THE NEW 'MORALITY'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 24, 11 June 1903, Page 17

THE NEW 'MORALITY'

« T is nearly twenty years since, in our student days in France, we heard the elder Coquelin recite, in his inimitable way, one of his own monologues which told of the sea of troubles that would break over the judge, the policeman, the father of a family, etc., ' $i le bon Lieu

n eristait pas — if there were no over-ruling Creator and Judge to whom each of us is responsible for his actions. It was, in effect, a long-drawn paraphrase of the saying of the First Napoleon : ' Without religion men will kill one another either for an apple or for a pretty woman.' Without God there can be no morality. 4 It, haa neither foundation nor coping-3tone, neither root nor sanction. Having no dependence on any person or thing, it depends solely on caprice. We may take or leave what we like, according to our passions.' Our belief, true or false, rules our cotfduct, whether for good or evil. r J he sense of daty is, as we know by common experience, the ruliDg sense of the human race. Religion supplies the only principle which caa serve as the basis of our idea of duty. It alone can give no morality the fixed sanction which is its safeguard. It has lor ages dominated, at least

in a considerable degree, the lives of men ; it has made it* possible for men to live together in society by securing their' acceptance of those divine principles of guidance— m- the rules of the game of life— which we call the moral law : and it has thus prevented the human race from acting.'on a large scale the tragedy of the Kilkenny cats

Agnosticism and the new materialism, however, see no God beyond— no controlling Power, no guiding Mi D d. They have no sane message to give the world as to the origins and end of matter, life, mind, will, conscieDce. Their philosophy of life is mainly destructive. When they attempt to build up, their voices are the voices of Babel They take away the last basis and sanction on which the moral code rests. But they know that human society cannot wag along without law. They have, therefore, cast nneasirl a S? U w-S Dd ? DeW C 0d M.orM '. or afc leasfc for a new basis for th£ old Willingly or unwillingly, they confess their inability to devise anything to supersede the grand old moral law • they acknowlecge that charity, justice, brotherly love, etc must continue to exercise their sway upon this old world if human intercourse is not to be turned into a red and raging chaos. In the old, old way when a man is tempted to crime or sm, he thinks of the all-seeing God, his great Creator, his loving Father, his all-just Judge, before whom he must one daystand to render an account of his life-stewardship. And the thought gives him pause. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The love of Him is its end But the puny philosophers who try to get rid of God, endeavor thereby to snap the last strong ties that hold people fast to the only ultimate and effective sanction of right living and virtuous conduct. What new motive have they devisid to keep mankind from kicking over the traces of moral law and turning human society into a raging anarchy ?

The answer that comes from their ranks is a chorus of rasping discord and contradiction. The new ' morality ' is an angry Babel, and the mutual recriminations of its professors are painful and frequent and free. Each one has his own theory as to the origin of things, the beginning of life mind, will. Each has his bolus, his plaster, his Pink Pili for the prevention or cure of humanity's moral ill Each has his patent kicking-strap, curb, bearing-rein, or mechanical whip to make the human race work creditably in harness and do away, if po&sible, with the need of the Divine Will of an infinite Creator as the Guide, Lawgiver, and Judge of our race. The discussions provoked by the Bible-in-schools agitation has elicited more or less bald statements of some of the many and varied and contradictory schemes for finding a pubsutute for the Deity as the source of the moral law. Each year a fresh crop of < systems ' comes up like the flowers that bloom in the spring. To Professor Tyndall for instance, and to Tame, you are nothing better than a rather well-made clock— that has no Maker ; you can no more control your actions, good or bad, than an old Dutch ' wall-wagger ' can control its striking— a doctrine full of comfort for the burglar and the magsman ; and virtue} which is the foundation of personal character, of domestic and social well-being, and of all true civilisation— is a mere 'product,' like sugar or alcohol ! Comte, Huxley Clifford, Leslie Stephen, and other lights of the new-pagan school very properly declare this teaching to be * degrading ' ' crass,' ' sheer nonsense,' ' too absurd a doctrine even for philosophers,' ' the most illogical form of metaphysics ' etc Sir James Fitzjames Stephen blows a pretty Jittle soapbubble theory — a Pantheistic fancy of his own. But Spencer Harrison and all the rest fall upon him with great violence, burst his bubble, and (figuratively, of course) beat his brains out. Mr. Harrison is a believer in Thingsin -General. He puts ' Cosmic Emotion ' (in capitals) in the place of God ; advises you to calm your passions by thinking, for instance, of the beauty of a golden sunset or (say) of the petals of a " daffy-down-dilly ' ; counsels the newlybereaved widow and orphan to bear their bitter sorrow bravely, not by the thought of a future life of endless bliss with One Who wipes away the tear from the eyes of them that mourn, but by reflecting on 'stellar infinities.' For all useful purposes, he might as well ask them to think of the multiplication table. And all the rival professors of the new « morality ' join in ridiculing his fantastic substitute for a Divine Ruler. 'It would,' said one of them *be like offering roses to a famished tiger.' '

