Some ten or twelve years ago a certain young woman, then fresh from the
hands of an esteemed but erratic professor of English literature, wrote
a novel the plot of which was roughly as follows. A college graduate
suddenly finds himself the inheritor of a shoe factory in a New England
town. Filled with the benevolent ideas absorbed in the academic
contemplation of economics, he undertakes to introduce profit-sharing
with his employees and otherwise to conduct his business for the benefit
of the community. So far, good. But hard times follow, and his
competitors by lowering wages and reducing labour are able to undersell
him. Now there is in his control a considerable sum of money which a
widow had entrusted to his father to invest for her, and the question
arises whether he shall shut down his mills and inflict suffering upon
his men, or shall divert this trust fund to his business and so try to
tide over the period of stress. He yields to his sympathies and
virtually embezzles the trust fund; but fails nevertheless, and with his
own loss brings ruin upon the widow. The story was called The Burden of
Christopher, with the implication that the hero was a bearer of Christ
in his misfortune, and the author indicates pretty clearly her sentiment
that in surrendering his personal integrity for the expected good of his
working people he was following the higher of two conflicting codes of
ethics.
The book no doubt has gone its own way to the "limbo large and
broad," where the heroes of ancient fiction wander with
Embrios and idiots, eremites and friars;
but it made a lasting impression on one reader at least as the first
popular presentation to come under his notice of a theory which now
confronts him wherever he turns his eyes. There has, in fact, been an
astonishing divulgation in the past decade of what is called, with
magnificent audacity, the New Morality.
Perhaps the most honoured teacher of this code is the mistress of
Hull House, who by her devoted life and her services to the people of
Chicago in various times of need has won the right to speak with a
certain authority for the striving generation of the day. And in one of
her books, the Newer Ideals of Peace, Miss Addams tells of an actual
occurrence and infers a moral which points in the same direction as the
novel of Christopher. A family of five children is left motherless. The
father, a drunkard, disappears, and the household is left to the care of
a feeble old grandmother. Thereupon work is found for the oldest boy, "a
fine, manly little fellow" of twelve, who feels keenly "his obligation
to care for the family." But after a time he becomes "listless and
indifferent," and at sixteen turns to professional tramping. "It was
through such bitter lessons as these," observes Miss Addams, "we learned
that good intentions and the charitable impulse do not always work for
righteousness." As the story is told there is a plain implication that
to find work for a boy under such circumstances is "cruel and
disastrous" (her own comment), and that society, and not his own nature,
was responsible for his relapse. One would suppose that scarcely an
honest workman, or prosperous merchant, or successful professional man
had ever taken up the burden of a family in youth or childhood.
Doubtless hardships and waste often come from the exigencies of life,
but there is not a single word in Miss Addams' account to indicate that
she has felt the need of developing in the future citizen a
sensitiveness to the peculiar duties that will confront him, or has
reflected on the evil that might have been done the boy if he had been
relieved of his natural obligations and supported by society. "Our
democracy," as she says with approval, "is making inroads upon the
family, the oldest of human institutions."
This is not an isolated case in Miss Addams' works, nor does it
in any wise misrepresent her. In another book, The Spirit of Youth and
the City Streets, the thesis is maintained and reiterated, that crime is
for the most part merely the result of repressing a wholesome "love for
excitement" and "desire for adventure." In the year 1909 "there were
arrested and brought into court [in Chicago] fifteen thousand young
people under the age of twenty, who had failed to keep even the common
law of the land. Most of these young people had broken the law in their
blundering efforts to find adventure." The inference to be drawn here
and throughout the book is that one need only relieve the youth of the
land from the necessity of "assuming responsibility prematurely,"
affording them meanwhile abundant amusement, and the instincts of
lawlessness and the pursuit of criminal pleasure will vanish, or almost
vanish, of themselves - as if there were no Harry Thaws and the sons of
the rich were all virtuous.
But it must not be supposed that Hull House occupies a place of lonely
isolation as the fountain of these ideas. From every self-authorized
centre of civic virtue in which a type-writer is at work, the stream
proceeds. The very presses groan, as we used to say when those machines
were still in the mythological stage, at their labour of supplying the
world with the new intellectual pabulum. At this moment there lies
before the writer of this essay a pile of books, all recently published,
which are devoted more or less specifically to the subject, and from all
of which, if he had courage to go through them, he might cull abundant
examples and quotations. He was, indeed, about to enter this "hollow
cave, amid the thickest woods," when, an unvaliant knight, he heard the
warning of the lady Una:
Yea but (quoth she) the perill of this place
I better wot then you, though now too late
To wish you backe returne with foule disgrace,
Yet wisedome warnes, whilest foot is in the gate,
To stay the steppe, ere forced to retrate.
