The Roman and the Teuton

Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of Sir James Stephen: a law which man has been trying in all ages, as now, to deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if he had willed, working steadily in all times and nations.  And that is—that as the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength and honour; the fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy, weakness and shame.  It is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever young.  The Hebrew prophets preached it long ago, in words which are fulfilling themselves around us every day, and which no new discoveries of science will abrogate, because they express the great root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot get a hearing.

For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human welfare founded.  The true subjective history of man is the history not of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective history of man is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and his virtues.  So far from morals depending upon thought, thought, I believe, depends on morals.  In proportion as a nation is righteous,—in proportion as common justice is done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely, triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted, and faithfully obeyed, to the welfare of the whole commonweal.  But where a nation is corrupt, that is, where the majority of individuals in it are bad, and justice is not done between man and man, there thought will wither, and science will be either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to the ends of tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes, amid the general ruin of all good things; as she had done in Greece, in Rome, in Spain, in China, and many other lands.  Laws of economy, of polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for the sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may become, and will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as it is not enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which Salvian describes among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the Franks were thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the widow, swindling the poor man out of his plot of ground, and sending meanwhile to the tottering Cæsar at Rome, to ask, not for armies, but for Circensian games.

We cannot see how science could have bettered those poor Gauls.  And we can conceive, surely, a nation falling into the same madness, and crying ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,’ in the midst of railroads, spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, and crystal palaces, with infinite blue-books and scientific treatises ready to prove to them, what they knew perfectly well already, that they were making a very unprofitable investment, both of money and of time.

For science indeed is great: but she is not the greatest.  She is an instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she is wielded by the hand of virtue or of vice.  But her lawful mistress, the only one which can use her aright, the only one under whom she can truly grow, and prosper, and prove her divine descent, is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God.  This, indeed, the Hebrew Prophets, who knew no science in one sense of the word, do not expressly say: but it is a corollary from their doctrine, which we may discover for ourselves, if we will look at the nations round us now, if we will look at all the nations which have been.  Even Voltaire himself acknowledged that; and when he pointed to the Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their prosperity uniformly to their virtue.  We now know that he was wrong in fact: for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not of peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness.  But that fact only goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!) was common to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he scoffed, namely, that virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin.  For we have found that these Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least, are an especially unrighteous people; rotting upon the rotting remnants of the wisdom and virtue of their forefathers, which now live only on their lips in flowery maxims about justice and mercy and truth, as a cloak for practical hypocrisy and villany; and we have discovered also, as a patent fact, just what the Hebrew Prophets would have foretold us—that the miseries and horrors which are now destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct and organic results of the moral profligacy of its inhabitants.

I know no modern nation, moreover, which illustrates so forcibly as China the great historic law which the Hebrew Prophets proclaim; and that is this:—That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative of their morals, so are their morals the correlative of their theology.  As a people behaves, so it thrives; as it believes, so it behaves.  Such as his Gods are, such will the man be; down to that lowest point which too many of the Chinese seem to have reached, where, having no Gods, he himself becomes no man; but (as I hear you see him at the Australian diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even by the scum of Europe.

I do not say that the theology always produces the morals, any more than that the morals always produce the theology.  Each is, I think, alternately cause and effect.  Men make the Gods in their own likeness; then they copy the likeness they have set up.  But whichever be cause, and whichever effect, the law, I believe, stands true, that on the two together depends the physical welfare of a people.  History gives us many examples, in which superstition, many again in which profligacy, have been the patent cause of a nation’s deoradation.  It does not, as far as I am aware, give us a single case of a nation’s thriving and developing when deeply infected with either of those two vices.

These, the broad and simple laws of moral retribution, we may see in history; and (I hope) something more than them; something of a general method, something of an upward progress, though any thing but an irresistible or inevitable one.  For I have not argued that there is no order, no progress—God forbid.  Were there no order to be found, what could the student with a man’s reason in him do, but in due time go mad?—Were there no progress, what could the student with a man’s heart within him do, but in due time break his heart, over the sight of a chaos of folly and misery irredeemable?—I only argue that the order and the progress of human history cannot be similar to those which govern irrational beings, and cannot (without extreme danger) be described by metaphors (for they are nothing stronger) drawn from physical science.  If there be an order, a progress, they must be moral; fit for the guidance of moral beings; limited by the obedience which those moral beings pay to what they know.

And such an order, such a progress as that, I have good hope that we shall find in history.

We shall find, as I believe, in all the ages, God educating man; protecting him till he can go alone, furnishing him with the primary necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, inspiring him, as we should do to our children; bearing with him, and forgiving him too, again and again, as we should do: but teaching him withal (as we shall do if we be wise) in great part by his own experience, making him test for himself, even by failure and pain, the truth of the laws which have been given him; discover for himself, as much as possible, fresh laws, or fresh applications of laws; and exercising his will and faculties, by trusting him to himself wherever he can be trusted without his final destruction.  This is my conception of history, especially of Modern History—of history since the Revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.  I express myself feebly enough, I know.  And even could I express what I mean perfectly, it would still be but a partial analogy, not to be pushed into details.  As I said just now, were the true law of human progress revealed to us to-morrow, we could not understand it.

For suppose that the theory were true, which Dr. Temple of Rugby has lately put into such noble words: suppose that, as he says, ‘The power whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment.  The successive generations of men, are days in this man’s life.  The discoveries and inventions which characterize the different epochs of the world, are this man’s works.  The creeds and doctrines, the opinions and principles of the successive ages, are his thoughts.  The state of society at different times, are his manners.  He grows in knowledge, in self-control, in visible size, just as we do.’  Suppose all this; and suppose too, that God is educating this his colossal child, as we educate our own children; it will hardly follow from thence that his education would be, as Dr. Temple says it is, precisely similar to ours.

