Chapter VIII: The Results of Ethical Inquiry on an Evolutional Basis (2)

It is true that the majority of the objectionable points of Christian Ethics are found in the Old Testament. This testament is, however, accepted as the exponent of divine truth, though the authority it now possesses is slight in comparison with that which it formerly held. Yet Christ himself says: "Think not I am come to destroy the Law (_i.e._, the Pentateuch),[270] or the Prophets, I come not to destroy, but to fulfil. For, verily, I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." Repeatedly, Christ shows himself a strict conformant to the Jewish code. But if we examine the Pentateuch, the Jewish Law, we shall easily find on what grounds the burning of heretics and witches, and all the other cruelties of the Middle Ages were committed in the name of Christianity. Lubbock writes, for instance:[271] "Among the Jews, we find a system of animal sacrifice on a great scale, and symbols of human sacrifice which can, I think, only be understood on the hypothesis that the latter were once usual. The case of Jephthah's daughter is generally looked upon as exceptional; but the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth verses of the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus appear to indicate that human sacrifices were at one time habitual, among the Jews." See also 2 Sam. xxi. 1, 5-9, 14. In Lev. xx. 27; Ex. xxii. 18, the stoning of witches is commanded. In Ex. xxii. 20; Deut. xiii. 1-5, 6-10, 14, 15; xvii. 1-5; xviii. 20, it was commanded that men be put to death for idolatry or heresy or for "dreaming dreams" in the service of another god, and that idolatrous cities should be utterly destroyed even to the cattle within them. Superstition and insanity must have fared ill among the Jews. Ex. xxxi. 14, 15; xxxv. 2, 3; sentence of death is pronounced on any who shall perform even so much labor as the kindling of a fire on the Sabbath; and Num. xv. 32-36, describe how a man was put to death, by God's command to Moses, for gathering sticks on that day. Death was also commanded for murmuring and for all sorts of ceremonial offences; see, for instance, Ex. xii. 15, 19; xxx. 33-38; Lev. vii. 20-27; xvii. 8-10, 13-16; xix. 5-8; xxiii. 29, 30; xxiv. 10-16, 23; Num. i. 51; iii. 10, 38; iv. 15, 18-20; xi. 1; xvii. 13; xviii. 3, 7, 22; see also especially Deut. xxviii. 15-68; xxxii. 22-42. Command of subjection to the priesthood on pain of death is found in Deut. xvii. 8-12, and examples of fearful punishment for protest against its supremacy are given in Num. xvi. 3-15, 20, 21, 26-35, 41-47, 49. It may be noticed, that here the children are represented as perishing with the parents by God's express command and miracle. Many instances of the stoning and putting to death of whole families for the sins of some member or members of the family are recorded in the Old Testament, and prove that the expression "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation," is not to be interpreted as a mere reference to heredity, as many have endeavored to prove it to be. See on this point Is. xiv. 21; also Ps. cix. 7-20; cxxxvii. 9. The origin of ordeals may be traced to Num. v. 11-31.