We have in fact to deal with the consummation of a long and deep-seated
revolution, and there is no better way to understand the true character
of the movement than by turning aside a moment to glance at its
historical sources. This attempt to find some basis of conduct to take
the place of the older conception of personal integrity, as we see it
exemplified in the works of Miss Jane Addams and a host of other modern
writers, is in fact only one aspect of the slow drift from medieval
religion to humanitarianism. For a thousand years and well into the
second thousand the ethical feeling of Christian Europe may be said to
have taken its colour from the saying, "What shall it profit a man, if
he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" - which in
extreme cases was interpreted as if it read, If he reform the whole
world; and on the other, kindred saying, "Sell all that thou hast and
distribute unto the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven, and
come, follow me" - in which the command of charity was held to be not so
much for the benefit of the poor as for the liberation of the giver's
own soul from the powers of this world. Such was the law, and its
binding force was confirmed by the conception of a final day of wrath
when the souls of men should stand before a merciless tribunal and be
judged to everlasting joy or everlasting torment. The vivid reality of
the fear that haunted men, at least in their moments of reflection, may
be understood from the horrors of such a picture as Michael Angelo's
Last Judgment, or from the meditations of one of the most genial of
English cavaliers. In his little treatise on Man in Darkness -
appropriate title - Henry Vaughan puts the frank question to himself:
And what madness then is it, for the enjoying of one minute's
pleasure for the satisfaction of our sensual corrupt appetite, to lie
forever in a bed of burning brass, in the lake of eternal and
unquenchable fire? "Suppose," saith the same writer [Drexelius], "that
this whole globe of earth were nothing else but a huge mass or mountain
of sand, and that a little wren came but once in every thousand years to
fetch away but one grain of that huge heap; what an innumerable number
of years would be spent before that world of sand could be so fetched
away! And yet, alas! when the damned have lain in that fiery lake so
many years as all those would amount to, they are no nearer coming out
than the first hour they entered in."
No doubt practice and precept were at variance then, as to a certain
extent they are at all times, and there were many texts in the Bible
which might be taken to mitigate the harsher commands; but such in its
purest, highest form was the law, and in the more sensitive minds tints
conception of the soul naked before a judging God must have created a
tremendous anxiety. Morality was obedience and integrity; it scorned the
world for an ideal of inner righteousness; it created a sense of
individual responsibility for every word and deed; and, say what we
will, there is something magnificent in this contempt for the reckoning
of other men beside that eternal fame which
...lives and speaks aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
But there was also in this law something repellent and even
monstrous. Who has not shuddered with amazement at the inscription which
Dante set over the portal of Hell: E 'L PRIMO AMORE? Was it Love that
prepared those winding coils of torture to enclose for endless time the
vast majority of mankind? Was it even justice to make the everlasting
doom of a soul depend on its grasp of truth in these few years spent in
a world of shadows and illusions? There is something repulsively
irrational in the notion of an unchanging eternity suspended on the
action in a moment of time - ex hoc momento pendet æternitas. It should
seem to be unthinkable, if it had not actually been thought. As a matter
of fact the rigour and crudity of this doctrine had been mitigated in
the Middle Ages by the interposition between man and God of the very
human institution of the Church, with its substitution of temporal
penances and pardons and an interposed Purgatory in place of the
terrible paradox of irrevocable judgment. It remained for the
Reformation, and particularly for the Calvinistic Puritans, to tear away
those veils of compromise and bring man face to face with the awful
abstraction he had created. The result was for a while a great hardening
and strengthening of character, salutary indeed after what may be called
the almost hypocritical compromise of Catholicism; but in the end human
nature could not endure the rigidity of its own logic, and in revolting
turned not to another compromise but to questioning the very hypothesis
of its faith.