Mr. Spencer has also his own pet substitute for the Almighty. He would keep people in the path of moral rectitude by the worship of the Unknowable : an indefinite, Bonorous Something — or Nothing — with a capital U and no mind or will. The rest of the ' philosophical ' Babel greet this new agnostic ' god ' with a storm of boisterous ridicule and protest. It is described by one of them as ' a sort of a something about which I can know nothing? *It might,' said another, 'be a gooseberry or a parallelopiped.' 'To make a religion out of the ' Unknowable,' Mr. Harrison declared, *is far more extravagant than to make it out of the Equator or the Binomial Theorem.' And they all spat upon the new idol and hacked it to pieces with the axe of their sharpest sarcasm. Mr. Harbison's own little plan fared no better at the hands of the other professors in the Babel school of new 'morality.' It is Merely Comte's idea hashed up and served hot : the cult of collective Man, ' the Beligion of Humanity.' Mr. Harrison would dethrone the Living God. But he finds that, if this old world is to wag creditably on, he must find a substitute for Him. So he makes Man in General — Humanity with a capital H — the god of Man in Particular : of John of Styles and Joan of Noakes, of John Roe and Richard Doe. The drunkard, according to his theory of moral sanction, is to be kept from tasting the wine when it is red, the thief from his neighbor's till, the murderer from his victim, not by the thought of their responsibility to a just and all-seeing Judge of the living and the dead, but by a tender consideration for a pure abstraction called Humanity, and by the thought that, ages hence, some people would probably feel the better for his self-restraint ! Now the other apostles of the new school of morals were not restrained by any sense of respect of Mr. Harrison's Capital Letters. They fell with great violence upon his Plan, tore his Subtsitute for a Deity into Ribbons, aod flung them to the four Winds of Heaven on a Storm of Ridicule. His fetish is contemptuously compared by one of them to Mr. Spencer's Unknowable (with a capital U). By another it is irreverently described as ' a stupid, ignorant, half-beast of a creature,' worse than ' the ugliest idol in India.' ' Mostly fools ! ' is Carlyle's description of the ruck of Humanity which Mr. Harrison sets up as the god of the new dispensation.

soul does not, or will not, soar to the serene heights of doing all things for the love of its Creator. And in the spiritual as in the civil domain, for the less heroic or ignoble souls the fear of the punishments of violated law acts as a deterrent when right reason and hope and love have made their appeal in vain.

Robespierre was no Christian. Yet he exclaimed : ' Let us lay the foundations of our morality in God ; no nation has ever yet ventured to socialise atheism.' In the course of an able article on the new ' morality ' in 1884, Edmond Scherer said : ' Let us learn to see things as they are ; the true, the good, the ancient, the authoritative morality needs the Absolute, aspires to the transcendental, and finds its mainstay in God alone. Conscience, like the heart, demands a future, Duty is nothing if not sublime, and life would be a comedy but for its relation to eternity.' Despite his fantastic theories, Sir James Stephen admits that if there is to be religion — and there must be if there is to be a moral code and security from social chaos — the only workable system is Christianity. Christ, he says, has reigned so long, ' the object of passionate devotion and enthusiasm ' to myriads of people in every time and clime, precisely because they believed that He lives, that He possesses an authority which His acts had proved to be divine. And he rallies the founders of fresh creeds with the well-kuown witticism of Talleyrand, who, when requested to furnish advice as to the best method of promulgating a new religion, counselled him to try the effect of being crucified and rising again on the third day.