The Old Testament also sanctions slavery, and makes no protest against the selling of children into slavery; see Ex. xxi. 2-6, 7; Lev. xxv. 44-47; although the Israelites were to treat slaves and servants of their own nation with much greater kindness than that used towards those of other nations. Ex. xxi. 20, 21, prescribes that a man shall not be punished for beating his servant to death, provided the servant does not die directly under his hand, but linger a day or two; "for he is his money." Christians have often protested that their religion cannot be held responsible for the sins of the prophets,--for David's murder of Uriah in order to obtain the wife with whom he had already committed adultery; for his torture of the Ammonites with saws and axes and harrows and fire, and his houghing of the horses of a thousand Moabitish chariots; for Solomon's concubinage and his slaughter of Joab according to David's last orders; for Elijah's wholesale slaughter of the priests of Baal; or for the thousand other vices, crimes, and atrocities described in the Old Testament as committed by God's chosen men, generally without punishment or protest from him. However, the case is not so easily dismissed when we find just as great cruelties and atrocities directly ascribed to God's express command or miraculous interposition. A large number of such are included in the passages already noticed; and we further find descriptions of a destruction from God for the crime of census-taking[272]--1 Chron. xxi. 1, 11-15--for touching the ark in the endeavor to save it from a fall--2 Sam. vi. 6, 7,--and for many other trifling offences. God is always represented as favoring the Israelites in their wars and massacres, and often as commanding the slaughter of thousands; so that we can easily understand how it happened that the cowardly murderers of the Duke of Gloucester, in the time of Richard II., swore "upon the Body of Christ before a certain chaplain of St. George in the church of Our Lady of Calais, that they would not disclose the murder they were about to perpetrate,"[273] as also, on what precedent Russia, at the present day, has her war-engines blessed by priests of the "God of Battles." Deut. xx. 10-15, commands the slaughter of males captured in a siege, but the sparing alive of women and children as booty; and Num. xxxi. describes a case in which the command was carried out, with the reservation of a certain portion of young girls for the priests. See also Deut. xxi. 10-14. Furthermore, a religion that makes man absolute ruler of the earth and all living things, and sanctions animal sacrifice, cannot conduce to a sense of the duty of self-restraint towards other species, and is, in fact, often used as an excuse for the autocracy and cruelty of man.

It is, indeed, strange to see civilized peoples of the nineteenth century proclaiming the divine origin of laws and beliefs like these--laws and beliefs at least as barbarous as those of the Greeks and Romans whose gods the Christians deride, and far behind the Ethics of some philosophical systems produced among those "heathen" peoples. As has been said, various attempts have been made to explain away these barbarities, or to withdraw all responsibility for them from God, to whom the Old Testament often directly ascribes them. But in the light of what we know of other primitive peoples the customs of the Jews are only too easily comprehensible; the same barbarities of human and animal sacrifice, slavery, murder without pity, and unscrupulous cruelty of every sort, were to be found, as we have seen, among many other ancient peoples. As for withdrawing the responsibility from the God of the Jews, Christians forget that, in denying the divine origin of the cruel, brutal, and obscene laws ascribed to God together with other laws of less barbarity but of organic growth with these, they are forever destroying the grounds of belief in any assertion of divine supervision, and throwing doubt, by implication, on the New Testament as well, since Christ and his followers were believers in the Law and the Prophets, and often refer to their assertions and accounts of divine direction. But most religions have claimed, and do claim, the divine origin and ratification of their laws, as a means of enforcing them.

The God of the Jews, Jehovah, was originally a nature-god, the god of the heavens, like Zeus, Jupiter, and many other of the greatest gods of other peoples. Science has exploded ancient ideas of the sky; but the Christians still cling to the old terms brought into use at a time when men believed in a flat earth and a region of spirits above floored by an opaque heaven. The God of the Jews was, like the gods of all primitive peoples, a "jealous" and revengeful god, rather to be "feared" than loved; for to such peoples, possessing few resources against the powers of nature and ignorant of their character, the destructive forces of the elements appeared at first rather evil than good, and therefore to be conciliated and appeased; the gods take on their friendly character only as man comes to learn how the forces of nature may be employed for his benefit, and as he slowly attains, in himself, to sympathetic and moral feeling. Accordingly, the Jews were continually occupied with all manner of propitiatory offerings of their most valuable possessions--their herds and the fruits of the earth; and these were burnt under the impression common to nearly all primitive and savage tribes, that they suffered by fire a sort of death and entered the spiritual world. Gradually, the Jews became more civilized, and took on the higher ideals of Eastern religions with which they came in contact; but even to very recent date, the "fear" of God was regarded as the chief essential emotion on the part of the worshipper. Of late, as social ideals have become higher, and sympathy more general, the idea of love, lost for a time through the mixture of Eastern peoples with more barbaric ones, has come to the fore. That a doctrine of polytheism is clearly taught in Gen. iii. 22; vi. 1-4, Christians do not generally even notice. The idea of demigods, found in the latter verse, is called by them, when they meet with it in the Greek or Roman religion, a "myth"; and the idea of sexual intercourse between men and gods, also taught in these verses, is held worthy of all abhorrence, when these "heathen" religions are under consideration. The fact is, that exegesis, forced to advance by progressing civilization, has left far behind the simple original meaning of bible-texts,--such obvious meaning as Christians find in the Buddhist, Persian, or Egyptian Scriptures, when they peruse them. This is true of the New Testament as well as of the Old. The Christian religion has indeed developed into a system of Christian philosophy as different from the Christianity warranted by the Old and New Testaments as were the later Buddhist philosophies from original Buddhism.

