It is, however, a very striking and significant fact, that the very great majority of mankind who have thought about these questions at all, while acknowledging the existence of divine beings and their influence in the government of the world, have sought for the spring and sanction of duty in something above and beyond the gods. The religions of Brahmanism and of Buddhism, and the moral system of Confucius, have together ruled over more than two-thirds of the human race during the historic period; and in all of these the moral sense is regarded as arising indeed out of a universal principle, but not as personified in any conscious being. This vast body of dissent might well, it should seem, make us ask if there is anything unsatisfying in the theory which represents the voice of conscience as the voice of a god.

Although, as I have said, the idea of an external conscious being is unavoidably suggested by the moral sense, yet, if this idea should be found untrue, it does not follow that nature has been fooling us. The idea is not in the facts, but in our inference from the facts. A mirror unavoidably suggests the idea of a room behind it; but it is not our eyes that deceive us, it is only the inference we draw from their testimony. Further consideration may lead to a different inference of far greater practical value.

Now, whether or no it be reasonable and satisfying to the conscience, it cannot be doubted that theistic belief is a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be doubted, at least, by many of us in this generation, who either profess it now, or received it in our childhood and have parted from it since with such searching trouble as only cradle-faiths can cause. We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead. Our children, it may be hoped, will know that sorrow only by the reflex light of a wondering compassion. But to say that theistic belief is a comfort and a solace, and to say that it is the crown or coping of morality, these are different things.

For in what way shall belief in God strengthen my sense of duty? He is a great one working for the right. But I already know so many, and I know these so well. His righteousness is unfathomable; it transcends all ideals. But I have not yet fathomed the goodness of living men whom I know; still less of those who have lived, and whom I know. And the goodness of all these is a striving for something better; now it is not the goal, but the striving for it, that matters to me. The essence of their goodness is the losing of the individual self in another and a wider self; but God cannot do this; his goodness must be something different. He is infinitely great and powerful, and he lives for ever. I do not understand this mensuration of goodness by foot-pounds and seconds and cubic miles.

A little field-mouse, which busies itself in the hedge, and does not mind my company, is more to me than the longest ichthyosaurus that ever lived, even if he lived a thousand years. When we look at a starry sky, the spectacle whose awfulness Kant compared with that of the moral sense, does it help out our poetic emotion to reflect that these specks are really very very big, and very very hot, and very very far away? Their heat and their bigness oppress us; we should like them to be taken still further away, the great blazing lumps. But when we think of the unseen planets that surround them, of the wonders of life, of reason, of love that may dwell therein, then indeed there is something sublime in the sight. Fitness and kinship; these are the truly great things for us, not force and massiveness and length of days.

Length of days, said the old Rabbi, is measured not by their number, but by the work that is done in them. We are all to be swept away in the final ruin of the earth. The thought of that ending is a sad thought; there is no use in trying to deny this. But it has nothing to do with right and wrong; it belongs to another subject. Like All-father Odin, we must ride out gaily to do battle with the wolf of doom, even if there be no Balder to come back and continue our work. At any rate the right will have been done; and the past is safer than all storehouses.

The conclusion of the matter is that belief in God and in a future life is a source of refined and elevated pleasure to those who can hold it. But the foregoing of a refined and elevated pleasure, because it appears that we have no right to indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce as its consequence, a decline of morality.

3

There is another theory of the facts of the moral sense set forth in the succeeding discourse, and this seems to me to be the true one. The voice of conscience is the voice of our Father Man who is within us; the accumulated instinct of the race is poured into each one of us, and overflows us, as if the ocean were poured into a cup. Our evidence for this explanation is that the cause assigned is a vera causa, it undoubtedly exists; there is no perhaps about that. And those who have tried tell us that it is sufficient; the explanation, like the fact, covers the whole voluntary field.' The lightest and the gravest action may be consciously done in and for Man. And the sympathetic aspect of nature is explained to us in the same way. In so far as our conception of nature is akin to our minds that conceive it, Man made it; and Man made us, with the necessity to conceive it in this way.

6

Schopenhauer. There is a most remarkable article on the 'Natural History of Morals' in the North British Review, Dec. 1867.

♦ For an admirable exposition of the doctrine of the social origin of our concep tions, see Professor Croom Robertson's paper, 'How we come by our Knowledge,' in the first number of this Review.

I do not, however, suppose that morality would practically gain much from the wide acceptance of true views about its nature, except in a way which I shall presently suggest. I neither admit the moral influence of theism in the past, nor look forward to the moral influence of humanism in the future. Virtue is a habit, not a sentiment or an -ism. The doctrine of total depravity seems to have been succeeded by a doctrine of partial depravity, according to which there is hope for human affairs, but still men cannot go straight unless some tremendous all-embracing theory has a finger in the pie. Theories are most important and excellent things when they help us to see the matter as it really is, and so to judge what is the right thing to do in regard to it. They are the guides of action, but not the springs of it. Now the spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set to work by the practice of comradeship. The union of men in a common effort for a common object-band-work, if I may venture to translate co-operation into English-this is, and always has been, the true school of character. Except in times of severe struggle for national existence, the practice of virtue by masses of men has always been coincident with municipal freedom, and with the vigour of such unions as are not large enough to take from each man his conscious share in the work and in the direction of it.

What really affects morality is not religious belief, but a practice which, in some times and places, is thought to be religious-namely, the practice of submitting human life to clerical control. The apparently destructive tendency of modern times, which arouses fear and the foreboding of evil in the minds of many of the best of men, seems to me to be not mainly an intellectual movement. It has its intellectual side, but that side is the least important, and touches comparatively few souls. The true core of it is a firm resolve of men to know the right at first hand, which has grown out of the strong impulse given to the moral sense by political freedom. Such a resolve is a necessary condition to the existence of a pure and noble theism like that of the third discourse, which learns what God is like by thinking of man's love for man. Although that doctrine has been prefigured and led up to for many ages by the best teaching of Englishmen, and-what is far more important-by the best practice of Englishmen, yet it cannot be accepted on a large scale without what will seem to many a decline of religious belief. For assuredly if men learn the nature of God from the moral sense of man, they cannot go on believing the doctrines of popular theology. Such change of belief is of small account in itself, for any consequences it can bring about; but it is of vast importance as a symptom of the increasing power and clearness of the sense of duty.

On the other hand there is one decline of religious belief," inseparable from a revolution in human conduct, which would indeed be a frightful disaster to mankind. A revival of any form of sacer

dotal Christianity would be a matter of practice and not a matter of theory. The system which sapped the foundations of patriotism in the old world; which well nigh eradicated the sense of intellectual honesty, and seriously weakened the habit of truth-speaking; which lowered men's reverence for the marriage-bond by placing its sanctions in a realm outside of nature instead of in the common life of men, and by the institutions of monasticism and a celibate clergy; which stunted the moral sense of the nations by putting a priest between every man and his conscience; this system, if it should ever return to power, must be expected to produce worse evils than those which it has worked in the past. The house which it once made desolate has been partially swept and garnished by the free play gained for the natural goodness of men. It would come back accompanied by social diseases perhaps worse than itself, and the wreck of civilised Europe would be darker than the darkest of past ages.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. III.-MAY 1877.

MONTENEGRO.

THEY rose to where their sovran eagle sails,

They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,

And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years, Great Tsernogora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

VOL. I.-No. 3.

BB