Analogous it may be, but not precisely similar; and for this reason: That the collective man, in the theory, must be infinitely more complex in his organization than the individuals of which he is composed.  While between the educator of the one and of the other, there is simply the difference between a man and God.  How much more complex then must his education be! how all-inscrutable to human minds much in it!—often as inscrutable as would our training of our children seem to the bird brooding over her young ones in the nest.  The parental relations in all three cases may be—the Scriptures say that they are—expansions of the same great law; the key to all history may be contained in those great words—‘How often would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings.’  Yet even there the analogy stops short—‘but thou wouldest not’ expresses a new element, which has no place in the training of the nestling by the dam, though it has place in our training of our children; even that self-will, that power of disobedience, which is the dark side of man’s prerogative as a rational and self-cultivating being.  Here that analogy fails, as we should have expected it to do; and in a hundred other points it fails, or rather transcends so utterly its original type, that mankind seems, at moments, the mere puppet of those laws of natural selection, and competition of species, of which we have heard so much of late; and, to give a single instance, the seeming waste, of human thought, of human agony, of human power, seems but another instance of that inscrutable prodigality of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns dropping to the ground, but one shall become the thing it can become, and grow into a builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the nearest swine.

Yet these dark passages of human life may be only necessary elements of the complex education of our race; and as much mercy under a fearful shape, as ours when we put the child we love under the surgeon’s knife.  At least we may believe so; believe that they have a moral end, though that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or narrow prying into final causes (a trick as fatal to historic research as Bacon said it was to science), we may justify God by faith, where we cannot justify Him by experience.

Surely this will be the philosophic method.  If we seem to ourselves to have discovered a law, we do not throw it away the moment we find phænomena which will not be explained by it.  We use those phænomena to correct and to expand our law.  And this belief that History is ‘God educating man,’ is no mere hypothesis; it results from the observation of thousands of minds, throughout thousands of years.  It has long seemed—I trust it will seem still—the best explanation of the strange deeds of that strange being, man: and where we find in history facts which seem to contradict it, we shall not cast away rashly or angrily either it or them: but if we be Bacon’s true disciples, we shall use them patiently and reverently to correct and expand our notions of the law itself, and rise thereby to more deep and just conceptions of education, of man, and—it may be—of God Himself.

In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective, rather than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere, without impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we shall study in a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on the one hand, and necessitarianism on the other.  We shall not be afraid to confess natural agencies: but neither shall we be afraid to confess those supernatural causes which underlie all existence, save God’s alone.

We shall talk of more than of an over-ruling Providence.  That such exists, will seem to us a patent fact.  But it will seem to us somewhat Manichæan to believe that the world is ill made, mankind a failure, and that all God has to do with them, is to set them right here and there, when they go intolerably wrong.  We shall believe not merely in an over-ruling Providence, but (if I may dare to coin a word) in an under-ruling one, which has fixed for mankind eternal laws of life, health, growth, both physical and spiritual; in an around-ruling Providence, likewise, by which circumstances, that which stands around a man, are perpetually arranged, it may be, are fore-ordained, so that each law shall have at least an opportunity of taking effect on the right person, in the right time and place; and in an in-ruling Providence. too, from whose inspiration comes all true thought, all right feeling; from whom, we must believe, man alone of all living things known to us inherits that mysterious faculty of perceiving the law beneath the phænomena, by virtue of which he is a man.

But we can hold all this, surely, and equally hold all which natural science may teach us.  Hold what natural science teaches?  We shall not dare not to hold it.  It will be sacred in our eyes.  All light which science, political, economic, physiological, or other, can throw upon the past, will be welcomed by us, as coming from the Author of all light.  To ignore it, even to receive it suspiciously and grudgingly, we shall feel to be a sin against Him.  We shall dread no ‘inroads of materialism;’ because we shall be standing upon that spiritual ground which underlies—ay, causes—the material.  All discoveries of science, whether political or economic, whether laws of health or laws of climate, will be accepted trustfully and cheerfully.  And when we meet with such startling speculations as those on the influence of climate, soil, scenery on national character, which have lately excited so much controversy, we shall welcome them at first sight, just because they give us hope of order where we had seen only disorder, law where we fancied chance: we shall verify them patiently; correct them if they need correction; and if proven, believe that they have worked, and still work, ουκ ανευ Θεου, as factors in the great method of Him who has appointed to all nations their times, and the bounds of their habitation, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him: though He be not far from any one of them; for in Him we live, and move, and have our being, and are the offspring of God Himself.

I thus end what it seemed to me proper to say in this, my Inaugural Lecture; thanking you much for the patience with which you have heard me: and if I have in it too often spoken of myself, and my own opinions, I can only answer that it is a fault which has been forced on me by my position, and which will not occur again.  It seemed to me that some sort of statement of my belief was necessary, if only from respect to a University from which I have been long separated, and to return to which is to me a high honour and a deep pleasure; and I cannot but be aware (it is best to be honest) that there exists a prejudice against me in the minds of better men than I am, on account of certain early writings of mine.  That prejudice, I trust, with God’s help, I shall be able to dissipate.  At least whatever I shall fail in doing, this University will find that I shall do one thing; and that is, obey the Apostolic precept, ‘Study to be quiet, and to do your own business.’