When Christ conferred upon his Apostles the power to forgive sins, he laid the foundation for papal authority, and confirmed the ancient authority of the priesthood, preparing the way for that organization of priestcraft which figured so prominently in all the sorrowful history of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the vein of sadness and the subordination of natural modes of life which mark his teaching as they mark only in a greater degree those of the Buddha, easily led to the celibacy and mortification of the flesh which so long condemned the most aspiring from a moral point of view, the most gentle and conscientious, to a life of loneliness, and peopled the world with the progeny of the less moral. Indeed, if we read Matt. xix. 12 correctly, Christ distinctly taught emasculation as a high religious virtue.

The New Testament tolerated the slavery upheld by the Old Testament, and we not only find no protest whatever against it, but we even find Paul returning a runaway slave to his master. Not only Paul, but John also, taught both predestination and hell-fire for idolaters and unbelievers, as well as for the fearful and doubtful, equally with murderers, whoremongers, and liars: Rev. xvii. 8; xx. 15. Christ himself plainly proclaims the damnation of unbelievers--Matt. xxii. 13, 14; xxiii. 14, 33; Mark xvi. 16; etc.--and he at the same time asserts a very positive doctrine of predestination, avowing that he himself takes special pains that many of those to whom he preaches shall not be able to understand him, believe, and be saved: Mark iv. 11, 12; John xii. 39, 40. His language on these subjects is very clear, and bears no sign of being intended as figurative, though modern Christians prefer to regard it as such rather than to relinquish a religion the morals of which would, by other interpretation, be proved inadequate to the demands of the standards of higher civilization; the same method of exegesis applied to the sacred books of Confucianism or of Buddhism, from which it now appears probable that very many of the Christian ideas were derived, would suit them ill. But even if Christ's language were figurative, it must have some meaning; the wrath and vengeance of God are continually spoken of in the New Testament as well as in the Old. Such expressions were not looked upon, until of late, as figurative, and they doubtless did much to justify, to the minds of earlier Christians, the burning of heretics. The justification of all sin in God's elect, a permanent indulgence, is plainly taught by Paul, Rom. viii. 33; iv. 5-8; 1 Cor. vi. 12. Let us take the Buddhist Scriptures, and, in the light of the better passages, or in the light of Siddhartha's devotion to truth and to his fellow men, interpret the passages which, morally, we find wanting, and we shall find this religion as beautiful as the Christian.

A chief reason often advanced by Christians for continued faith in their religion, is the comfort conferred by a belief in immortality and the forgiveness of sins through Christ; that is, the rescue of men from the "wrath of God" through the offering of an innocent being, a "human sacrifice," which was to bear this wrath, and appease it, according to the old Jewish idea of the scapegoat. The morality of the last doctrine we have already condemned; there is no real making atonement in this world; we should recognize this fact, bear the responsibility of our deeds, and in the light of past experience, avoid the repetition of our old sins. And the moral question as to mortality or immortality is not: "What is the pleasanter to believe?" but "What is the truth?" In this recommendation of the pleasant in belief, we have but an illustration of one of the chief defects of Christian theory, which lays most stress upon faith and far less upon a love of the Truth at all costs. The peace of the Christian's death-bed is often made one of the chief arguments in favor of the Christian religion. But the mind in which there exists the noble love of truth will seek this only at the cost of all peace and blind content.

