The Motives Of Christian Morality
THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
THE code of Christian morals is first exhibited in the life of the Christian Founder; it is lived before it is written.
'The doctrine to be proclaimed to the world was in the first instance embodied in a human life.
If we would seek the history of the development of that doctrine in the world and in the individual soul, we must trace it up to its fountain-head in the person of the Son of Man.
We must try to determine before all things what was the moral order of the life of Jesus, what was that law of development by which men perceived His moral glory.
'That they did not perceive His moral glory all in a moment is transparent on the very face of the history.
That the light had to shine for long in a darkness that comprehended it not, and that the steps by which the darkness climbed into the light were steep and arduous, are amongst the most indisputable facts in the whole range of Christian annals.
What were those steps?
What was that order of thought by which the disciple slowly mounted into sympathy with the Master?
If we can put our hand upon
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this initial process of Christian development, we shall in all probability have reached that universal law which determines the Christian development of all future disciples.
Let us merely premise that in the pursuance of this design we shall take the portrait of the Master as we find it.
We are not writing a theological treatise, nor attempting a critical exegesis; we are aiming simply at an exposition of what Christian morality claims to be.
We shall therefore close our eyes to all fields of religious controversy—to the mythical theory, and the creed of Paulus, and the school of Tiibingen—and shall merely ask, What does the Gospel narrative say?
What does it say of the order of Christian development?
What does it tell of the process by which the Son of Man won the hearts of the sons of men?
What does it reveal of the nature of that growth by which thé human spirit ripens from the outer into the inner life 2 The design of the Christian Founder, in so far as His design was purely ethical, was to reveal the morality of Judaism no longer in the form of a law, but in the form of a vision—the vision of a human life.
By a choice unique in history, the life He selected to be the world's revelation of morality was His own.
At the very moment when He expresses most strongly the absence from His nature of all self-consciousness, He declares unequivocally that He came to be the model of ethics to the world
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(Matthew xi. 28, sq.).
His desire above all other things was to win the love of men.
But it must never be forgotten that He desired to be loved not because He was a person, but because He was a personification. very man; saint or sinner, finds a joy in being loved.
But the Son of Man in desiring to be loved did not contemplate Himself in His person but in His character.
It was not because love was sweet that He wanted to win the hearts of men; it was because He deemed Himself to be the type of moral purity, and held that in loving
Him men would love the pure.
To say, "Lord, Lord!" to magnify His name apart from His character, was nothing to Him; nay, He looked upon it as a hindrance to moral progress.
' Blessed is the womb that bore Thee," cried a woman in the crowd.
"Yea, rather," is our Lord's reply, "blessed are they that hear the word of God."
It was because He believed Himself, and proclaimed Himself, to be the Way, the Truth, the Life, that He insisted on receiving human love.
To love Him was to keep His commandments.
'To fix the heart on Him was to fix the heart on the virtues of the Mount.
It was to love absolute justice, ~ absolute purity, absolute truth.
It was no sentimental emotion, no ebullition of feeling, no mere expression of a personal endearment.
The love of what He loved, the admiration of His moral loveliness, the devotion to that type of character which made His humanity Divine—that
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was what He meant when He said, "Come unto me." * To accomplish this aim one thing was required as a preliminary condition—man must first be
- attracted within the radius of His person.
It was impossible that the immediate ground of the attraction should be the beauty.
Morality can only be revealed in action, and moral action demands an already gathered community.
It was only by coming within the circle of Christ's presence that man could learn anything of His nature.
His nature was to be exhibited not merely, nor even mainly, in words; the very soul of His ethical teaching was to come forth in the deeds of His social life.
The problem was, how to create the society, how to make that social circle which would render such deeds possible.
Clearly to create such a circle He must at the outset appeal to men, not as He wished them to be, not as He designed to make them, but as He actually found them.
He must seek to attract them, not by the appeal to an incipient higher nature in themselves which as yet they did not know, but by stirring up the elements of that old nature which had long been in possession of their souls.
He could only commend the new doctrine by throwing a momentary veil over its novelty, by showing that it was not a complete disruption between the old and the coming genera- * See the antithesis of the two kinds of loye in the Greek of John xxi,
15-17.
