Chapter LXV: Conclusion (2)

This was a mistake which assigned to the Church work, which what have now become its constitution, its real objects, and the means and forces at its disposal, incapacitate it from doing; and which led the State to abdicate what is now its highest, and really paramount, function. It put both the Church and the State in a wrong position, and on a wrong path. It enfeebled, depraved, and shackled both. It brought them into inevitable conflict with each other. It made them both aim at what could never be more than very imperfectly attained by the means they were respectively endeavouring to employ. Its results were confusion, anarchy, and failure. Hence came about the neglect by the State of national education. And hence the claims of the Church to educate the nation. Hence the fierce contradictions to these claims, expressed in a blind demand, as if that were the only way of effectually contradicting them, for secular education, that is to say, for the exclusion of morality from education, and its limitation to an acquaintance with the instruments of knowledge, plus a little physical instruction. This would make things far worse than they are at present. It would be prohibiting the acquisition, by those who are now the depositories of power, of the knowledge and sentiments requisite for its right use. It would be creating, and setting at work, in the midst of us, the most efficient machinery imaginable for the general demoralization of the community. It would be going some way towards transforming the commonwealth into an aggregation of wild beasts, but of wild beasts possessed of knowledge and reason. The concession of this by the State would be the renunciation of its first and most imperative duty. Hence, in short, all the imbroglio and the evils of the present situation of this great question; and all the misunderstandings and hot conflicts between those on the one hand, whom logic, working with wrong data, has made secularists, but to the exclusion of secular morality, the chief point of all, and, on the other hand, those whose fealty to what is highest and best, and should be supreme in man’s nature, even when regarded only as a political animal, has obliged them to enrol themselves as supporters of (I am afraid we must say internecine) denominational teaching in the education of the people. It is obvious that, as it is the duty of the State to regard the community as a single family, and to endeavour to bring its members to act harmoniously together, it would be better, both theoretically and practically, to exclude the inculcation of these differences from the Schools of the State: that, if it must come, would come with less evil from the denominations themselves.

But truth, reason, right, and History must in the end triumph. It is the duty of the State, and we rigidly exact from it the performance of it, to punish and repress crime: it must, therefore, be its duty, but this we will not allow it to perform, to teach that kind of morality which manifestly has a tendency to prevent the commission of crime. The evil is done when the crime has been committed: _à fortiori_, then, it is better to prevent than to punish it. It is the duty of the State, and we energetically insist on its being discharged effectually, to protect person and property: _à fortiori_, then, it must be its duty to teach that morality which shall dispose men to respect the rights of person and of property. It is the duty of the State to do what it can, within its own sphere, to promote the well-being of its members; we may presume, then, that it is its duty to teach that morality which shall have a tendency, above every thing else the State can do, to secure this great object. How can it be argued that the State does rightly and wisely in neglecting the one means which stands first in the order of nature, and which is emphatically the most efficient, for bringing about its great paramount object? To deny that the means for doing this duty are within its sphere, is to deny that it has any duty at all, except that of punishing. Possibly such means may not be within the sphere, as some define it, of the political Economist. But, though a Statesman ought to be a political Economist, he ought to be something besides. And it may be very bad political Economy to allow in these days the mass of the people to be vicious. This may, in the highest degree, be destructive of wealth. But, at all events, what the Statesman has to lay his measures for is the well-being of the community, of which wealth is only one ingredient; and which, too, may be so distributed, and so used, and productive of such effects and influences, looking at the community generally, as on the whole not to promote its well-being. At all events, man, even when regarded in his social capacity exclusively, does not live either by, or for, bread alone.

The present condition of society is never to be lost sight of. And the two most prominent elements of its present condition are the general diffusion, throughout all classes, of political power, which almost means that the decision of political questions has been entrusted to the most ignorant and uninstructed, because they are the most numerous, part of the community; and the fact that every member of the community is now required to think, and to act, and to take charge of, and to provide for himself. Here are two reasons, which have made it as much the duty of the State to teach, as to repress, and to punish; for knowledge, and this means pre-eminently moral knowledge, has become quite as necessary to it for self-preservation. Though, indeed, punishment is a mode of teaching, and the policeman and the magistrate are a kind of teachers; but it is as unreasonable, as suicidal, to have recourse to no other mode of teaching, and to no other kind of teachers.

