The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform. Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585 B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel and a fiercely polemical husk—they both are full of the contrast between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place, Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii. 2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite injunctions—to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn (xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee secretly, saying, let us go and serve other gods, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9; xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One point here is particularly far-sighted—the severe watchfulness against all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.

The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon; and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and schematic—already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel reveals to us deathless truths—the responsibility of the individual soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel (chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch (xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history—in about 560 B.C., the Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests. The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism (at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such rules as are assumed by P throughout.

And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the all-reasonable God—its single parts good, its totality very good; and man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.

In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still, lies probably the composition of three religious works full, respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550 B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of our Book of Isaiah—a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews' proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C. Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii. 1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the Suffering Servant of Yahweh—the tenderest revelation of the Old Testament—apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560 B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law—to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job, in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably composed when Greek influences began—say in about 480 B.C., the year of the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.

Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of the Law of Moses—the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.

The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light were handed down to times again aglow with great—the greatest religious gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the circumstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities brought by Christianity.

In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between 163 and 165 B.C.) all earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii. 10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of a heightened life beyond death—though not yet for all (xii. 2). The noble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap. vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia, Greece (Alexander), and God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to 701—a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of God's Church and people, we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the Lord')—we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But, for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection—of the central importance for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its full, deathless articulation.

Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome. Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God never ceases from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to God'—this in spite of God's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet, Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of God'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat; it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of God'.[45] The majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel find here noble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed by Jesus Christ.

2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages of its development—Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.

The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or only single attestation; for this material springs from two original sources—a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses, probably Saints Peter and Matthew.

The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and assumes, as fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the accounts of Mark and Luke.

The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a profoundly important constituent of His life and teaching—impressively contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for those years of silent preparation.

The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages, divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate, sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation; they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's experience and outlook.

The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of God. But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience—the Fatherhood of God. In the second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by Jesus's other great experience—of Himself as the Son of Man. In the earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings, and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious, intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook—especially this also in the Parables of Immediate Expectation—as not present but future (Matt. xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64); not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).

To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father—for so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special to Matthew, 'Come unto Me—and my burthen is light', raise no grave difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are delivered unto Me by the Father—neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical perplexities.

I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience, 'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet' (Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11; xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22); indeed His whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29) entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of God. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys, admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a comprehensiveness unlike the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in suffering of St. Francis of Assisi.

The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x. 45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of Man'—His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific vocation—its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness, dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly interrelated—only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer and acceptance of the Crown.

As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived, accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His service—so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life—the visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the Christ.

The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul—the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially pneumatic manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members of the one Christian society and Church.

Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy, dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him. On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist—in both cases, the strict need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless coat, symbol of the Church's indivisible unity. The Universalism of this Gospel is not merely apparent: 'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of the world' (iv. 42)—this glorious teaching is traceable in many a passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews—in the Synoptists only the Pharisees; He is from above, they are from below; all those that came before Him were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world—'ye shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the commandment, designated here by Jesus as His own and as new, to 'love one another', is for and within the community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12; xiii. 34)—in contrast with the great double commandment of love proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already formulated in the Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and as directly applicable to every fellow-man—indeed, a schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of such perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).

Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict with Canaanite impurity; the Johannine writings take shape during the earlier battles of the long war with Gnosticism—the most terrible foe ever, so far, encountered by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open and fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon Knowing and the Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in an Eternal Present, the reception of truth and experience is not limited to Christ's earthly sojourn—'the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth who will abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the knowing and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who doeth the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ has a fold, and other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one Shepherd; indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one Church (so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism here is but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the great historical figure of Jesus, and of the most specifically religious of all facts—of the already overflowing operative existence, previous to all our action, of God, the Prevenient Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,' 'no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him'—a drawing which awakens a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44; iv. 14; vi. 35).