On the general connection of faith and morals, Clifford writes: "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 consequences, a decline of morality."[274] Indeed, Christianity, as has been already remarked, and as is conclusively shown by any conscientious and unprejudiced examination of the Bible itself, leaves room for an ease of conscience and a self-excuse in even very great sins, which no high standard of morals can tolerate. How many of those who attend church regularly, on Sunday, are restrained by their religion from practising vice and injustice on week-days, under the consolation, if their conscience troubles them at all, that their prayers for forgiveness and the bestowal of charity, or even, in extremity, a death-bed "repentance" will make their peace with God? In place of an attempt at reparation towards men, against whom sin is really done, Christians are taught to seek the "forgiveness" of God. Some there are, indeed, who remember only the law of love and endeavor to follow it. All honor to them. But they are adherents of a modern Christian Philosophy, the product of many good men who have winnowed out the wheat of their religion and left the chaff; they are not followers of the Bible, or even of the New Testament, as a whole. Many there are who are perceiving this, and the old system needs replacement with a newer and higher--with a system which affords clear and evident grounds for moral action, leaves no room for mysticism, self-justification, or inaction, offers no opiate to conscience. Such a system must be founded on the solid rock of scientific Truth; not on any doctrine of blind obedience to traditions; it must take into account man's evolution, that it may progress with his progress.

Many term the Ethics of science dry and uninspiring, and turn, with preference, to religions which, if they give us mysticism or pessimism, give us poetry also; for man is an emotional as well as an intellectual being; and there may be much poetry in pessimism. But again, it may be said that the Truth is that which we should first seek. And especially let it be remembered that, if poetry is lacking, it may be that the deficiency is in ourselves. It is a history many times repeated, that men call their age and its ideas dry and uninteresting, and seek their ideals and inspirations in the past, until the master-mind arises, who boldly faces and interprets the realities about him; and then men exclaim and wonder, and find that their own blindness, and not the age, was at fault. We cling by habit to the old and fear the new; and so we have yet to inspire these new ideals with the beauty gained by association and habit; in themselves, they do not lack beauty. In truth, as I believe that there is more of poetry in the gray wires strung across our streets and guiding the swift, silent, fearful forces in which lies power to light a city or destroy a life, than ever was in any feeble-flamed Grecian lamp, so I believe also that, in the dry, hard, cold-seeming facts of modern science there lurks more poetry than all the ages gone have known; though we may need the poet to interpret it to us. The highest poetry is that of love; and it is the realization of this poetry that the Ethics of Evolution teaches, promises, and enjoins. Certainly the superficial Utilitarianism which looks only at external forms of government and customs and the arithmetically calculated relations of men, not at their inner character and the organic complexity of moral questions, cannot satisfy in the long run. Nor can the bald Materialism satisfy which, standing by its analysis in physical terms like the physiologist in the dissecting-room with his chemicals about him and the dead nerves and muscles in his hand, exclaims with a triumph that is half a sneer: "This is all." It is not all. The synthesis of nature and of life cannot be represented by its parts merely; the bond of organization wanting, all is wanting. Nor is the action in the brain more real, more forceful, more spontaneous, or freer, than the love for a friend, the thought of him, or the will to do him a kindness.

FOOTNOTES:

[256] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 292; Part I., this book, pp. 250, 251.

[257] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 287, etc.; Part I. p. 249, this book.

[258] "Moral Order and Progress," pp. 307, 312; Part I. pp. 250, 252, 253, this book.

[259] "Moral Order and Progress," Book I. Chap. II.; Part I. pp. 231, 232, this book.

[260] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 332.

[261] See "Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Weltalls."

[262] "Moral Order and Progress," p. 270; Part I., this book, p. 247.

[263] On the theory of Weismann.

[264] "Human Progress, Past and Present," "The Arena" for Jan., 1892.

[265] "Ethik," p. 344.

[266] See Part I. p. 147.

[267] "The Science of Ethics," pp. 32-34.

[268] George Eliot, "Romola."

[269] Salter, "Ethical Religion."

[270] It is strange that even enlightened Christians often, without thinking, interpret the "Scriptures" referred to by Christ as if they, in some way, included the New Testament, which was not written till long after his death.

[271] "The Origin of Civilization," p. 373.

[272] Superstitious fears are often awakened in savage tribes, and among the ignorant of our own more advanced societies, by attempts at census-taking.

[273] Pike, "History of Crime," I. p. 405.

[274] Essays and Lectures, "The Influence upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief."