscience in man as obedient to the law of growth equally with his physical organisation, because we know of men now existent in whom the faculty is still in a very rudimentary state. Every advance in humanitarianism, in our treatment of men and animals, is evidence to us of the illimitable capacities of moral expansion in our nature, and therefore of the growth of conscience, or the moral sentiment.

But are we to conclude therefrom that conscience is nothing more than a product of organic evolution? It is a shallow philosophy, a surface system, indeed, which is content with such an estimate, and is only possible in a school of bald empiricism which imprisons man within the boundaries of his sense-experience, and resolves him into a string of feelings bound together, like a rope of sand, by nothing. The truth is, that Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain, Mr. Mill and the whole corps of experimental philosophers are confusing the reality with its outward manifestation or history. Indeed, by their principles they are constrained to do so. Once affirm that nothing beyond the reach of your sensory organs is trustworthy, and conscience must be, like the nervous system, the development of a shock or a thrill. But it has never apparently dawned upon these thinkers that the very distinguishing note of conscience, its compulsory power, its assumption of authority to command the obedience of the will and its capacity to torment the soul with an overmastering remorse—to make a man say, "my sin is greater than I can bear"—is left wholly unexplained and unaccounted for in the historical analysis with which they favour us. What we want to know is: Whence has conscience the strange, mysterious power to influence us even in the sanctuary of our thoughts; why does the wicked man flee when no one pursueth except that the sleepless eye of his own outraged conscience is upon him and he cannot tolerate its reproachful gaze? Nowhere do we feel the inadequacy of the sense-philosophy more piercingly than in this matter of conscience. It has cut the world in twain and treated it as a piece of mechanism and reduced man to the position of an automaton.

But the facts are too strong; Nature is too strong. Every time some splendid heroism, some complete self-surrender is made; every time some deed of moral enthusiasm thrills the pulses of the world, or some lonely man or woman succeeds in crushing some infamous desire; every time for the sake of the good, for the sake of the right alone, we resist "even unto blood," conscience is exalted and enthroned above the stars, lifted utterly out of the low and insignificant category of physical experiences in which they would vainly endeavour to imprison it.

The commanding voice is heard throughout the ages, and men will, men must, ask: Who is it—what is it that spoke? They will not be put off with the reply that all they hear is an echo of the past, reverberating throughout the race as the successive generations arise. Ah! but whence has it power to command me, even in the sanctuary of my deepest solitude, in the loneliness of my silent thoughts? No ancestral traditions, no shouts of blessing or curse of multitudes can influence me there. I am alone in the abysmal depths of my personality, solitary as though in a desert world, and yet the mysterious voice is heard, the solemn sense of obligation and duty makes itself felt. It bids me respect myself, my moral dignity, though no one be nigh; it bids me chase the phantoms of evil from my mind.

In vain do you attempt to evade its jurisdiction by pointing to the acknowledged facts that men form different estimates of their duties in different countries and in different ages. Conscience is not concerned with that. Such subordinate tasks as the formation of moral codes, the ascertainment of the conformity or nonconformity of certain precise acts with morality are the work of the reason. Conscience is no theoretical instructor. Far more than that, it is a practical commander. It speaks but one voice. Obey what you know to be right, for the right's sake alone. And conscience has never wavered in the inculcation of that precept. The reason of man has been constantly advancing, discovering the content of the moral law just as it has been discovering the content of the geometrical, mathematical or musical law; but conscience, like the polar star, has been pointing steadily in one direction, the direction of duty, without error, without failure. "An erring conscience," says the ethical master, "is a chimera."

We learn, thus, from the teaching of both schools that conscience is at once the voice of man, the accumulated and concentrated moral experience of the race, but still more the voice of the eternal Reason which is revealed to our wondering eyes in the true, the good and the beautiful. If "this universe in its meanest province is in very deed the star-domed city of God"; if "the glory of the One breaks through it all in every place," what are we to say of that which is higher than the stars, more radiant than the sun, diviner than all worlds—the conscience of man nobly conformed to the great obedience of the everlasting laws? What are we to say of lives such as those of Gotama, Socrates and Christ? Nothing. Like the psalmist of Israel, I am struck dumb in the presence of a vision so majestical. Deveni in altitudinem maris et silui: "I came unto the great deeps and I held my peace".



[1] See his well-known essays, "The Ethics of Belief" and "The Ethics of Religion".