The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who, born a North African Roman (A.D. 354) and a convert from an impure life and Manichaeism, with its spatially extended God (A.D. 386), wrote his Confessions in 397, lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth, 410, composed his great work, The City of God, amidst the clear dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of his psychological analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God, precedest all past times by the height of Thine ever-present Eternity; and Thou exceedest all future times, since they are future, and, once they have come, will be past times. All thy years abide together, because they abide; but these our years will all be, only when they all will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One Day—not every day, but To-Day. This Thy To-Day is Eternity'.[46] The human soul, even in this life, has moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the great scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia.[47] And this our sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God, proceeds at bottom from Himself, immediately present in our lives; the succession, duration of man is sustained by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of ours does pass within Thee, since all these things' of our deeper experience 'have no means of passing unless, somehow, Thou dost contain them all'. 'Behold, Thou wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast with me, but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely that life which all men desire? Even those who only hope to be blessed would not, unless they in some manner already possessed the blessed life, desire to be blessed, as, in reality, it is most certain that they desire to be.'[48] Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the futility of the question as to what God was doing in Time before He created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures; it never existed of itself.[49]

And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented by St. Thomas Aquinas (A.D. 1225-74), in the one great question where this Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul apparently so largely derivative and abstractive, is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints Paul and Augustine with all their greater directness and intensity. We saw how the deepest originality of our Lord's teaching and temper consisted in His non-rigoristic earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from things temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the Second Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman world, had first to go, the great Germanic migrations had to be fully completed, the first Crusades had to pass, before—some twelve centuries after Nazareth and Calvary—Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic and promptly authoritative expression of this its root-peculiarity and power. No one has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural. The Supernatural is now recognized not only in the great complicated miracle of man's redemption from out of the world corrupted by original sin. But the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an autonomous principle of a logical, religious and ethical kind. The creature, even the perfect creature, is only Natural—is possessed of only natural laws and ends; God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature, above this creature's co-natural limitations, to God's own Supernature'. The distinction is no longer, as in the Ancient Church, between two kinds (respectively perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the distinction here is between Natural Law in general and Supernature generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness, is not yet the Christian Ethic. "Biblical" now means revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for the Bible represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development which moves through universal history and possesses various stages. The Decalogue is indeed present in the legislation of Christ, but as a stage preliminary to the specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the contrary, for the specifically Christian Moral Law is here the Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest and absolute, the entirely simple, Moral end—an end which contains the demand of the love of God in the stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial, contemplation) and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the active relating of all to God, the active interrelating of all in God, and the most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice for God). This Ethic, a mystical interpretation of the Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian Ethic'.[50]

Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State leaves off, the Church begins.

It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God. And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption. Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution, marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and, especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour, Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here.

3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially brought out by the Jewish Christian development.

Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars especially) and of Ancestors, and of a finely simple system of ethical rules for man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship closely resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought so fiercely in Israel; and the immemorial antiquity and still vigorous life of such a worship in China indicates impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And the Ethical Rules, and their very large observance, illustrate well how real can be the existence, and the goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World morality, even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural attraction or conviction.

Buddhism, in its original form, consisted neither in the Wheel of Reincarnation alone, nor in Nirvana alone, but precisely in the combination of the two; for that ceaseless flux of reincarnation was there felt with such horror, that the Nirvana—the condition in which that flux is abolished—was hailed as a blessed release. The judgement as to the facts—that all human experience is of sheer, boundless change—was doubtless excessive; but the value-judgement—that if life be such pure shiftingness, then the cessation of life is the one end for man to work and pray for—was assuredly the authentic cry of the human soul when fully normal and awake. This position thus strikingly confirms the whole Jewish and Christian persistent search for permanence in change—for a Simultaneity, the support of our succession.

And Mohammedanism, both in its striking achievements and in its marked limitations, indeed also in the presentations of it by its own spokesmen, appears as a religion primarily not of a special pervasive spirit and of large, variously applicable maxims, but as one of precise, entirely immutable rules. Thus we find here something not all unlike, but mostly still more rigid than, the post-Exilic Jewish religion—something doubtless useful for certain times and races, but which could not expand and adapt itself to indefinite varieties of growths and peoples without losing that interior unity and self-identity so essential to all living and powerful religion.

III

Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic order, a short allocation and estimate of the facts in past and present religion which mainly concern the question of Religion and Progress.

We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art, Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice—can be based in anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook, combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and Goodness—of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.

The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations—sincerity, conscientiousness, docility—are not, even collectively, already Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these dispositions on our part, objective facts and living Reality can reach us—and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first, through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or keen exclusiveness of feeling have—pace Lord Acton—saved for mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of priceless worth—as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and, where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective realities, the constraints of past ages—constraints which now, in any case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.