I think, then, that none but unstatesmanlike Economists will deny that it is the duty of the State to see to the education of the whole people. The Egyptian Priest, and the Hebrew Prophet, never made, nor could have made, a mistake of this kind; to their apprehension the right training of the people was the paramount duty of a Government—the very purpose and object for which it existed. This must, amongst ourselves, be given mainly in schools established everywhere. We have now at last got so far as to attempt their general establishment. The schools, however, are only machinery; and the great question is, what kind of work this machinery is to do? and the State will not discharge properly its duty in this all-important matter, if it does not take care that the schools shall teach the morality indispensably required, under existing conditions, for the well-being of society. This morality means the principles of Justice, Truth, Temperance, Honesty, Manliness, Forbearance, Considerate Kindliness, Industry, Thrift, Foresight, Responsibility. These are political and social, and perhaps also economical, necessities of modern communities. They are now the first great wants of society. Speaking generally, they can be taught to the masses of the people, and to the whole people, best, and, in fact, only by the State. Every one, I think, must be ready to acknowledge, that if the State, during the last fifty years, had seen to their having been taught, so far as schools and early training could have taught them, to the population of this country, we should be in a widely different position—all the difference being on the right side—from that in which we are at this day.

It is just because the State has made, at best, only half-hearted attempts to do any part of this work, and has even at times loudly proclaimed that it saw that it was not its duty to undertake it, that is to say that it was its duty to renounce its most important duty, that that part of the community in which the moral instinct predominates, has turned to Church organizations, and called upon them to undertake it. And this is a reason why many of this class have been attracted to that particular branch of the Church which advances, most loudly, the most unqualified claims to the superintendence of the whole domain of morality, not making any distinction between that which is social, civil, and political, and that which belongs to the higher sphere of the spiritual life. Had the State seen its duty in this great matter, and endeavoured to act up to it, nothing of this kind would, or could, have occurred. On the contrary: the wisest and best part of the community would have supported it in carrying out what it had undertaken, with their whole heart and soul.

Of course it is a mistake to look to the Church for this kind of work. Neither the Church of Rome, nor any other Church, either in this, or in any other, country, has the means necessary for enforcing this kind of teaching, or even for bringing it home, generally, to the bulk of the population, that is to say to the very part of it which most needs it. Nor under any conjuncture of circumstances, which can be imagined as possible, will they have the means for doing it. And even further, if the powers necessary for the purpose could be conferred upon them, it would be putting them in a false position to call upon them to undertake this mundane, political work. Besides that, the false positions into which events and circumstances have already, more or less, brought all Churches, have so damaged their credit with large proportions of the population, in all the foremost nations of the world, as that their teaching of this kind would not, generally, be received, would even be strenuously resisted; and it would still further weaken them, were they to attempt to teach these things for these purposes. It would bring them before the world as mere instruments of national police—a position that is now so utterly and glaringly at discord with the purpose and idea of a Church, that its assumption would go a long way towards obscuring altogether in men’s minds that purpose, and that idea; far too much in that direction having been done already. We know how disastrous an effect the assumption, to some extent, of this position has had, in this and other countries, on some branches of the Church. This is true now, and will continue to be so, till the Church shall have become an organization in which all of us, laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, who shall be animated by the desire for the higher moral and spiritual life, shall find ready for us places and work; and until, in this matter, the first effort amongst us shall not be to secure this-world power, and social and political position, which must always be accompanied by separations and antagonisms, and is demoralizing, and destructive of the very idea of a Church; but to reform and improve, and to lift above the world; an effort which is actively and fruitfully moral, and of the very essence of the work of a Church. This is truly spiritual work.

Taking things, then, as they are, any Church would be but a bad and inefficient teacher of the political, we may even call it the secular, kind of morality we are now thinking about. While every one can see that, as it is an affair of the State, and comes within its sphere, and is useful for its purposes; and as it is the duty, and the interest, of the State to teach it; and as the State has, and alone has, the power of teaching it, it might be well and properly taught by the State. But it may also be remarked that no Church can afford to give to this work of the State the first place in its thoughts and efforts. Every branch of the Church, from the greatest down to the least, must be occupied, primarily, by its own necessities. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, in the case of Churches as well as of every thing else that has life. The first care, therefore, as things now are, of every Church must be to maintain and enforce its own system; and, as part of the same effort, to weaken those whose systems are opposed to its own. This, however disguised, must be a main object with all of them. That it is so, is very disastrous for Churches; still it is a necessity of their present position. And the efforts that arise out of this necessity can, at the best, be only non-moral: in truth, one cannot but think that they must generally be demoralizing, and even immoral: at all events, they can only be made at the expense of the higher morality, which is the true domain of the Church. But, however much this point may be controverted, the other is an obvious fact, and incontrovertible, that no Church has the power of teaching to the community, and this is especially true of the most numerous and least instructed part of the community, that morality which is now necessary for the well-being of political societies. In this matter there is a wide difference between past and present times. Formerly this teaching, however desirable it might have been, was not indispensable under the old restrictive and paternal systems of society. All that has now passed away. We have drifted from those moorings, and out of those harbours. Our population has been agglomerated into large masses; and these masses have been put into a position to exercise the power which resides in numbers. Every one, too, is now called upon, and this is a most important element in the consideration of what ought to be done, to take care of himself. No class is now put in charge of another class. The moral training, therefore, which these conditions require has become the paramount object and first duty of the State; and, one way or another, perhaps the highest personal mundane interest of every member of the community; and all would do well to demand from the State the discharge of this duty.