[2] Prof. J. Seth, in his Study of Ethical Principles, concludes from Mr. Huxley's Romanes lecture that "agnosticism could scarcely have been the final resting place for such a mind".

[3] I have ventured to repeat here a portion of the argument set forth in the chapter on "Ethics and Theism".



VII.

PRIESTS AND PROPHETS.

One of the most striking characteristics of the ecclesiastic, as opposed to the religious mind, is its tendency to concentrate its attention upon detail to the exclusion of fundamental principles. We are assured that the same habit distinguishes the statesman from the party man, or mere politician. At any rate, we have had abundant evidence during the past fifty years—evidence which has been emphasised during the past year—that the love of detail, of all that comes under that washing of cups and platters, of first places and salutations in the market-place, resplendent raiment and broad phylacteries, which Jesus so summarily denounced in the official religion of his own time, is still a mark of the ecclesiastic temper in the England of to-day. If a man—even though that man be a pope—should question the validity of its "orders," volleys of sacerdotal refutation are fired from the press, the whole atmosphere is electric with the controversial charges such profanity provokes. But let a man proclaim that there is no such institution as "orders" at all, that true religion, that Christianity, as conceived by its founder, is destitute of ritual, priest and sacrifice, and everything is still as a Quakers' meeting. How is it that men will seriously devote their energies to repelling such side attacks as those directed against them by rival churches, while they totally neglect to satisfy an enlightened age as to the validity of the fundamental assumption on which their entire system reposes? The pope and the Eastern Churches may be serious rivals in the camp ecclesiastic, but what are our native pontiffs and priests to reply to men like Hatch, Jowett and Stanley, to say nothing of Martineau, who roundly proclaim that "orders," as understood by them, are nothing more nor less than a superstition? For instance, what would the patrons of the "mass in masquerade" answer to Stanley's direct and emphatic pronouncement: "In the beginning of Christianity there was no such institution as the clergy; it grew naturally out of the increasing needs of the community . . . the intellectual element in religion requires some one to express it, and this, in some form or other, will be the clergy"?[1] Surely if there were no "orders" in the beginning, then a priesthood was no creation of Jesus, his apostles were no priests, they created, therefore, no priests, and a priestly caste grew up as an intrusion in Christendom just as it arose in the religion of the holy Buddha in India, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to invade the severely simple religion of Mohammed.

The view which ethical religion takes of sacerdotalism is very well known, but it is essential to do more than merely repudiate the notion of priesthood as an integral portion of religion; our duty is also to possess ourselves of the facts of history and criticism so as to satisfy ourselves and others who may need such instruction, that sacerdotalism is not only not ethical, but is anti-Christian, and that the greatest anomaly the world presents to-day is that of the clergymen of the Eastern and Western Churches arrogating to themselves the possession of powers which the founder of their religion and his earliest followers not only never exercised, but of which they had not even a remote conception.

A singular interest has been added to this inquiry by the recently-revived controversy between two of the many Churches into which Christendom is divided on the highly debatable matter of Anglican orders. The said controversy had been in a state of suspended animation from the time of the Stuarts up to the Tractarian movement, when it was partially revived, and a fair crop of literature sprang up around it. It has been reserved, however, for our own days to witness its complete vivification under the auspices of the High Church societies and certain sagrestani among "the nobility and gentry" of our day. To the credit of the female sex, we hear of no ladies being prominently identified with the movement. Even Oxford, once "the home of lost causes and impossible ideals," concerns itself with these minutiae no more. Like the later pantheon of imperial Rome, it offers its impartial hospitality to representatives of every form of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The shadowy warfare is now waged, apparently, in the London press and magazines, in the bulls of popes and the responsions of archbishops. Of course, the renewed inquiry set on foot by the industry and temerity of Lords Halifax and Nelson—tanti nominis umbra surely, in this latter case, to engage itself in such a battle—could have but one ending, namely, the reiterated and emphasised condemnation of our national ecclesiastics as nothing better than mere laymen, and the renewed degradation of the officiating curate to the level of his neighbouring Nonconformist minister who celebrates "the Supper" and preaches in his coat.

The papal representatives in this country have published a rejoinder to the official reply of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which, if I may shelter myself behind the authority of the Times[2] reviewer, does not err on the side of dignity, moderation and scholarship. It is said to be jaunty, perky, off-hand, suggestive of "the smart evening journalist"—this last is very serious—and, worse than all, it is an appeal, not to theologians or scholars, nor even to thoughtful and instructed men, but "to the gallery".