This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality, but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction, Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion, this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen, or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660), Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily, simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and imperfect, which environ such a soul.

A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must, conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's Unmoving Action, in Humanism, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no difficulty—at least as regards the Time-element—in the doctrine of Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise at all—it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great Know Thyself, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work The World and the Individual, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures. And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook, really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love, souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.

The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls. We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate, and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or short, is certainly nearest to the truth—as regards the form and vehicle of the experience.

The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our Religious Accessions, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals, each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole) growing content and worth—hence the Science of Religion. Yet such Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.

The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have been more or less filled up, amongst the peoples concerned, by varyingly vigorous and valuable attempts to articulate and systematize, to apply in practice, and rightly to place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to elude, to deflect, or directly to combat them, or some of their interpretations or applications. Now fairly steady improvement is possible, desirable, and largely actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents and details of these Accessions; in the philosophical articulation of their doctrinal and evidential content; in the finer understanding and wider application of their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy (both as to firmness and comprehensiveness) of the institutional organs and incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in the Knowledge of Religion.

The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds had become too largely other-worldly—had lost a sufficient interest in this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from what looked like a prison-house—religion. Yet through all these violent oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer—of Confucius and Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously, prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life—to life in its deepest depths.

Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God, the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to become,—He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even in the Cross.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

I. 1. Oswold Kuelpe, The Philosophy of the Present in Germany, English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, 3s. 6d. net.

2. J. McKeller Stewart, A Critical Exposition of Bergon's Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1913, 6s. net.

II. 1. R. H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. London: A. & C. Black, 1899, 10s. 6d. net.

2. Ernest T. Scott, The Fourth Gospel. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1906, 6s. net.

III. 1. Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction against Science. English translation. Macmillan, 1914, 12s. net.

2. F. C. Schiller, Humanism, Macmillan, 1903, 7s. 6d. net.

3. C. C. J. Webb, Group Theories of Religion and the Individual, Allen and Unwin, 1916, 5s. net.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] The Idealistic Reaction against Science, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6, 7.

[33] A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze, 1895, p. 104.

[34] Aliotta, op. cit., pp. 89, 187.

[35] Encyl. Brit., 'Psychology,' 11th ed., p. 577.

[36] Ed. 1898, p. 90.

[37] Discours sur la Methode, 1637, IVe Partie.

[38] Aliotta, op. cit., p. 408.

[39] Ed. 1893, vol. ii, p. 759.

[40] First Principles, 6th ed., 1900, vol. i, p. 67.

[41] Article, 'Moses,' in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 1913.

[42] Ed. Mangey, vol. i, pp. 44, 49.

[43] Ibid., pp. 80-179.

[44] Ibid., pp. 308, 427.

[45] Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.

[46] Conf. x, 13, 2.

[47] Autumn, 387.

[48] Conf. 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.

[49] Conf. xi, 13.

[50] Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, 1912, pp. 263-5.

[51] De Fide, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.

[52] Cognosci Te Stesso, 1912, pp. 144-7.



VI

MORAL PROGRESS

L. P. JACKS

From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course I gather that every lecturer on the programme is dealing with the question of moral progress. This is inevitable. Each lecturer must show that the particular sort of progress he is dealing with is real or genuine progress, and this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a significant fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It shows that progress, as it is studied throughout the course, is not progress in the abstract, whatever that may mean, but progress for us constituted as we are; and since our constitution is essentially moral all progress that we can recognize as such must be moral also. Science, Industry, Government, might all claim progress on their own ground and in their own nature, but this would not prove progress as we understand the word, unless it could be shown further that these things contribute to human betterment in the highest sense of the word. Their progress might conceivably involve our regress.

To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as a process that has begun, and is going on, and will be continued—that is one thing, and it is my own position. To believe that this progress is far advanced is another thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer to the beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to accustom ourselves to this thought. Many of our despairs, lamentations, and pessimisms are disappointments which arise from our extravagant notions of the degree of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric, cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but not the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery. A good rule for optimists would be this: 'Believe in moral progress, but do not believe in too much of it.' I think there would be more optimists in the world, more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science, nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought. That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality, than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out of us—to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of moral advance—and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the future.