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tions, by demonstrating that in some sense true and real the aspirations of the past would be perfected by the faith of the future.
Christ then had at the outset to attract men, not by Himself but by something in themselves; He had to appeal to the hopes of their old nature.
That nature was Judaism, and from a certain point of view it was also Epicureanism.
It sought a material kingdom, a visible crown, an outward reward.
It was to this Judaic or materialistic hope that Christ first addressed Himself; He was known to the multitude in the breaking of temporal bread.
Do not think that in thus attracting men by physical benefits the Son of Man was stooping to a Jewish accommodation ; He was directing their minds to a vital truth.
He had indeed come to found a kingdom, a material kingdom, a kingdom which, if not of this world, was still to be a this world.
When He broke the bread to the multitude, He taught that there was a real connection between the power to follow Him and the power to distribute bread.
When He promised that those who should come after Him would receive wm this life houses and brethren and lands, He drew men by no fiction, but by a profound reality.
Christianity in its ultimate development is indeed intended to perfect a man's relation to houses and brethren and lands.
It is designed to make better householders, better landlords, better members of the family circle.
It is to strenethen the bonds of master and servant,
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parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife.
It contemplates in its last result the resurrection of the body politic—the incorporation of the state and all its institutions.
It looks forward to the time when the secular shall itself be the sacred, when the week-day shall itself be the Sabbath, when the workshop shall itself be the temple, when the Government shall itself be the Church.
The outward rewards of Christianity are real rewards, and the kingdom which it designs to rear is a kingdom more real, more secular, more purely earthly and natural, than that fantastic and supramundane fabric which constituted to the Jew the Messiah's empire.
Nay, we may go further.
Christianity came to give what, as we have seen, the Jew did not dare even to hope for—that individual freedom from care which the Epicurean sought to win.
It told the Epicurean that his was not adream.
It told him that there was indeed to be found a divine absence of care, a state in which the individual soul would rest completely from its labours, a sense of perfect freedom from all the burden and heat of the day, and it offered itself as the pioneer to that Elysium where the human yoke was easy and the human burden light.
Such was Christ's message to the multitude, to that outlying mass which He desired to bring within the radius of His person; He appealed to their individual wants.
Is it surprising that to the longrepressed individualism of the Jewish nation such
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an appeal should have sounded like music?
Is it wonderful, that to men, who with all their materialism had not been allowed to hope for more than a national independence, the promise of personal comfort should have been unspeakably dear?
At all events, it was so.
The multitude heard Him gladly because He manifested a sympathy with their human struggles, and offered Himself as a ministrant to their daily wants and toils.
They came for the sake of the loaves, but they came, and their coming was itself the first step to the goal.
They were, as regarded the person of the Master, as yet only utilitarians; they sought Him for what
He could give.
But in so doing they were already in the presence of a Power they did not seek, a Power which sooner or later must make its influence felt and known.
In the pursuit of their own shadow they were brought, as it were by accident, into contact with a great light, and the accident was thenceforth to become the essence of their being.
They were to catch the glow of a principle which as yet they did not see, and to find the joy of a life which as yet they did not understand.
For this brings us to the point of transition between the first and second stage of Christian morality.
Men began by reverencing the Master because He was the minister to their wants; from this there is but a step to another and higher reverence—the reverence for the ministration itself, the veneration for that law of Christ's nature which
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impelled Him to minister.
If the first stage of Christian morality was Epicurean, the second was distinctly Stoic.
Men had been the objects of a law of ministration; they must now become the subjects of that law: "Freely have ye received, freely give!"
The principle is the Christian doctrine of substitution, or the imputation of oneself to another.
It said, Ye who have had wants and had them relieved, put yourselves in the place of those who have still wants that have not been relieved.
You have found joy in your relief; try to figure in your heart the joy they would find in their relief.
You have had the bread broken to you by coming within the radius of the Christian influence; try to bring others within the same radius that they may share the same bread.
You have experienced the age of promise; now the age of duty is come.
It is in this, its second phase, that Christianity comes nearest to Stoicism.
It is now that for the first time there breaks upon the mind of the disciple the momentous fact that each man has a duty to the whole—a duty whose sphere is the universe and whose standard is the Golden Rule.
But here too as in Stoicism the door which opens the revelation is the door of personal sacrifice.