The inevitable reaction from the intolerable logic of the
Protestants was Deism, in which God was stript altogether of his
judicial and moral attributes and reduced to a kind of immanent,
all-benevolent force in nature. "But now comes a modern Sage," says
Warburton of Bolingbroke, "...who tells us 'that they made the Basis
of Religion far too wide; that men have no further concern with GOD than
TO BELIEVE THAT HE IS, which his physical attributes make fully
manifest; but, that he is a rewarder of them who diligently seek him,
Religion doth not require us to believe, since this depends on God's
MORAL ATTRIBUTES, of which we have no conception.'" But the deistic
position was manifestly untenable, for it left no place for the
undeniable existence of evil in this world and life. From the
unaccountable distribution of wrong and suffering the divine had argued
the certainty of adjustment in a future state; the deist had flown in
the face of facts by retaining the belief in a benevolent Providence
while taking from it the power of supernatural retribution; the atheist
was more logical, he denied the existence of Providence altogether and
turned the universe over to chance or blind law. Such was the progress
of thought from Baxter to Bolingbroke and from Bolingbroke to Hume.
The positive consequences of this evolution are written large in the
literature of the eighteenth century. With the idea of an avenging deity
and a supernatural test there disappeared also the sense of deep
personal responsibility the very notion of a radical and fundamental
difference between good and evil was lost. The evil that is apparent in
character comes to be regarded merely as the result of the restraining
and thwarting institutions of society as these exist - why, no one can
explain. Envy and jealousy and greed and the sheer lust of power, all
those traits which were summed up in the single Greek word pleonexia,
the desire to have more, are not inherent in the human heart, but are
artificially introduced by property and a false civilization. Change
these institutions or release the individual entirely from restrictions,
and his nature will recoil spontaneously to its natural state of virtue.
He needs only follow the impulse of his instinctive emotions to be sound
and good. And as a man feels of himself, so he feels of others. There is
no real distinction between the good and the evil, but all are naturally
good and the superficial variations we see are caused by the greater or
less freedom of development. Hence we should condemn no man even as we
do not condemn ourselves. There is no place for sharp judgment, and the
laws which impose penalties and restrictions and set up false
discriminations between the innocent and the criminal are subject to
suspicion and should be made as flexible as possible. In place of
judgment we are to regard all mankind with sympathy; a sort of emotional
solidarity becomes the one great virtue, in which are included, or
rather sunk, all the law and the prophets.
It was the great work of the eighteenth century, beginning in England
and developing in France, to formulate this change and indoctrinate with
it the mind of the unthinking masses. Here is not the place to follow
the development in detail, and those who care to see its outcome may be
referred to the keen and unjustly neglected chapters on the philosophes
in La Harpe's Lycée. To those, indeed, who are acquainted with the
philosophical writings that preceded and introduced the French
Revolution, the epithet "new" as it is attached to our present-day
morality may seem a bit presumptuous; for it would be difficult to find
a single fundamental idea in current literature on this subject which
could not be closely paralleled by a quotation from Rousseau, or
Diderot, or Helvétius, or one of their compeers. Thus, in our exaltation
of sympathy above judgment and of the unrestrained emotions generally as
the final rule of character, we are but following Diderot's philosophy
of the heart: "Les passions amorties dégradent les hommes
extraordinaires"; and when we read in Ellen Key and a host of other
feminist liberators the apotheosis of love as higher than any divine or
human obligations, we are but meeting again with Toussaint's religion a
little disguised: "On aime de même Dieu et sa maîtresse." Our revolt
from constitutional law as a power imposed by the slower reflection of
men upon their own immediate desires and opinions is essentially the
same as the restlessness consecrated by the French économistes in the
phrase, "le despotisme légal." And, to return whence we began, the
economics of Hull House flow only too easily from Helvétius' definition
of virtue as "le desir du bien public," and from his more specific
statement: "The integrity which is related to an individual or to a
small society is not the true integrity; integrity considered in
relation to the public is the only kind that really deserves and
generally obtains the name."
Miss Addams herself has been disturbed by these reminiscences. Thus she
quotes from one of the older humanitarians a characteristic saying: "The
love of those whom a man does not know is quite as elemental a sentiment
as the love of those whom a man does know," and repudiates it as vague
and unpractical beside the New Morality. She ought to know, and may be
right; yet it is not easy to see wherein her own ethics are any less
vague when she deplores the act of a boy who goes to work for his
starving grandmother because in doing so he is unfitting himself for
future service to society. And as for effectiveness, it might seem that
the French Revolution was a practical result fairly equivalent in
magnitude to what has been achieved by our college settlements. But Miss
Addams is by no means peculiar in this assumption of originality.