That the State should awake to a sense of its duty in this matter, and act up to that awakened sense, would be no encroachment on the domain of the Church. In so doing, indeed, it would set free, and strengthen, the Church for its own proper work. The State cannot do the work of the Church, any more than the Church can do the work of the State. Each has now, distinctly, marked out for it its own sphere, its own aims, its own rights, and its own duties. The world is rapidly advancing to a correct understanding of all this. Each should, properly, by attending to and doing its own work, help the other. Each is necessary to the other. The morality the State has charge of is that which, obviously, contributes to the right ordering and prosperity of the commonwealth generally, and of its members individually. It is such as can be expounded, and made intelligible to all and acceptable to many. Much of it too can be enforced on all. Not, of course, in the old Egyptian fashion, but in a fashion which is in accord with the conditions of modern societies.

There can be few things more mistaken and ridiculous than to urge that the Master of a School, because he is a layman, cannot teach such morality as the State requires for its own maintenance, and for the well-being of its members. He is just as capable as the Minister of Religion, or as any body else, of learning his own proper work. The point that really needs to be seen clearly is that the proper work of the State School Master, and of the Minister of Religion, so differ, as that each is incapable of teaching fully and rightly what ought to be taught by the other. The Minister of Religion puts himself quite in a false position, and contradicts the idea of his office, when he undertakes the work of the State; and the School Master goes out of his way, and passes beyond the work of the State, when he enters on the ground of the Minister of Religion. From the time that civil societies existed, or that men had come to act from a sense of duty, all well disposed Fathers of families, not excluding Masters of Schools, have deemed themselves qualified to teach, and have taught, with more or less success, to their children such ethics as they themselves had attained to a knowledge of, and thought desirable. Let any one refer to the duties I just now enumerated, as socially and politically necessary in these days; and, when he has considered what they are, will he be disposed to assert that a man of ordinary intelligence, the business of whose life it is to teach, whose attention has been particularly directed to this subject, and who has studied it with the knowledge that he must teach it, will, after all, be unable to teach it? Or would any teacher, with that list in his hand, say that it never would be in his power to give lessons on each of the heads it contains; and to see that the practice of the pupils corresponded with what he taught? If the Clergy could do this, why not the Masters of Schools? The fact, however, is that the Clergy cannot, and that the Masters of Schools can.

Nothing else that is taught in Schools can be taught so naturally, so easily, and so surely. Almost everything that occurs, or that is done, supplies ground for a lesson on the subject. In nothing else that we have to teach do we find a foundation laid for our teaching already, as it is here, in the instinctive moral sentiments which have, some how or other, come to be, or, if not, which may be made to be, a part of the pupil’s nature. The discipline, too, of life here again aids the teacher in a manner, which is not the case in anything else he has to teach. The Ethics the State requires may be taught, as the occasion in any, and each, case will suggest to the teacher, either practically, or dogmatically, or scientifically; either with a reference at the moment to the principle of utility, or to the voice of conscience, or to experience. Lessons of this kind may also be set forth in Parables, or illustrative stories: a large proportion of the reading lessons now used in Schools have this aim. Nor would there be many who would object to reference being made, in the teaching of the State School-Master, to the Religious ground, that is to say, to the future life: though of course it is manifest that this would belong rather to the teaching of the Church and of the Minister of Religion. Practically, however, that is with respect to the substance and form of the virtues taught, there would be no antagonism between the two: for even with respect to Charity, which Religion elevates above Justice, the layman would still have something to say in the same sense, for he would show that the kindliness, and consideration for others, he taught supplemented and went beyond Justice. Indeed, what antagonism could there be, seeing that our ideas of the several virtues, wherever they differ from what Aristotle or Cicero would have taught, are what our Religion has made them to all of us alike? The chief difference, indeed, I can make out would be a very small one, for it would be the importance the lay-teacher would have to assign to industry and thrift, secondary virtues of which popular Religion does not take much notice: an oversight which, of course, arises out of popular misapprehensions, such, for instance, as those we are all familiar with in respect of the purpose and character of the present life, of the meaning of faith, and of the teaching of Jesus Christ on the subject of Divine interposition in the current affairs of life.

But, however, this little difference, though indeed it happens to be one that must ultimately disappear, for it arises out of a misconception, will help us to understand the difference between the morality the State requires and that which the Church presents to us. The former is limited to what is useful politically and socially, and for mundane purposes; while that of which the Church has charge (there being ultimately no real contradiction between the two) consists of the same principles, only purified, elevated, and rendered more fruitful by the action of higher motives. It is that which is in thought perfect; the morality of the kingdom of God, that is of those who have been brought to understand that they have a citizenship which is not of this world, and whose conversation is above. It is that morality which is cast in the mould of the ideas we endeavour to form of the moral attributes of the Deity; or rather the application of that to our own present condition: its members endeavour to form God within themselves. This cannot be enforced. The idea of constraint contradicts its nature. Its motives are found in men’s spontaneously engendered conceptions of moral perfection; and in the hope of a future life, which alone can supply a stage and conditions suitable for the complete realization of such conceptions. The rights of the Church are those of humanity to complete freedom in its effort to advance and purify its ideal of the moral and spiritual life. This has been its work from the beginning, though in the early stages of society it embraced the State, and has subsequently often, during the struggles of the State to establish its independence, been in conflict with it: sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both having been in the wrong: all this History explains. Its true position is to be in advance of the State. It elaborates and diffuses that interpretation of man’s nature, and position, and of the knowledge man has attained to, those conceptions of virtue and that morality which the State, following in the wake of the Church, adopts in its own degree and fashion, and makes in such degree and fashion the aims and principles of its legislation. Every virtue, however elementary and indispensable, according to our ideas, might once have been beyond the power and the ken of the State. We can imagine such a condition of things, as that, during its continuance the State would have been unable to enforce and inculcate the principles of common honesty, and even of responsibility. It may once have been so here, just as it is still, to this day, in Dahomey. Scientifically, the condition of Dahomey is as much a part of the subject as the condition of England. The question is, what has brought about the difference? The answer is the Church—the Church that was in Egypt, that was in Israel, that was in Greece, that was in Rome, that was in the forests of Germany, that has been, and is, amongst ourselves. The Church has, all along, been going before and shaping, little by little and step by step, higher and clearer conceptions of right, and of duty, and of life; and the State has followed, little by little and step by step, accepting and adopting what the Church had made possible for it. Its position has generally been, and _ex rerum naturâ_ it must be so, behind the Church. This is seen distinctly in the early days of Christianity. The Church was then working out, and diffusing, much that the State afterwards recognized and acted upon. This is their true relation to each other. It is not merely that the nation, organized for its immediate mundane wants, is the State, and that humanity, organized for the needs of its higher life, is the Church; but that, besides this, in the progress of society and of humanity, each is indispensable to the other. Universal History tells us this: and from universal History, in a matter of this kind, there is no appeal. And what universal History tells us the History, as far as it goes, of the two famous buildings before us confirms.

And now we must take off our thoughts from the two great organizations of society, whose action and interaction have all along been at work in shaping our political, social, and moral growth, and making us what we are, symbols of which, in the two buildings before us, we have been looking upon, and must turn our thoughts to the great million-peopled city itself, of the existence of which we are reminded, at the spot where we have taken our stand, chiefly by a few lordly mansions, glimpses of which we catch, here and there, through the trees. What variety of life is stirring within its widely differing regions! How much energy and power, and how much waste of power, and neglect of opportunity, are there! What principles are struggling into existence! What principles are dying out! What a conflict of principles is going on! We shall think not only of the lordly mansions environing the parks that are spread out before us, but equally of the commercial city on the banks of the river, and of the moiling and toiling, the rough and gin-drinking myriads of the manufacturing quarters of this world-capital. We shall, in our thoughts, set by the side of what is refined, and intellectual, and energetic, what is frivolous and enfeebled, what is rough, and degraded, and vicious. We shall become sensible of the uncertainties, as well as of the power, of the great intellectual and moral organism that is at work all around us.

How much is there that is good and hopeful in all classes, and how much in all that is evil, and evil enough almost to cause despondency! How vast and complex is the whole! Your thought enables you to understand that the railway and the telegraph have made the city in which you are standing the centre of English business and life, in a manner that was impossible formerly; and more than that, for the ocean steamers and electric cables have made it the centre of the business of the world. How does the imagination, when stirred by the suggestions of the scene, picture to itself the fashion in which are peopled the decks and saloons of the great steamships that are hurrying, outward and homeward, on all seas and oceans, to carry out the plans that have been originated and matured here! You think, too, of the countless messages that are flashing to and fro, beneath those seas and oceans, every moment, for the same purpose. Here is the heart of the world. The life-sustaining blood, in the form of human thought, and which carries along in itself the elements of construction as well as of life, is ever going forth from this heart, and coming back to it again. How many tens of thousands of steam-engines, in as many mines and factories, are throbbing and working to supply the wants, and maintain the wealth, of this manifold Babylon we have built. Of this wealth we see an exhibition here every day; for this is the spot for the daily parade of one of its braveries. How have the corn-fields and meadows of this island been solicited year by year to yield more and more, and how widely have Australian and African wildernesses been peopled with flocks and herds, for the enlargement of this wealth. This has on its surface only a material aspect. It is true that its first and most obvious result is to give wealth, and the enjoyment of wealth; and that neither of these are necessarily and in themselves good: for if wealth lead only to the self-bounded fruition of wealth it is deadening, corrupting, and degrading: and of this there is in the city around you much. But, however, this is not all its effect. It has given to many minds culture and leisure, which they have devoted to advancing the intellectual wealth of man; and it has produced many who have devoted themselves, according to the light that was within them, and prompted by the noblest impulses of our nature, to the improvement of the moral condition of those with whom they come in contact. Which of the two preponderate, the good or the bad effect of the sum of all that is going on, we need not attempt to estimate here. But to whichever side the balance may incline at the present moment, we believe that the bad will perish, as it has done in past times, and that the good only will survive—for only what is good and true is eternal.