In the Judaic or Epicurean stage of Christianity the end contemplated above all things was physical enlargement ; in the second or Stoical stage the end contemplated was physicalrepression.
'There was recognisedin the
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human soul a law which was not of the human soul, a law which placed it in the front ranks of creation, but which at the same time demanded its allegiance and its service—the law of duty.
The very name of duty wherever it be found, implies that on one side of the nature there is a process of fence-raising.
Moral obligation signifies by etymology a binding of the nature of man.
It means that in one direction of the soul a barrier has been put up to check the inroads of another, to prevent that other from becoming too free.
Were there no such binding the word obligation would have no meaning; it gets its meaning from the fact of struggle.
The Christian sense of obligation appears in a sense of conflict : 'There is a law in my members warring against the law of my mind;" "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these two are contrary ;" "Think not I am come to send peace on earth; | am not come to send peace but a sword ;" 'If any man will be My disciple, let him renounce himself, and take up My cross and follow Me."
These are strong words, and they carry a weighty message.
They tell us that we have passed into another atmosphere than that in which the Master broke the loaves to the multitude.
In contact with that Master, man has begun to know his higher self.
But the lower self is not yet dead within him; it remains to dispute the field, There is no longer only one motive in his life; there are now two motives drawing opposite
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ways.
Duty says, Bear ye one another's burdens ; interest says, Every man shall bear his own burden.
The Stoic and the Epicurean elements of the human soul are in conflict ; who shall reconcile them ?
We must point out indeed that even from the beginning of this stage of moral conflict Christianity contemplates such a reconciliation.
Take the opening words of that most remarkable of discourses, the Sermon on the Mount.
Christ's thought is clearly this: however wide and impassable may seem to be the gulf that separates the world of duty from the world of interest, there is in reality a bridge between them.
Do not think that pleasure lies wholly with the bad, and that self-denial is the only possession of the good. I tell you that self-denial is no more an end for the saint than it is an end for the sinner. I tell you that the value of selfdenial is just the fact that it promotes a higher interest than self-seeking can ever secure.
If I preach poverty of spirit, meekness, the dissatisfaction with self which men call mourning, the spiritual aspiration which they call hunger and thirst, it is not because individual greatness is an evil and individualjoy a sin.
It is because in these things individual greatness alone consists and individual joy is alone to be found.
It is because the fruit of these is personal blessedness—the kingdom, the comfort, the inheritance of the earth, the satisfaction of the spirit, the right to rejoice and be exceeding glad.
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It may be asked, How has Christianity succeeded in achieving this end?
Stoicism crucified the individual, but it did not thereby seek to produce joy; it did so as a means of crucifying the desire of joy.
Christianity exhorted to take up the cross, but it did so as the road toa crown.
It not only declared that there was an Olivet behind the Calvary, it said that the Calvary was indispensable to the Olivet.
Can we explain this contrariety between the two systems?
We can; and the explanation constitutes the real point of difference between this stage of Christianity and all stages of Stoicism.
For let it be remembered that the Stoic did not, any more than the Epicurean, emancipate himself from the bonds of self-contemplation ; nay, his very doctrine involved self-contemplation.
To despise pleasure and pain is not only a_purely individual act, but an act which has self for its object.
T'o make the business of life the study of individual nothingness is to make the business of life a selfstudy ; it is the soul's worship of its own despair.*
But the " poverty of spirit" of which Christianity speaks is totally different from this.
Humility in the Christian sense does not mean to think of one's self humbly; it means not to think of one's self at all.
The idea which expresses the Christian view of sacrifice is not the restraint of self, but the death of self; restraint implies an effort, and therefore a constant self-inspection, but death is a complete
* Cf, Col. ii, 18—''a voluntary humility."
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self-forgetfulness.
It is not that the ideal Christian is to despise his pleasures or his pains; he is never to think of them.
He is to pass through a form of death called love, in which his own being is to be lost in the being of others.
That is what St. Paul meant when he said, "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God."
He meant that it was possible by the power of love to become so much the part of another life as to have no consciousness of one's own, that it was possible to be so absorbed in an impersonal interest as to lose all sense of personal care.