Who the gallery in this particularly Divine comedy may be I really do not know. I strongly suspect that if the piece were put upon the boards—and everything is now dramatised, from the trials of Satan to the Dreyfus case—the gallery would be the emptiest department of the theatre. And this opinion I am pleased to see confirmed by the closing remarks of the review above noticed, which warns the Christian bishops and pastors of the present day that the comparative merits of one set of "orders" as opposed to those of another set have "little interest and not much meaning for nine Englishmen out of ten".

But what, I think, the average man would be interested to know is whether there be such things as "holy orders" at all. Very many of them are, in this matter, I believe, in the position of those interesting Asiatics who "knew not whether there be such a thing as a Holy Ghost," and I think it will be abundantly easy to show that the ignorance of the ordinary man as to the precise nature of "orders" was shared in also by our Asiatic friends whose existence is noticed in an early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We shall therefore proceed to show the groundlessness of the entire controversy from evidence which satisfactorily establishes that the authentic form of Christianity, as fixed by its founder and his followers for two centuries, admits of no such thing as a priesthood in the sense contemplated by the disputants whose wordy warfare has now, we understand, been closed for ever.

To begin, then, whence arose the idea of a priest? What is the meaning of the word? Etymologically, we may take it to be identical with the Saxon word preost, which again is doubtless, though it is not admitted on all hands, identical with the Greek presbys or elder. A priest, then, originally and literally, signified senior or elder, whether in the family or the State. How an elder came to be associated with religion was in this wise. Every philosopher and anthropologist has been constrained to admit the presence in man of an instinct of unity, impelling him not merely to society or intercourse with his fellows, but to communion with a power unseen. This instinct, as already defined in a former chapter, is religion. Now the initiatory development of this aboriginal instinct was very humble, and if we wish to know what our direct ancestors once were, we need only consult the record of anthropological research among such savages as the Fijians or Tonga Islanders. The shape assumed by religion amongst such people was most probably ancestor or ghost worship. The dead father or chieftain is still seen in the dreams of his children or people, and the mysteriousness of the new shape and presence he assumes excites the awe and reverence which is at the root of the religious habit. The chief becomes the tutelary deity or protector of his tribe, or locality over which he ruled. Other chieftains are added to him in course of time, and soon we have a veritable pantheon of gods, good and evil, whom it is necessary to placate by certain offices and functions, very much as it is necessary to covet the favour of powerful men on earth. Whose duty shall it be to perform such rites? Naturally, it falls to the head of the family and the head of the State. They are the born officers of religious functions, the father for his home circle, the chieftain for his clan or tribe. Thus Livy tells us that Numa, the Roman king, was accustomed to offer sacrifice, but that the increasing cares of State caused him to relinquish the office in favour of specially appointed individuals who were called Flamens, and Mr. McDonald,[3] in his account of the Blantyre negroes, informs us that during the temporary absence of a chief, it devolved upon his wife to take his place at the sacrificial altar. Numberless instances are supplied in such works as Tylor's, Lubbock's, and Spencer's Ecclesiastical Institutions, which go to show this primatial or pontifical authority resident in the chief of the State, and the transference of its offices to subordinate people, who gradually and naturally became an official body or caste called priests or elders, as representatives of heads of families, or of the tribe or State.[4] At any rate, however much interested people may be inclined to dispute the lowly origin of religion and worship, the indisputable fact remains that such worship and sacrifice goes on among aboriginal peoples at this very hour, and there is not one shred of evidence, beyond a mistaken prejudice, which goes to show that our religion had any other origin than that.

We may now enter on the further inquiry whether Christianity, meaning thereby the religion personally professed and practised by Jesus of Nazara, was a sacerdotal or sacrificial system in the sense already explained. Such an inquiry necessarily resolves itself into this further one, namely, whether there is any reliable evidence that the founder of the Christian religion was himself a priest, taught a sacerdotal doctrine, or exercised any sacerdotal functions.