And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions which so many of us have entertained? I think they arise from our habit of letting ourselves be guided by words rather than by realities, by what men are saying rather than by what they are doing, by what teachers are teaching than by what learners are learning. If you take your stand in the realm of words, of doctrines, of theories, of philosophies, of books, preachings, and uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case for a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But if you ask how much of this has been learnt by mankind at large, and learnt in such a way as to issue in practice, you get a different story. We have attached too much importance to the first story and too little to the second. There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence. This false emphasis is especially prominent in the education controversy which is now going on—and the question of moral progress, by the way, is the question of education in the widest and highest sense of the term. People seem quite content so long as they can get the right thing taught. They don't always see that unless the right thing is taught by the right people and in the right way it will not be learnt. Now education is ultimately a question of what is being learnt, not of what is being taught. The process of learning is a very curious and complicated one, and it often happens that what goes in at the teacher's end comes out at the pupil's end in a wholly different form and with a wholly different value; and we have the highest authority for believing that what really counts is not so much that which goeth into a man but that which cometh out of him. That applies to all education—especially moral education. So that if you argue from what has gone into the human race in the way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what has come out of the human race in the meantime. What has been taught is not what has been learnt. It has suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question wholly one of learning. There is the further question of remembering. I believe that a candid examination of the facts would convince us that the human race has proved itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always retained what it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find that out? The only accents Emerson knew of were those which the world happened to have remembered. If any had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary, whose precise office I am not able to define, called 'the Lord's Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to Moral Progress if we had in modern life a People's Remembrancer. His place is occupied to some extent by the study of history, and for that reason one could wish for the sake of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal. For my own part I seldom open a book of history without recovering what for me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost. Next to conceit I reckon forgetfulness as the greatest enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard Kipling had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem—

Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget.

Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress is that we have thought too much of the abstract State and too little of the actual States now in being. Our devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us to overlook the fact that many actual States represent a form of morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called morality at all. In their relations with one another they display qualities which would disgrace the brutes. And the worst of it is that at times these States drag down to their own low level the morality of the individuals belonging to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite decent Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing one another to pieces like mad dogs, a thing they would never dream of doing as between man and man, and which they do only because they are in the grip of forces alien to their own nature. We have overestimated Progress by thinking only of what is happening inside each of the States. We have forgotten to consider the bearing of the States to one another, which remains on a level lower than that of individuals.

The impression has gone abroad that the nations of the world need to take only one step from the position where they now stand to accomplish the final unity of all mankind. Taking any one of these nations—our own for example—we can trace the steps by which the warring elements within it have become reconciled, until finally there has emerged that vast unitary corporation—the British Empire. So with all the others. What more is required therefore than one step further in the same direction, to join up all the States into a single world State. But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the unity of mankind as needing only one step more. It is not so easy as all that. When you study the process by which unity has been brought about in the various European communities you find that motives of conquest and corresponding motives of defence have had a great deal to do with it. Germany, for example, was built up and now holds together as a fighting unit. Whether Germany and the other States would still maintain their cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there were no longer any enemy States to be considered.

But what do we mean by Progress?

Progress may be defined as that process by which a thing advances from a less to a more complete state of itself. Now whether this process is a desirable one or not obviously depends on the nature of the thing which is progressing. Take the largest and most inclusive of all things—the whole world. And now suppose philosophy to have proved that the world, the whole world, is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself—which as a matter of fact is what the doctrine of evolution claims to have proved. Ought I to rejoice in this discovery? Will it give me satisfaction? That clearly depends on the nature of the world. If I am antecedently assured that the world is good, I shall naturally rejoice on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself. But if the nature of the world is evil, what reason can I possibly have for rejoicing in its evolution? Assuming the world to be evil in its essential nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the matter, would certainly give my vote against its being allowed to advance from a less to a more complete state of itself. The less such a world progresses the easier it will be for moral beings to live in it. Our interest lies in its remaining as undeveloped as possible.

Obvious as this seems there are some evolutionists who take a rather different view. They seem to think that any sort of world, no matter what its nature might be, would ultimately become a good world if it were allowed to develop its nature far enough. It is just the fact of its continually becoming more of itself that makes it good. But this would compel us to abandon our definition that progress is the advance of a thing from a less to a more complete state of itself. For if itself were a bad self to begin with all such advance of itself would only make it worse. It is possible that an essentially bad man like Iago might be converted into a good one, but not by advancing from a less to a more complete state of himself as he originally was—unless indeed we change the hypothesis and suppose that he was not essentially bad to begin with. So with the world at large. Our nature being what it is, namely moral, we must first be convinced that the world is in principle good before we can derive the least satisfaction from knowing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself. The alternative doctrine makes a breach in the doctrine of progress which is inconsistent with its original form. A thing develops by retaining its essential nature—that is the original form. But a bad world which develops into a good one doesn't retain its essential nature. There comes a point somewhere when the next step of progress can be achieved only by the thing dropping its original nature—a point at which the thing is no longer becoming more of its former self, which was bad, but is ceasing to be its former self altogether and becoming something else, which is good.

Let us apply this to progress in three specific directions—Science, the Mechanical Arts, and Government.

We find that the progress of science has enormously increased man's power over the forces of nature. Is it a good thing that man's power over the forces of nature should be increased? That surely depends on the manner in which this power is used, and this depends again on the moral nature of man. When we observe, as we may truly observe, especially at the present time, that of all the single applications which man has made of science, the most extensive and perhaps the most efficient is that of devising implements for destroying his brother man, it is at least permissible to raise the question whether the progress of science has contributed on the whole to the progress of humanity. Had it not been for the progress of science, which has enormously increased the wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out, it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and property we are now witnessing—such that, within a space of two years, about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions wounded, and wealth destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand millions sterling—though some say it is very much more. Science taught us to make this wealth: science has also taught us how to destroy it. When one thinks of how much of this is attributable to the progress of science, I say it is permissible to raise the question whether man is a being who can safely be entrusted with that control over the forces of nature which science gives him. What if he uses this power, as he plainly can do, for his own undoing? To ask this, as we can hardly help asking, is to transfer the question of scientific progress into the sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction of the human race.

Take the mechanical arts. The chief effects of progress in the mechanical arts have been an enormous increase in the material wealth of mankind, and, partly consequent upon this, a parallel growth of population in the industrial countries of the world. It is by no means clear that either of these things constitutes a definite step in human progress. Consider the growth of population—the immense increase in the total bulk and volume of the human race. Whether this constitutes a clear gain to humanity obviously cannot be answered without reference to moral considerations. To increase the arithmetical quantity of life in the world can be counted a gain only if the general tendencies of life are in the right direction. If they are in the wrong direction, then the more lives there are to yield to these tendencies the less reason has the moralist to be satisfied with what is happening. No one, so far as I know, has ever seriously maintained that the end and aim of progress is to increase the number of human beings up to the limit which the planet is able to support; though some doctrines if pressed to their conclusion would lead to that, notably the doctrine that all morality rests ultimately on the instinct for the preservation and the reproduction of life. We have first to be convinced that the human race is not on the wrong road before we can look with complacency on the increase of its numbers. We may note in this connexion that mankind possesses no sort of collective control over its own mass or volume. The mass or total number of lives involved is determined by forces which are not subject to the unitary direction of any existing human will either individual or collective. This applies not only to the human race as a whole, but to particular communities. Their growth is unregulated. They just come to be what they are in point of size. This fact seems to me a very important one to bear in mind when we talk of the progress of science giving us control over the forces of nature. So far no state, no government, no community has won any effective control over that group of the forces of nature which determine the total size of the community in question. It is an aspect of human destiny which appears to be left to chance; and yet when we consider what it means, is there any aspect of human destiny on which such tremendous consequences depend? And ought we not to consider this before claiming, as we so often claim, that the progress of science has given us control of the forces of nature? It is strange that this point has not been more considered, especially by thinkers who are fond of the word 'humanity'—'the good of humanity'—or the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Humanity has an arithmetical or quantitative side, and the good of humanity surely depends, to some extent, on how much humanity there is. I can imagine many things which might be good for a Greek city state of 10,000 souls which would not be good, or not good in the same sense, for a community of 100,000,000 souls. Surely it needs no reasoning to prove that our power to do our duty to others is affected by the number of others to whom duty has to be done—it makes a difference where there are 10,000 of men or 100,000,000. Similarly with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. What is the greatest number? A great deal that has been said about this would not have been said if we had considered that the greatest number itself is left at the disposal of forces outside the present scope of our own will. Even the proposal to sell our goods and give the proceeds to the poor would surely be affected, from the moral point of view, by the number of the poor who were to receive the distribution. Were this so small that the poor would get five pounds apiece it would be one question; were it so large that they would receive a halfpenny apiece it would be another question. Thus we may conclude that the progress of the mechanical arts with the consequent increase in the bulk of the human race has not solved the problem of moral progress, but only placed that problem in a new and more perplexing context. A similar conclusion would meet us if we were to consider the parallel increase of the wealth of the world. The moral question is not about the amount of wealth the world possesses, but about the way men spend it and the use they make of it. Industrially speaking, the human race has made its fortune during the last hundred years. But has it made up its mind what to do with the fortune? And has its mind been made up in the right way? To raise these questions is to see that progress from the economic point of view may be the reverse of progress from the moral. But I shall not further enlarge upon this—the theme being too familiar.