'' Bear ye one another's burdens, for every man shall bear his own burden," is a saying which ceases to be contradictory in the developed
Religion of the Cross.
Bear thou the burden of} thy brother, for thou too hast a burden of thine own ; it will be too heavy for thee without the selfforgetfulness of love.
Only in the preoccupation of thy heart with the wants of others can thine own individual wants be lulled to rest.
Wouldst thou have freedom from personal care—LHpicurean freedom, bounding freedom such as youth rejoices in ? thou shalt find it in the life of love.
In that fire, which itself is incapable of being extinguished, all that is not itself shall be extinguished ; all the wood, and the hay, and the stubble of merely individual desires shall be burned up like chaff before the blaze of a divine enthusiasm for humanity ; he that loseth his life shall keep it unto life eternal.
This brings us to the third stage of Christian
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'morality.
In its first stage it contemplated the promise of virtue; in its second it looked at the duty of virtue; it was now to enter on the love of virtue.
Its first vision had been all the crown ; its 'second had been all the cross; its third was to be the vision of the crown in the cross.
There is as it seems to us in the Gospel narrative a clearly marked line of demarcation between the age of simple duty and the age of love, which is at once the abolition and the fulfilling of the law.
Already in that narrative there begins to be prefigured the reion of that influence which theologians call the Holy Spirit, but which called by any name is a oreat fact of history.
The tone of the Christian Founder is never so joyous as in those chapters which predict the Spirit—the transition from duty into love.
When He says, '' Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you," what does He mean?
We do not ask what does He mean theologically, but what bearing has such a statement on the subject of Christian ethics?
Is it not clearly this: that to the mind of the Christian Founder there is already present the advent of a time when that life which was now costing His followers so great a struggle would become as natural to them as breathing?
He saw that a day was coming when the crucial word for morality would not be duty, nor yet obligation, but love.
His first or outward coming had sent into the world not peace but a sword, it had revealed a dualism in
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man's nature, and had made the human goul a theatre of strife.
But in His second or inward coming all this was to be changed.
There was to be no more sea; there was to be no more pain.
The virtue which now was a sacrifice and received a sacrificial name was to become a positive joy.
It was to be a component part in the very life of man, so that to part with it would henceforth be itself the sacrifice, to lose it itself the pain; it was this absence of the sense of struggle that was predicted in the words, '"' My peace I give unto you."
For, let us remember that this inwardness of the Divine law was the essential peace of Christ Himself.*
The growth of the human nature that was in Him was a growth towards this sublime goal.
He, too, had His Gethsemane—not, indeed, in the form of a wish to evade duty, but in the guise of a hope that duty might be found to coincide with a path less strewn with thorns.
None the less it was a struggle, and a struggle which lay within the natural limits of humanity.
But there came to Him a time when Gethsemane faded from His view, and a Divine strength made the burden light. When
He emerged from the shades of Gethsemane He emerged from the shadows of His own soul, He rose into peace.
'he struggle, whatever it was, had all passed away, and He had accepted the path of the Cross as for Him the destined path.
So complete * See Arnold's chapters on the Secret and Method of Jesus, in Literature and Dogma.
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was His new sense of rest that He longed to make it the possession of the world.
He could wish nothing better for the world than that it might be able to enter into His joy—the joy of completed conflict : " Father, I will that these be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory," are the words in which He expresses that desire.
He wanted men to feel that the straight gate and the narrow way had become to them what they were to Him, a wide gate and a broad way.
He wanted them to realise what He realised—that the outward law had become an inward law, that duty had become nature, that sacrifice had become privilege: that was the sense in which He uttered the words, '"' My peace I give unto you."
This aspiration of the Son of Man was of course only fulfilled in that great Pentecostal outpouring which inaugurated the dispensation of the Spirit.
It is then that for the first time the antithesis begins between law and grace.
That antithesis is no merely verbal one; it marks the completed transition from an outer into an inner morality.
Grace is the new word which expresses the first sense of Christian freedom.
It expresses man's consciousness that he has passed into a new relationship toward the will of God, that it is no longer outside of him compelling him as a schoolmaster, but that it is written in his heart and embodied in his life.
'To find grace is to find the passage from duty into love.
It isin one sense the destruction
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OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
of the sense of moral obligation.
The Divine Will ceases to stand over against the human will as its master and its monarch; the human is made one with the Divine.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, looking at ethics from a purely scientific standpoint, has quite independently arrived at the same conclusion as the New Testament.
We say quite independently, for it evidently comes to him as a discovery, and he advances it as a paradox.
He suggests that the motive of moral obligation will lose its force in proportion as the moral life itself advances.*
What is this but the recurrence of the old refrain that when aman is touched by grace he is no longer under law?
What is it but in other words to say, that to love is to be dead to the law, that to burn with the enthusiasm for humanity is to outstrip at a bound all the requirements of duty?
' Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty "—that is to say, naturalness.
A man will no longer say, "It is my duty," but, "It is my nature ;" no longer "I ought," but "I must."
It is the difference of talent and genius; a man ought to use his talent, a man is compelled to use his genius.
In the one case there is an obligation from without, which, nevertheless, may be resisted; in the other there is an obligation from within, which, because it is the nature of the man himself, admits of no resistance.
Grace is the reconciliation of compulsion and freedom.
It takes away all power of choice by * Data of Ethics, p. 127.
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making goodness the only law of man's being.
Henceforth his service becomes his perfect liberty, and his implicit obedience is identical with his empire; the truth has made him free, and he is free indeed.
We have thus tried to sketch the evolution of Christian morality as it is exhibited in the immediate presence of the Christian Founder.
We believe it will be found to coincide with the order of moral development embraced by every completed spiritual life.* There is first the unclouded promise, which without perspective shows the distant goal as if it were already nigh.
Then there is the intervening cloud, which turns the sunshine into rain, and the morning into the burden and heat of the day.
Lastly, the cloud becomes part of the morning, and that which was a hindrance to our vision is changed into the climax of the glory, the master-light of all our seeing.
Neither the Epicurean's ease nor the Stoic's yoke is by itself the goal; the goal is only found when the yoke is easy and the burden light.
It will be seen that in the treatment of this subject there is a point which we have assumed but not discussed.
We have spoken of an intervening cloud.
We have said that the very idea of moral obligation implies that there is a part of our nature which needs to be restrained, that the very word duty indicates the putting up of a fence to prevent
* This subject will be treated in Chapter VIII.
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the inroads of some other power, The question which we have not asked is, What is that power ?
What is that tendency of human nature which has made the erection of a fence obligatory?
Why is it that in the present state of things we need to speak of duty at all?
Why does not the moral soil yield to us its fruit spontaneously, as the physical soil did to Adam?
'There can be but one answer, and it lies not in theory but in fact.
There is| clearly a disharmony in the nature of man.
The) fact will not be denied by the representative of any school, Christian or Pagan, Theist or Atheist.
The whole heat of the discussion centres round the point, Whence came this disharmony ? Some tell us it was by chance; others, by necessity.
Some say 1t came from a fall which crushed one side of human nature; others tell us it was the result of an evolutionary rise, by which one part of human nature got the start of another.
We shall not dispute the point.
Our purpose is not theological, but moral, and therefore we shall avoid the question of origins.
We shall not seek to determine how the disharmony arose; perhaps in order to find its origin we would require to be ourselves in astate of harmony.
It may be that to know how sin came would be already to transcend the nature of a sinful being, for how could we know its origin without conceiving that state which preceded its origination?
Be this as it may, ours is a humbler aim.
We do not inquire into the
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beginning, but only into the fact of things, and only into that fact as it was understood by Christianity.
The course we have to follow is simple and clear.
There is recognised in the Christian system, as in all systems, a chord which jars on the universal harmony.
What is Christianity's explanation of this jarring chord—her explanation not of its origin but of itself?
What is the Christian exposition of that great dissonance, which men call sin, whose marring influence has permeated every stage of the rhythm of this universe, and the consciousness of whose presence has proved so powerful an agent in the formation of every religious creed?
That is the question which Christianity sets herself to answer.
She answers it by no appeal to antiquities either sacred or secular, by no reference to a theological system whose authority must be infallible, by no effort of metaphysical subtlety or philosophical speculation, but by a simple flashing of the lantern upon the secret places of the human soul, by "'commending herself to the conscience of every man."
'The nature of this revelation will be considered in the following chapter.