Though he died a comparatively young man, if we may believe the gospel narrative, which makes him to have lived either to thirty-one or thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is set apart by the act of God, signified by some external rite or ceremony, whereby power is conferred to perform certain definite functions impossible to the ordinary man. He alone, in virtue of his consecration, can mediate between man and the Deity, can propitiate him for the sins of men, can forgive those sins, and mechanically communicate holiness by the adoption of a definite ceremony and the pronouncement of a precise formula. Nay, in virtue of his peculiar status, the priest is able to superinduce a physical sanctity in solid and liquid substances, like bread and wine, and quite independently of his own belief, or the belief of the bystanders, or even the recipients, cause those substances to be no longer what to every conceivable physical test they still continue to be, but the body and blood of a man who lived more than 1800 years ago. In a word, a ritual may be described as "a system of consecrated charms or spells, and the priest is the great magician who dispenses them".[5]

What we ask, then, is precisely this: Was Jesus a priest in this sense? Unhesitatingly and most emphatically we reply—and without any fear of serious attempt at refutation—that he was not, and that, in consequence, the whole scheme of sacerdotal religion as prevalent in the Roman and Oriental Christian Churches, and to a moderate extent in the Anglican Church, is entirely baseless, grounded, not on the institution of Jesus their reputed founder, but on an infantine superstition which the third century of Christianity took over from the Jewish and Pagan traditions which had preceded it. Hence the whole protracted controversy, which has set no end of theological hair on end, about the validity of these orders and the invalidity of those, is so much beating the air, because Christianity, as understood and instituted by Christ, knows no place, any more than Buddhism or Mohammedanism, for priest, rite or sacrament.

Let us proceed to offer some evidence for this statement. In the first place, the whole tenor of Christ's life was not that of the priest, but of something entirely different; Christ was a prophet. What is a prophet? We shall very imperfectly appreciate the character of the prophet if we look upon him as nothing more than an historian "for whom God has turned time round the other way," so that he reads the future as if it were the past. Most extraordinary instances of clairvoyance are brought to our notice in which things, eventually realised, turn out to have been previously known, but the clairvoyant is not the prophet. The prophet is the spirit representative of the Supreme Spirit before our own. He is the image—perfected by intercourse with the Unseen—of "the Invisible Goodness". He uses no rites, sacraments or symbols, for he is all that in himself. If his pure, lofty, ennobling life cannot impress the eternal upon the souls of men, then assuredly no bread, wine or oil, can do it.[6] Hence, we see, a prophet is born, not made. No consecration can make one any more than installing a scene painter in the studio of a Raphael could ensure a reproduction of a Transfiguration, or the Madonna di Foligno. And no desecration, no excommunication from church, chapel or sanhedrin can unmake him. The prophet is one of those royal beings who are kings by right Divine, aye and human too, for all fall down instinctively before him. It is the verdict of history that all that is most blessed we owe to the prophets—not to the priests—to Moses, Confucius, Chrishna, Buddha, Socrates, Zoroaster and Christ.

Now, surely no one can seriously question that the life of Christ as described in the gospel narrative is of a pronounced anti-sacerdotal type. He was not of the priestly family, no man laid hands upon him, he never exercised priestly functions. His teaching so directly tended to the disparagement of priesthood as such, that the official hierarchy of his country, quick to perceive it, compassed his death in the interest of their self-preservation. "What do we, for lo! the whole world has gone after him?" His first sermon was the announcement of a prophetic mission. In the synagogue of his own town, among the humble folk who had seen him grow from boyhood to youth and manhood, he made the announcement: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor". If he entered the stately courts of the temple, it was to teach rather than to worship, and never to sacrifice. At the close of a day's teaching, he retires to the hillside of Olivet, and feels the Great Presence in the night breeze upon his brow and in the heaven above him as deeply as within the walls of the "Holy Place". It is not, "Lo here, lo there!" for "the Kingdom of God is within you". A priest would have said the Divine Presence is upon the altar, but Christ discerns it always and everywhere. His teaching was almost entirely delivered under the canopy of heaven—on the mount of beatitudes, in a public street, in the market-place, from a fishing boat to crowds upon the strand, in a corn-field, or occasionally in some private dwelling-place. The only invective that broke the calm of his peaceful speech was directed against the ruling sacerdotal influence; he was emphatically a "Prophet of the Most High".