And now we turn from the many who are wealthy to the greater many who are poor, and are carrying on a painful struggle for bare existence, in this vast assemblage of humanity: and here, too, we find mingled with what there is of good much that is evil. Here, as with the wealthy, are aims that are unwise, springing from misleading instincts which society has, carelessly and ignorantly, allowed to be formed in its bosom, and which tend in the individual to unhappiness and degradation, and in society itself to disorder and subversion.

All this must be taken in by the mind in order that the scene before us may be rightly understood. We could not interpret the scenes of old Egypt till we had formed some conception of what old Egypt was, and we must endeavour to do the same for our corresponding English scene. It is in this way only that the study and understanding of old Egypt can be of any use to us. It is only when we understand both that we are in a position to ask the question whether old Egypt has anything to teach us.

It tells us that the aims of society must be moral; and that the morality required can, within certain limits, be created and shaped, and made instinctive, where society itself honestly wishes and intelligently endeavours to do it. But as we look upon old Egypt we see that the morality we need is not precisely what they imagined and established, and that we are precluded from attempting to establish what we want in the fashion of old Egypt. Theirs was a system of constraint, ours must be a system of freedom. Theirs was a system that concentrated its highest advantages on a few, ours must be a system that opens its advantages to all. We must present what we have to offer in such a form that men will voluntarily accept it for themselves and for their children, and allow it to shape them. If we see distinctly what we have to do, and the conditions under which we have to do it, this will be in itself the achievement of half our work. Their method was to devise a system, in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it then stood, and place it as a yoke upon society. They could do that: we cannot. Our method must be accepted freely by society, and by the individual. We, too, must devise a system in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it now stands; and it must be such as approves itself to the understanding and the conscience of the men of these times. The successful fulfilment of the first requirement will, probably, include the second.

Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, each did the work that had been allotted to it. What we have to do is not to repeat what any one of them did. That, indeed, we could not do; and, if we could, it would be of no use to us. Imitations at all times, but more particularly when circumstances differ, are worthless and disorganizing. And yet what each of them did was necessary for us. The work we have to do now is a great advance upon theirs, and is to be done under very different conditions from theirs, but is so connected with theirs that we cannot dispense with their foundations, or with the principles they worked with. We need them all, but we must use them in the way our work requires. When men came to build with stone, they did not abandon all the principles of construction they had worked out for themselves during the time they had built with wood. Those principles were right as far as they went. They were not all bad, and worthless, and inapplicable to the new material and its grander possibilities. What had to be done was to incorporate the new principles that were needed with those from among the old that would still be serviceable. The purpose and object of building, whatever the materials might be, continued one and the same. And so, now that we have come to use glass and iron largely in architecture, the same process is again repeated. Some new principles may be introduced, but we do not discard all the old ones. Just so is it with the social fabric.

The great and governing differences in our case are that what we have to do is to be done for all, and that this is accompanied with the condition of not partial, but universal freedom. It never was so with any of the old peoples. And though our work is new in some of its conditions, and such as, in its reach and variety, was never dreamt of by the four great teacher nations of antiquity, there is no more reason for our failing in it than there was for their failing in theirs. That it is to be done is, in some sort, proof that it may be done. Indeed, there is apparently more reason for our success than there was for theirs. We have their experience; and in the principles of universal freedom, and universal justice, we have more to commend what ought to be done now to men’s hearts and understandings then they had. Freedom, knowledge, truth, justice, goodness; these must be our aims, our means, our statecraft, our religion. We do not go off the old tracks. They all converge into our path. And so we find that we are advancing, having history for guide, through new conditions, into a richer and better life, placed within the reach of an ever increasing proportion of the community.

The greatest, perhaps, of the advantages that will be found in our wealth is that it will enable us to confer on every member of the community such knowledge and such training as shall have an hopeful, perhaps a preponderant, tendency towards making instinctive, at all events in the minds of the greater number, a rational use of the freedom they already possess, and the love and practice of truth, justice, and goodness. Though, indeed, when we look at the educational efforts of Saxony, of Switzerland, and of New England, we are almost brought to fear that this great and necessary work will be undertaken more readily and intelligently, and done sooner and better, among people, who have less of the material means for carrying it out than ourselves. In saying this, I do not at all mean that we should confine our efforts merely to what they have done, for they have, to a great extent, omitted that morality which I consider the main point of all; but that we should be much better than we are, if we had done as much as they, with their very inferior means, have already accomplished.

In Egypt submission and order; in Israel, though labouring under most cruel disadvantage, during its better days belief in and devotion to right, and during its latter days the determination to maintain at any cost its morality and religion; at Athens the appreciation of intellectual culture; in the Roman Empire, by the mere working of its system, the idea of the supremacy of the law, and the sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind—were made instinctive. Why should we despair of doing as much for what we need? Our task, indeed, though so much grander, and promising so much more fruit than theirs, does not appear as hard as theirs. If it be beyond our powers, then modern society is but a fermenting mass of disorder and corruption. It cannot be so, however; for if it were, then the long course of History would now have to be reversed. All the progress of the Past, and all its hard-won achievements, would prove without purpose; and there would remain for us only to despair of truth, of right, of religion, and of humanity itself.

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was written in 1871. It was in the following year, that is, in the interval between the first and the second edition of this work, that the Livingstone-search Commissioner of the ‘New York Herald’ found the great African explorer.

[2] Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of this Chapter by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The following appear to be the steps in the process, by which they endeavour to reach this conclusion. There was, in remote times, on the banks of the Euphrates, a Priest Class, which, on the supposition that in its sacred and literary language, there are some traces of the early Turanian form of speech, might have had a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is rather an eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.) This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably, have had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of Egypt. (There is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its antiquity was as great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.) Therefore the Egyptians might have had a Turanian origin. To put the argument abstractedly: We may imagine two presumable possibilities; the first of which possesses little probability, and the second still less; and then by the juxta-position of the two reach a desired conclusion. In other words, some degree of probability will be the product of the multiplication of the non-probability of a first assumption by the improbability of a second. This is the form of argument by which probability is inferred from the accumulation of improbabilities.

Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may have in store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an unlikely supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and Religion were, aboriginally, Turanian.

[3] It is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the Lake-villages of Switzerland cultivated, in the prehistoric period, as may be seen in the Zurich collection of objects from the sites of these villages, the same variety of wheat—that which we call Mummy, or hen-and-chickens wheat—as the old Egyptians. Did the first immigrants into Europe, of whom we may suppose that we have some historical traces, for the Etruscans may have been, and the Laps, Finns, and Basques may still be, surviving fragments of their settlements, bring with them this variety of wheat at the same time that another swarm from the same Central Asian hive were taking it with them to the Valley of the Nile.

[4] I am led to propound this conjecture from a desire to render intelligible what Herodotus says of their hair and skin; for we know, both from the old paintings and from the existing mummies, that the true Egyptian’s skin was not black, and that there was no kink in his hair. It is impossible then to take his statement as it stands; and I can imagine no other way of correcting it.

The difficulty here I conceive to be of just the reverse kind to that which meets us in his statement, that the circumference of Lake Mœris was 450 miles; and which, therefore, in the chapter on the Faioum, I endeavoured to render intelligible by just the reverse process, that is to say, by suggesting that, while we suppose he is speaking of the Lake only, he is really speaking of the whole of a vast system of artificial irrigation, of which the lake was the main part. Here he is speaking of a part of the Egyptian population, only he puts what he says in such a way that we suppose that he is speaking of the whole of it.

I will take the opportunity of this note to propound an explanation of Homer’s having sent Jupiter, and all the gods, to Oceanus, to feast, for twelve days, with the irreproachable Ethiopians. We immediately ask, Why with the Ethiopians? Why are they irreproachable? What have they got to do with Oceanus? Why to feast? Why for so long a period? Why all the gods? The light, in which things are viewed in this book enables us to see an answer to each of these questions.

Homer, we know, was acquainted with the magnificence of Thebes. In his time, and for many centuries before, the Phœnicians had, through commercial intercourse, been closely connected with the Greeks; having, during the whole of that time, been an autonomous dependency, or dependent ally, of the Egyptians, who, in going to and from their head-quarters on the Euphrates, had kept open a line of communication through Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt, the chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes. There was plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over. Sethos and Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded Homer’s day by four or five centuries. And, as such things never lose in telling, Homer’s contemporaries must have had no very inadequate—we now know that they could hardly have had exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth of Thebes. He mentions the great amount of its military population; its hundred gates, which, as no traces of walls of fortification for the city have been found, meant, probably, the propylons of the temples; and its vast wealth. He knew probably that Egypt consisted of an Upper and of a Lower Egypt, and that the inhabitants of the Upper country were darker, and that in the extreme south, as then understood, the complexion became quite black; and so, to distinguish them from the maritime Egyptians, he calls them Ethiopians. He uses the same word as an epithet of dark objects, as of wine and bronze. And here among these Ethiopians was the wondrous Thebes. When the Phœnicians had told the inquisitive Greeks of its mighty temples, and of its incalculable wealth, they must have described its commerce, the source, to a very considerable extent, of its greatness. For centuries it had been the emporium of the trade of India, Arabia, and Africa. This, and its position in the supposed extreme south, to Homer’s mind, connected it with the outer, world-surrounding ocean. What was told to him, and to his contemporaries, of the tides and monsoons of the Indian Ocean, suggested to them, and most aptly, only the idea of a stream. They heard of tides on the Atlantic also; hence his mighty stream of circum-ambient ocean. As to the trade of Thebes, all international wholesale trade in those times, and in that part of the world, was carried on in the courts and sacred enclosures of temples. The greatness of the temples was, in some measure, an indication of the greatness of the trade. The great festivals were, in substance, only great fairs. Trade was then under the guardianship of Religion. Society was not yet sufficiently organized for the protection of trade: for such a purpose the civil power could hardly as yet be said to exist. Religion alone had either the wisdom, or the power, to enforce fair dealing, or to ward off violence. At the season, therefore, that the great annual caravans arrived from the interior, and the easterly monsoons wafted the merchandise and products of Arabia and India to Egypt, to be bartered for those of Africa (and the caravans were doubtless so arranged as that their arrival synchronized with that of the ocean-borne traffic), there were great processions and feasts at the temples. Religion then put on its most imposing aspect. We have now only to recall the number of temples in the sacred enclosure at Thebes (this enclosure itself meant order and protection), and then we shall have all the materials requisite for enabling us to understand every particular of Homer’s statement. Jupiter goes to the Ethiopians, because he was the chief god of Thebes. But there are temples enough for all the gods, and so they all accompany him. Here they meet, we see why, Oceanus. It is a great festival of many days. This is intelligible. We see why these Ethiopians are irreproachable. In an age of piracy and violence they enforce, with all the authority of Religion, the order, fair dealing, and abstinence from all kinds of violence, and ensure the security, necessary for trade; and which had made the trade they were protecting and fostering the greatest, at that time, in the world. Their singular irreproachableness might be measured by their unparalleled prosperity, and their unparalleled prosperity accounted for by their singular irreproachableness; and both might be explained by their profound and all-embracing piety. This made them irreproachable. This made them prosperous. This ensured the presence of all the gods at their twelve days’ Feast.

[5] Throughout this chapter I distinguish between the idea, and the doctrine, of a future life. There may be some traces of the idea in the Old Testament; though I believe that they are not so numerous, or so distinct, as many suppose. And what there may be of this kind is certainly counterbalanced by the general tenor of the documents with respect to this subject, and by some distinct statements in the opposite sense. What I affirm is, that there is no trace of a doctrine of a future life. A doctrine on such a subject is a categorical averment of it, unmistakably announced, and unmistakably used as a motive for shaping the whole life. Of such an averment, so used, I assert, and endeavour to account for, the absence.

[6] It has been pointed out to me by a reader of the first edition of this book, that there is a great similarity between the above paragraph and a passage in Bishop Butler’s _Analogy_. But as I have not seen that great work since my Oxford days, now thirty-two years ago, I think I may be allowed to leave it standing with an acknowledgment of unconscious reminiscence.

[7] NOTE.—After the foregoing Chapter was in type, it occurred to me to apply the light of the fact it accounts for to some prominent particulars of the Old Testament. Here are a few of the results: Moses gives as a reason for our first parents having been driven out of Paradise, that God desired to preclude the possibility of their eating of the fruit of a certain tree, whereof if they were to eat they would become immortal; and that He afterwards carefully guarded the tree from them by Cherubims, and a flaming sword that turned every way. This was to prevent their becoming immortal. Previously, too, God had threatened that, if they disobeyed a certain commandment, they should become incapable of immortality (for the context shows that this was the meaning intended); and, on their disobedience, God had passed on them the sentence that they should return to the dust out of which they had been made. There can be no reasonable doubt but that in this part of the introductory history a foundation is designedly laid for the absence of the doctrine of a future life from the dispensation; and objections to its absence answered by anticipation. Popular hermeneutics, however, are incapable of explaining these particulars, notwithstanding the significant prominency assigned them in the narrative.

Again, on the theory of the popular interpretation, we can see no reason why Isaiah should have placed the ultimate suppression of evil, and the complete triumph of good, on this earth. That would be of no advantage to the generation to which he had to address himself; and it would be an arrangement that would give nothing to those who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and everything to those who had done nothing. The difficulty, however, vanishes, when we remember that he had no doctrine of a future life, or of any other stage than this earth for man. Everything, therefore, that was to be brought about, must be brought about on this earth, and during this earthly life, which were all.

Our fact also accounts for the conspicuous, and otherwise inexplicable, want of proselytizing zeal in the old Israelites. They quite believed that the best thing for man was the knowledge of God; but they had no disposition to communicate this knowledge. The reason was that the advantages of this knowledge were temporal. Had, therefore, Jehovah been brought to give protection, wealth, and strength to their neighbours, with whom they were generally in a state of hostility, it would have been a hurt to themselves. So soon as the objects of religion became moral only, and not of this world, Israelites had abundance of zeal for making proselytes among their neighbours.

Doubtless other particulars will occur to the reader, which, like those I have just noted, are explicable only by the aid of the direct opposite to that which the popular interpretation assumes, this direct opposite being, in fact, the most prominent and distinctive of the peculiarities of the dispensation.

[8] Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.—_Acts_ vii. 22.

[9] In ‘Land and Water,’ of February 3rd, 1872, may be found an interesting account of the way in which D. (Lord Ducic) stalked, killed, and ultimately secured the sunken carcass of one of the few stragglers that may now occasionally be seen to the north of the cataract. It was a full-grown specimen, and, as the evidence of its stomach proved, a child-eater. _Jure occisus est._ The scene was 3° 32´ north of the cataract.

[10] M. de Lesseps has lately raised these charges 50 per cent., having made the discovery that the chargeable tonnage of a steamship includes the space required for engines and fuel. As well might he, after having charged a sailing vessel for its cargo-space, assess at so much more the scantling of its spars, and the spread of its canvas. At all events this method of charging is not after the fashion in which he himself originally interpreted those terms of the concession, which fix the rate at which ships using the Canal may be charged.

INDEX.

Abraham, his genealogy, 29.
At the Pyramids, 83.
At Heliopolis, 119.
Bargaining with Ephron, 337

Abydos, 97-104.
Ride to, 98.
Its Palace and Temple, 100;
its Tablet, 101.
Antiquity of its civilisation, 102-104

Acacia, 411

Achmed and Hodge, 396-401

Agriculture, Egyptian, favoured early civilization, 13-15.
Syrian, 245

Alexandria, 448-457

Alkali, Egyptians used, in washing, 367

Amasis, 277

Amenemha III., his register of risings of the Nile, 5, 114.
Engineered Lake Mœris, 114

American, an, on the Pyramids, 85.
The ⸺ pig, 433

Amunoph, 124.
His Colossus, 150

Apries, or Pharaoh Hophra, 277

Arabs sleep in the open air, 99.
Truthfulness and honesty of, 176.
Superstitions, 359-364

Arch, date of the, in Egypt, 142.
Why not used, 294.
Date of the pointed, 464

Art, style of Egyptian, 36

Arts, antiquity of useful, 44

Aryan ancestors of Egyptians might have come from the Persian Gulf,
38.
Date, 40.
Their belief in a future state, 35, 195

Ashdod, siege of, 275

Ass, the, 424

Assassef, 151

Assyrian Dynasty at Bubastis, 271.
They overrun Egypt, 272

Assouan, Governor of, 168.
Camel-riding at, 421

Astronomer Royal for Scotland on the Pyramids, 63, 65

Awe, its place in religion of Egypt, 127

Backsheesh, 45-51

Bahr Jusuf, 103, 106, 475

Bargaining, 337, 469

Basques, possible origin of, 40, 44

‘Beginning’ of 1st Ch. of Genesis, 264

Belief, travel and, 244-256

Belzoni, 138

Benihassan, 173

Bethany, girl of, 47-49

Bethlehem, women of, 50

Birds in Egypt, 436-440

Birket el Keiroon, 106, 111, 112

Bitter Lakes, 486

Bottled-up labour, Capital is, 59

Boulak Museum, wooden statue in, 72-74.
Chephren’s statue in, 74

Brotherhood, doctrine of, 318.
Overthrew Egyptianism, 320.
Its subsequent history, 322

Bubastis, 270.
Festival of, 278.
Canal of, 473, 475

Buffalo, the, 433

Builders, Orientals great, 467

Buildings, cause of disappearance of, 77.
Destruction of, in Egypt, 79.
In the Delta, 266-289.
Preservation of, in Upper Egypt, 290-298.
Why large, and constructed of large stones, 293

Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ 190

Cairo, 458-471

Caliphs, tombs of the, 467

Camel, 417-423

Canalization of the Isthmus, 472-493

Capital, what ⸺ is, and how it acts, 59.
What it will do for the East, 394

Caste, origin of, 34.
How used by the Egyptians, 311.
Survey of the phenomena of, 332-336

Christianity has no written law, 211, 213, 215, 217, 220, 229, 233,
318.
Why ⸺ triumphed in Egypt, 320.
Why ⸺ failed, 321.
Was a protest, 509.
What it dealt with, 516

Chronology, early, 75, 81