Nothing is more notable in the humanitarian literature of the day than
the feeling that our own age is severed from the past and opens an
entirely new epoch in history. "The race has now crossed the great
divide of human history!" exclaims an hysterical doctor of divinity in a
book just published. "The tendency of the long past has been toward
diversity, that of the longer future will be toward oneness. The change
in this stream of tendency is not a temporary deviation from its
age-long course - a new bend in the river. It is an actual reversal of
the current, which beyond a peradventure will prove permanent." To this
ecstatic watcher the sudden reversal took place at no remote date, but
yesterday; and by a thousand other watchers the same miracle is
vociferously heralded. Beyond a peradventure! Not a little of this
flattering assumption is due to the blind and passionate hope of the
human heart clamouring against the voice of experience. So many prophets
before now have cried out, looking at the ever-flowing current of time,
and having faith in some Thessalian magic:
Cessavere vices rerum.
...Amnisque cucurrit
Non qua pronus erat.
So often the world has been disappointed; but at last we have seen -
beyond a peradventure. If the vicissitudes of fate have not ceased, yet
at least we have learned to look with complacency on the very law of
mutation from which the eyes of men had hitherto turned away in
bewildered horror, at last the stream has turned back upon its sources,
and change itself is carrying us no longer towards diversity, but
towards the consummation of a divine oneness.
But it would equally be an error to insist too dogmatically on
the continuity of the present-day movement with that of the eighteenth
century; for one generation is never quite as another. We must not
forget that for a hundred years or thereabout there was a partial
reaction against the doctrines of the philosophes, during which time the
terrors of the Revolution lay like a warning nightmare in the
imagination of the more thoughtful men. A hundred years is a long period
for the memory to bridge, particularly in a time when the historical
sense has been weakened. Superficially, too, the application of the
theory is in some respects different from what it was; the law of social
sympathy has been developed into different conceptions of socialism, and
we have devised fresh schemes for giving efficacy to the immediate will
of the people. Even deeper is the change that has come over the attitude
of religious organizations towards the movement. In the age of the
Revolution the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, was still strongly
entrenched in the old beliefs and offered a violent resistance to the
substitutions of humanitarianism for responsibility to the priest and to
God. Now this last barrier has been almost swept away. Indeed, not the
least remarkable feature of this literature is the number of clergymen
who are contributing to it, with their constant appeal to the New
Morality as the test of faith. Open one of these books before us - let
us take The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life, for the promise of
its title - and you will be pretty likely to come upon such a passage as
this: "Faith's fellowship with Jesus is one with the realization of our
fellowship in humanity"; or on another page: "If the fundamental of the
true philosophy cannot be found by common men, what advantage in any
man's finding it? If life's secret, direction, and power . . . is not
attainable by the lowliest, then a man of this age, living in the social
passion of our time, is forced to be indifferent to that which would be
the monopoly of a few gifted souls." If such a social passion means
anything, it means the reconstruction of life to the level of the
gutter. It is the modern sham righteousness which would have called from
Jesus the same utter scorn as that which he poured upon the Pharisaical
cant of his own day. Yet it is not in religious books alone that you
will meet with this sort of irreligion. For one sermon you will hear on
the obligation of the individual soul to its maker and judge, and on the
need of personal regeneration and the beauty of holiness, you will hear
a score on the relation of a man to his fellows and on the virtue of
social sympathy. In effect, the first and great commandment, "Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with
all thy mind," has been almost forgotten for the second, "Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself." Worship in the temple is no longer a
call to contrition and repentance, but an organized flattery of our
human nature, and the theological seminary is fast becoming a special
school for investigating poverty and spreading agnosticism. In this
sense, or degree, that humanitarianism is no longer opposed by organized
religion, but has itself usurped the place of the Church, the New
Morality may really justify its name.
What are the results of this glorification of humanity? What does the
New Morality mean in life and conduct? Well, of such matters it is wise
to speak cautiously. The actual morals of an age are an extremely
complicated and elusive network of facts, and it is only too easy to
generalize from incomplete observation. On the other hand we must guard
against allowing ourselves to be deceived by the fallacy everywhere
heard, that, because the preacher has always, even from the remotest
record of Egypt, bewailed his own times as degenerate, therefore no age
has fallen off in morality from its predecessor. Such an argument is a
complete non-sequitur; there have been periods of degeneration, and
there may yet be. As for our own age, only a fool would dogmatize; we
can only balance and surmise. And in the first place a certain good must
almost certainly be placed to the credit of humanitarianism. It has
softened us and made us quicker to respond to the sufferings of others;
the direct and frightful cruelty that runs through the annals of history
like a crimson line has been largely eliminated from civilization, and
with it a good deal of the brutality of human nature. We sometimes hear
the present age compared with the later Roman Republic and the Empire,
and in some respects speciously, but the callousness of the greater
Romans to human misery and their hardness are almost unthinkable to-day.