The word hiereus, or sacrificing priest, is never once applied to him in the Gospels, and only in one epistle, that to the Hebrews, and there its appearance is not unworthy of our notice. Christ is declared to be a hiereus, or priest, only after his removal from earth. It is stated that it is an office which did not, which could not have belonged to him while on earth—precisely the point we contend. But how is it that in this epistle he comes to be designated as a priest at all? It was probably due to the exigencies of controversy. The epistle must be looked upon as a polemical pamphlet directed against those Hebrews who refused to embrace the new reform and derided its absence of priest, sacrifice and altar. Conscious that Jesus left no priesthood behind him, that his teaching was anti-sacerdotal and non-sacramental, there was nothing for the writer but to suggest that the great prophet himself was the high priest, the solitary member of the caste in the new gospel, and that therewith men are to be satisfied, because more than compensated thereby for the absence of the altar and hierarchy of old. So we have here an unique instance of the exception which proves the rule. Once and once only is the founder of Christianity affirmed to be a priest, and then by an anonymous writer, in a production which the whole Western Church for centuries refused to acknowledge as inspired, and on examination it turns out that by the very nature of the priesthood ascribed to him, such an institution is no longer possible on earth; it is banished for ever into invisibility, and can have no longer any representatives amongst men.

In like manner we find no instance of any attempt on the part of Jesus to make his immediate followers priests. He called them "witnesses," bade them "preach" and "teach". If he told them to baptise, or to break bread in memory of him, we shall soon see that, in the first three centuries of Christian history, his words were emphatically not taken to mean that no one but they, or such as they, could perform these offices. That which men call "the apostolic succession," and to which some of them apparently attach supreme importance, is nothing but a chimera, positively unknown to Jesus or his apostles, and absolutely unintelligible to the Christian Church for more than 200 years. The most profound silence on the whole subject prevails during this period, in vivid contrast with the language held on the subject by subsequent writers. In the face of available, and even readily accessible evidence, it is impossible to maintain that, before the age of Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, who flourished about the middle of the third century, there was any such distinction between clergy and laity as the apostolic succession theory maintains to-day. The very names of the clergy, such as deacon, presbyter, and bishop, are lay terms, borrowed from civil not ecclesiastical life. A deacon is a domestic servant; a presbyter, an elder; and a bishop an overseer or bailiff; and in conformity with these names there was no office or function of the Church so exclusively proper to the clergy as not to be capable of performance also by the laity. And if this can be shown, what follows but that the whole conception of "holy orders" is an absolute innovation upon the original teaching of Jesus—a corruption fruitful in disorders, or rather disasters, of the most deplorable character, and at this very hour tending more than any other ascertainable cause to divide man from man, and perpetuate the mischief of religious dissension?

To begin with, then, preaching was indiscriminately permitted in the apostolic times and subsequently. This may be gathered freely from the Acts and Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter xiv. Moreover, one of the most interesting monuments of the second century is a homily delivered by a layman at Rome, a fragment of which had long been known as the second epistle of Clement,[7] and the remainder of which came to light in 1875 in two forms, a Greek MS. and a Syriac translation. Moreover, the Apostolical Constitutions, which are still later—going well into the second century—expressly contemplate preaching by a layman. Dr. Hatch does not hesitate to say that the earliest positive prohibitions of lay preaching were issued solely in the interests of ecclesiastical order, not because there was any inherent right in the priest to teach as opposed to the layman.

Next, in regard to baptism, there need be no hesitation in admitting the capacity of the layman to baptise, because the Church of Rome admits it to-day, nay, it admits that a Mohammedan, or even the heathen Chinaman—if indeed he be such—could lawfully and validly perform that function. This, I submit, is not to be construed as an act of liberality on the Church's part. It is simply the result of the impasse to which it would otherwise be brought by the grotesque teaching that the Deity would condemn everlastingly the soul of an unbaptised infant. This, according to Augustine, being the Christian religion, naturally some loophole had to be fabricated, because priests are not always at hand in moments of emergency, and consequently the validity of lay baptism had necessarily to be recognised.

But there is one office which the Anglican, no less than the Roman Church, would reserve to the priest, and that is the celebration of the Eucharistic Supper.[8] It is abundantly clear to historians that the root-source of the superstitious belief in orders is to be found in the Eucharist and the theories which sprang up in the third century concerning the elements. It cannot be doubted that previously to the age of Cyprian, the communion was held to be what its name designates—an holy assembly, a pledge of unity symbolised by the common partaking of bread and wine after the example of Christ. Now, it is clear from the Ignatian epistles, writings of the second century, whoever may have been their author, that the Christians of those days were accustomed to hold Eucharistic meetings other than those over which a presbyter or elder presided. The practice is indeed reproved by the writer, but in exceeding gentle tones. "Break one bread," says the writer; "be careful to have only one Eucharist"; "let that be the valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop or by some one commissioned by him".