The third question which relates itself to moral progress is that of Government. Now Government, I need hardly say, is not an end in itself. It is a device which man has set up to help him in attaining the true end of his life. To make up our minds how we ought to be governed is therefore impossible unless we have previously made up our minds how we ought to live. What might be a good government for a people whose end is industrial success might be a very bad one for a people who had some other end in view. Well, then, are we well governed at the present time? Are we better governed than we were? Has progress taken place in this department? Plainly we cannot answer these questions unless we have chosen our end in life and are morally satisfied with it. In the history of modern states we discover a tendency, more strongly marked in some quarters than in others, towards that form of democracy which is called responsible self-government. Government of the people, for the people, by the people. The people are going to govern themselves. But they may do so in a thousand different ways—each of which has a different moral value. A people may go wrong just as fatally in governing itself as in being governed by some external authority. I confess that nothing I can learn from the history of government entirely reassures me on this point. I see everywhere progress towards organization, but then one is bound to ask on what ulterior end is this organization directed? I see everywhere a growing subordination of the individual to the State. This may or may not be a very good thing. What kind of State is it to which the individual is becoming subordinated? There are great differences among them—some seem to me, one in particular at the present time, thoroughly bad, and I cannot see that the individual gains morally by being subordinated to such a State—at least if he gains in one direction he loses more in another.

Even the social unity which Governments are capable of achieving must not be too hastily translated into moral progress. We are entitled to ask several questions before the one can be equated with the other. To begin with, do men know what they want to achieve by their unified life? And if they do know what they want, have we not still the right to criticize its moral value and say 'this is right' or this is wrong? Should the time ever come when the common will of mankind should get itself expressed by the decrees of a universal democracy, would moral criticism be at an end so far as the said decrees were concerned? For my part I cannot see that it would. Perhaps it were truer to say that only then would moral criticism effectively begin. As things now are, we are prevented from criticizing the common will because none of us knows what exactly the common will demands. But if it could get itself expressed and defined by the decrees of a perfect democracy we should know. Those decrees would reveal the human community to itself, and it is possible that the revelation would not be altogether agreeable to our moral sense. We might then discover that the common will is capable of being grossly immoral. So far it has been impossible for us to make this discovery because no organ exists for expressing the common will on the human scale, and even those which express it on the national scale are not perfect. I am far from saying the discovery would be made; but I know of no line of argument which rules it out as impossible. Meanwhile we are scarcely justified in regarding the common will as necessarily moral until we know more than we do of what precisely it is that the common will aims at and intends to achieve. To back the common will through thick and thin, as some of our philosophers seem disposed to do, is a dangerous speculation—it might perhaps be described as putting your money on a dark horse.

This leads me to say a word concerning a phrase which has been much in use of late—the Collective Wisdom of Mankind, or the Collective Wisdom of the State. Progress is sometimes defined as a gradual approach to a state of things where this collective wisdom rules the course of events. And collective wisdom is sometimes represented as vastly wiser than that possessed by any individual, even the wisest.

Now if this really is so it seems pretty obvious that, when the collective wisdom speaks, no individual can have the right of appeal. What are you, what am I, that either of us should set up our private intelligence against the intelligence of forty million of our fellow citizens? That surely would be a preposterous claim. The collective wisdom must know best: at least it knows much better than you or I.