Consider a sentence or two from Appian: "The head and hand of Cicero
were suspended for a long time from the rostra in the forum where
formerly he had been accustomed to make public speeches, and more people
came together to behold this spectacle than had previously come to
listen to him. It is said that even at his meals Antony placed the head
of Cicero before his table, until he became satiated with the horrid
sight." Such an episode scarcely stands out from the hideous story of
the Civil Wars; to the modern reader it brings a feeling almost of
physical sickness. So much we seem to have gained, and the change in
this respect even from our own seventeenth century shows that the credit
is due in no small part to the general trend of humanitarianism.
But in other directions the progress is not so clear. Statistics
are always treacherous witnesses, but so far as we can believe them and
interpret them we can draw no comfort from the prevalence of crime and
prostitution and divorce and insanity and suicide. At least, whatever
may be the cause of this inner canker of society, our social passion
seems to be powerless to cure it. Some might even argue that the
preaching of any doctrine which minimizes personal responsibility is
likely to increase the evil. Certainly a teacher who, like Miss Jane
Addams, virtually attributes the lawless and criminal acts of our city
hoodlums to a wholesome desire of adventure which the laws unrighteously
repress, would appear to be encouraging the destructive and sensual
proclivities which are too common in human nature, young and old. Nor
are the ways of honesty made clear by a well-known humanitarian judge of
Denver, who refused to punish a boy for stealing a Sunday-School
teacher's pocketbook, for the two good reasons, as his honour explained
in a public address, "that the boy was not responsible, and, secondly,
that there were bigger thieves in the pews upstairs." So, too, a
respectable woman of New York who asks whether it may not be a greater
wrong for a girl to submit to the slavery of low wages than to sell
herself in the street, is manifestly not helping the tempted to resist.
She is even doing what she can with her words to confuse the very bounds
of moral and physical evil.
There is, in fact, a terrible confusion hidden in the New
Morality, an ulcerous evil that is ever working inward. Sympathy,
creating the desire for even-handed justice, is in itself an excellent
motive of conduct, and the stronger it grows, the better the world shall
be. But sympathy, spoken with the word "social" prefixed, as it commonly
is on the platforms of the day, begins to take on a dangerous
connotation. And "social sympathy" erected into a theory which leaves
out of account the responsibility of the individual and seeks to throw
the blame of evil on the laws and on society, though it may effect
desirable reforms here and there in institutions, is bound to leave the
individual weakened in his powers of resistance against the temptations
which can never be eliminated from human life. The whole effect of
calling sympathy justice and putting it in the place of judgment is to
relax the fibre of character and nourish the passions at the expense of
reason and the will. And undoubtedly the conviction is every day gaining
ground among cool observers of our life that the manners and morals of
the people are beginning to suffer from this relaxation in many
insidious ways apart from acts which come into the cognizance of the
courts. The sensuality of the prevailing music and dancing, the plays
that stir the country as organs of moral regeneration, the exaggeration
of sex in the clothing seen in the street, are but symptoms more or less
ominous to our mind as we do or do not connect them with the regnant
theory of ethics. And in the end this form of social sympathy may itself
quite conceivably bring back the brutality and cruelty from which it
seems to have delivered us. The Roman who gloated over the head of his
and the people's enemy lived two thousand years ago, and we think such
bloodthirstiness is no longer possible in public life. Yet not much more
than a century ago the preaching of social sympathy could send a Lebon
and his kind over France with an insatiable lust for killing,
complicated with Sadism, while in Paris the leader of the government of
the most civilized country of Europe was justifying such a regime on the
pious principle that, "when the sovereign people exercises its power, we
can only bow before it; in all it does all is virtue and truth, and no
excess, error, or crime is possible." The animal is not dead within us,
but only asleep. If you think he has been really conquered, read what he
has been doing in Congo and to the Putumayo Indians, or among the
redeemers of the Balkan States. Or if you wish to get a glimpse of what
he may yet do under the spur of social sympathy, consider the callous
indifference shown by the labour unions to the revelation, if it
deserves the name, of the system of dynamiting and murder employed in
the service of "class-consciousness." These things are to be taken into
account, not as bugbears, for society at large is no doubt sound at
heart and will arouse itself at last against its false teachers, but as
symptoms to warn and prepare.*
[*All this was written and printed, I need scarcely say, before the
outbreak of the European war. I should not to-day refer to the Congo and
the Putumayo Indians for the savagery underlying civilization.]