It is surely positively inconceivable that Ignatius of Antioch, or whoever the author of these letters is, can have held the sacramental doctrine subsequently introduced and have used language of such mild remonstrance to the Asiatic Christians he addresses. What would the present occupant of the See of Antioch, of Lincoln, or of Rome say to a number of Christians who assembled together to-day, took bread and wine, and after repeating the Lord's prayer—for they did no more in the early centuries—proceeded to partake of it? Their holy horror is scarcely conceivable. And yet, these lay folk would be the true Christians, not their sacerdotal denunciators. Let us repeat, there was no office open to the priest which was not equally open to the layman. Merely considerations of order and procedure restricted ecclesiastical functions to a particular body or caste of men, and consequently the theory of the essential distinction between priest and layman is not a tenable one because it is none of Christ's making.[9]

It has been remarked that perverse conceptions of the Eucharist were responsible for the equally corrupt teaching about orders. This is the case. Previously to the third century, the Eucharist remained what it had ever been, "the breaking of bread," the commemorative meal. Then there came a change, and men began to read into it a sacrificial meaning and to interpret it as a mystical repetition of the death of Christ. From Cyprian this novel theology apparently passed to Augustine and Ambrose in the fourth century, and thenceforth it became dominant, though by no means universally so, until the eighth and ninth centuries. The rise of Athanasianism in the fourth century, and the abuse of the doctrine of incarnation by that bishop, reacted naturally in the matter of the Eucharist. Christ, who was proclaimed to be the solitary incarnation, the Deity hidden behind a veil of flesh, naturally paved the way for the Eucharist as a sacrament wherein the Deity is hid behind the veil of bread. The one incarnation is, as it were, the complement of the other. Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope to become like a God.

It would be just as easy to show that in the matter of church government and discipline everything was, in the early days, on a thoroughly democratic, or representative basis. Power, as in the England of to-day, is recognised to reside in the community, not exclusively in the presbyters. St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians recognises this in the matter of the removal of officers. The epistles of Clement and Polycarp recognise the same thing. Bishops are always elected by the people, and the net conclusion therefore is that no such thing as a hierarchy of ordained deacons, priests and bishops was known to Christ, to Paul, or the writers of the first two and a half centuries. The teaching and belief of those days was nonsacerdotal and non-sacramental, and nothing but a superstitious accretion overlaying the original truth can account for the spectacle which vast portions of the Christian world now present, as indeed do vast portions of the Buddhist world. The fate reserved for both these great prophets seems to be identical, the submergence of their pure and elevated ethical teaching beneath an accumulated mass of traditionary and ceremonial law; but here in the West, at all events, there appears to be a well-grounded hope that it is not altogether impossible to get back to Christ and his pure and wholesome teaching. Prophets have arisen in this past century who have far more influence than many priests, and there may be "some standing here" who will witness the close of the reign of the priest and the restoration of the dominion of the prophet.

The priests and scribes sat in the chair of Moses in the days of Christ, and that chair is overturned. No one knows where to look for it. Now we have another priest who sits in Peter's chair, a third who holds Augustine's seat, and a fourth and a fifth who can trace back their priestly ancestry in unbroken line to some era of superstition and decay. The same thing goes on in India and Ceylon, and in Thibet you have the Grand Lamas, to whom successively is united, by a sort of hypostatic union, the holy Spirit himself. Always and everywhere the shadow of the priest, the mystical, magical dispenser of the favours of heaven! We look to the days when religion shall be purified of such conceptions, when no one shall venture to stand between a man and his conscience, or claim to possess powers unattainable by other men, or pretend that the favour of heaven can be purchased by any other means than those indicated by the prophet of old and no less by the conscience of mankind—a life in accordance with righteousness, that is, a life in conformity with the moral law and the example of that supreme among the prophets of the race—Jesus who was called the Christ.



[1] Christian Institutions, p. 193.

[2] See Times, 5th February, 1898.

[3] Quoted in Spencer's Ecclesiastical Institutions.

[4] The appointment of Aaron by Moses, the leader of the Hebrew people, is the exact counterpart of the institution of the Flamens by Numa.

[5] Martineau, Studies of Christianity, p. 38.

[6] And, therefore, we note the inconsistency of the sacramentarian theory. It insists on moral goodness in the recipients and ministers of sacraments. But if the rite works of itself, its mechanical performance should be sufficient. But no; goodness is needed to secure any benefit therefrom; and this, of course, is the explanation of the alleged results of the sacraments. The moral goodness of the recipient has already secured the blessing before any rite has been administered.