But is the collective wisdom of the State so immensely superior to that of the individual, and of necessity so? Have we any means of bringing the matter to the test? It is extremely difficult to do so. Not until we make the experiment do we find how rare are the occasions of which we can say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community fairly and fully expressed itself. Acts of Parliament are not good examples. They usually represent not the collective wisdom of the whole community, but the wisdom of the majority after it has been checked, modified, and perhaps nullified by the opposing wisdom of an almost equal minority. Take as an example the history of the Irish Question. How difficult it is to put one's finger on any moment in that tangled story and say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community knew what it wanted to do and did it! So with almost everything else.

Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom of the State I suppose that the moment when we are most likely to find it in action is the moment when one State has dealings with another State. That surely is a fair test. If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show its existence and measure when they confront one another as States—when State calls to State across the great deeps of international policy. What should we say of any State which claimed collective wisdom only when dealing with its own individual members—with you and me—but dropped the claim when the question was one of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly endowed? This we should say is a very dubious claim.

Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied? The present war provides the answer. The war arose out of a type of quarrel which, had it occurred between half a dozen individuals of average intelligence, would have been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse, in twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure of the collective wisdom of such States as at present exist in this world? Does it not suggest that they have little faculty of reasonable intercourse with one another? And when you say that of any being, or any collection of beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of intelligence? It is literally true that these States do not understand one another. Thus we are driven back upon a plain alternative; either the States do not represent collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet. In either case we must be very cautious in our use of the phrase. We must not infer moral progress from the reign of collective wisdom until we are assured that collective wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees assume it to be.

About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this. Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and, at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that since the world began no moral progress has taken place he would thereby show his latent belief in moral progress. For no man would take the trouble to deny moral progress unless he believed that the world would in some way be made better by his denial. He would not even trouble to come to a private conclusion in the matter unless he believed that his private conclusion was something to the good. In that sense perhaps we may say that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any belief is that it remains indispensable to the life we have to live. But the appeal to experience would not prove it—and for this reason. A progressive world is a world which not only makes gains, but keeps its gains when they are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become a fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress, if you admit the possibility that the world might hereafter retreat from the position it had won. That possibility you could never rule out—except by an appeal to faith. A world which attained the goal and then lost it would be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral progress, than one which never attained the goal at all. The doctrine that the gains of morality can never be lost is widely held; but it does not rest on a philosophic or a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot infer an infinite conclusion from finite data—and in this case the conclusion is infinite and the data are finite. They are not only finite but various: some pointing one way, some another.

Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to any objective standard, such as the amount of happiness existing in the world at successive dates. Suppose you were able to show that, up to date, the amount of happiness in the world has shown a steady increase until it has reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose that you were transferred to another planet where the conditions were the exact opposite: where the inhabitants ages ago started with the happiness we now possess, and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they are no happier than the human race was at the first stage of its career. Now add together the totals of happiness for both your worlds, the ascending world which starts with the minimum and ends with the maximum, the declining world which starts with the maximum and ends with the minimum. The grand totals in both cases are exactly the same. So far as the total result is concerned, the declining world has just as much to show for itself as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one world would be worth as much as the other.

And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is not the same. The ascending is worth a lot more than the descending. Why? I leave you with that conundrum. Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral Progress.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Book III, ch. 3.

Lecky, History of European Morals, ch. 1.

Spencer, Data of Ethics, ch. 13 to 14.



VII

PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT

A. E. ZIMMERN

When I was asked to speak to you on the subject of Progress in Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject on which I have reflected a good deal. But when I came to think over what I should say, I saw that you had asked me for the impossible. For what is Government? I do not know whether there are any here for whom Government means no more than a policeman, or a ballot-box, or a list of office-holders. The days of such shallow views are surely over. Government is the work of ordering the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers all the activities of men as members of a community—social, industrial, and religious as well as political in the narrower sense. It is concerned, as the ancients had it, with 'that which is public or common', what the Greeks called [Greek: to koinon] and the Romans res publica. The Old English translation of these classical terms is 'The Commonwealth' or Common Weal; and I do not see that we can do better than adopt that word, with its richness of traditional meaning and its happy association of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern minds, of Wealth and Welfare.