To some few the only way out of what seems a state of moral
blindness is through a return to an acknowledgment of the responsibility
of the individual soul to its maker and inflexible judge. They may be
right. Who can tell what reversal of belief may lie before us or what
religious revolution may be preparing in the heart of infidelity? But
for the present, at least, that supernatural control has lost its
general efficacy and even from the pulpit has only a slight and
intermittent appeal. Nor does such a loss appear without its
compensations when we consider the harshness of medieval theology or the
obliquities of superstition that seem to be inherent in the purest of
religions. Meanwhile, the troubled individual, whatever his scepticism
may be, need not be withheld from confirming his moral faith by turning
from the perverted doctrine of the "Enlightenment" and from its
recrudescence in modern humanitarianism to a larger and higher
philosophy. For there is a faith which existed long before the
materialism of the eighteenth century and before the crude earlier
anthropomorphism, and which persisted unchanged, though often
half-concealed, through those ages and still persists as a kind of
shamefast inheritance of truth. It is not necessary to go to ancient
books to recover that faith. Let a man cease for a moment to look so
strenuously upon what is right for his neighbours. Let him shut out the
voices of the world and disregard the stream of informing books which
pour upon him from the modern press, as the "floud of poyson" was spewed
upon Spenser's Knight from "Errours den":
Her fruitful cursed spawne of serpents small.
Let him retire into himself, and in the silence of such recollection
examine his own motives and the sources of his self-approval and
discontent. He will discover there in that dialogue with himself, if his
abstraction is complete and sincere, that his nature is not simple and
single, but dual, and the consequences to him in his judgment of life
and in his conduct will be of incalculable importance. He will learn,
with a conviction which no science or philosophy falsely so-called can
shake, that beside the passions and wandering desires and blind impulses
and the cravings for pleasure and the prod of sensations there is
something within him and a part of him, rather in some way his truer
self, which controls and checks and knows and pronounces judgment,
unmoved amid all motion, unchanged amid continual change, of everlasting
validity above the shifting valuations of the moment. He may not be able
to express this insight in terms that will satisfy his own reason or
will convince others, but if his insight is true he will not waver in
loyalty to it, though he may sin against it times without number in
spoken word and impulsive deed. Rather, his loyalty will be confirmed by
experience. For he will discover that there is a happiness of the soul
which is not the same as the pleasure of fulfilled desires, whether
these be for good or for ill, a happiness which is not dependent upon
the results of this or that choice among our desires, but upon the very
act itself of choice and self-control, and which grows with the habit of
staying the throng of begetting end conflicting impulses always until
the judicial fiat has been pronounced. It is thus that happiness is the
final test of morality, bringing with it a sense of responsibility to
the supernatural command within the soul of the man himself, as binding
as the laws of religion and based on no disputable revelation or outer
authority. Such a morality is neither old nor new, and stands above the
varying customs of society. It is not determined essentially by the
relation of a man to his fellows or by their approval, but by the
consciousness of rightness in the man's own breast, - in a word, by
character. Its works are temperance, truth, honesty, trustworthiness,
fortitude, magnanimity, elevation; and its crown is joy.
Then, under the guidance of this intuition, a man may turn his
eyes upon the world with no fear of being swayed by the ephemeral winds
of doctrine. Despite the clamour of the hour he will know that the
obligation to society is not the primal law and is not the source of
personal integrity, but is secondary to personal integrity. He will
believe that social justice is in itself desirable, but he will hold
that it is far more important to preach first the responsibility of each
man to himself for his own character. He will admit that equality of
opportunity is an ideal to be aimed at, but he will think this a small
thing in comparison with the universality of duty. In his attitude
towards mankind he will not deny the claims of sympathy, but he will
listen first to the voice of judgment:
Away with charity that soothes a lie,
And thrusts the truth with scorn and anger by.
He will be sensitive to the vast injustices of life and its wide-spread
sorrows, but he will not be seduced by that compassion into the
hypocrisy of saying that "the love of those whom a man does not know is
quite as elemental a sentiment as the love of those whom a man does
know." Nor, in repudiating such a falsehood, will he, like the mistress
of Hull Hall, lose his power of discrimination under the stress of
"those vast and dominant suggestions of a new peace and holiness," that
is "to issue forth from broken human nature itself, out of the pathetic
striving of ordinary men." Rather, he will, at any cost, strive to clear
away the clouds of cant, and so open his mind to the dictates of the
everlasting morality.
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