The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

that if people are incapable of sustained effort, no effort is to be expected of them? Are we to decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in moral responsibility? No! because even if we are determinists, we have to take into account the fact that society does for some reason advance. When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current principles, say, of the fourteenth-century man, it is plain that there has been a remarkable rise of the moral temperature, and that our optimistic view of progress is a rational one.

The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races. It is inconsistent to acquiesce in faulty practice and not to acquiesce in the growth of ideals, even though one may believe that the advance is due to some external cause and is not self-developed. If performance is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further improvement. But in dealing with individuals the moralist does well to temper his hopes with a wise determinism, and not to be too much cast down if one to whom he has made clear the disastrous effects of yielding to temptation cannot at once harmonise his purpose and his practice. If it were true, as too many preachers take for granted, that we have all, whatever our difference of physical and mental equipment, an equal sense of moral responsibility, the result would be to plunge us into hopeless pessimism. The question is whether the moralist is justified in pretending, for the sake of the effort that it may produce, to the victim of some moral weakness, that he really has the power of conquering his fault. He may say to himself, "Some people have the power of self-mastery, and it is better to assume that all have, because it tends to produce a greater effort than if one merely tries to console a moral weakling for his deficiencies." But this is a dangerous and casuistical path to tread.

It may be justified perhaps on the medical theory that if you tell a man he will get well, even if you consider him to be doomed, he is more likely to get well than if you tell him that you consider him to be doomed. But it is surely wrong to display no more moral indignation in the case of a vigorous person who has perversely indulged some temptation which he might have resisted, than in the case of one who is hampered by inheritance with a violent predisposition to moral evil. Even the most ardent moralist ought to be true to what he knows to be the truth. The method of Christ seems here again to differ from the method of the Christian teacher. Christ reserved his denunciations for the complacency of virtuous people. We do not see him rebuking the sinner; his rebukes are rather heaped upon the righteous. He seems to have had nothing but compassion for the sins that brought their own obvious punishment, and to have been indignant only with the sins that brought material prosperity with them. He treated the outcast as his friend, the respectable as his enemy. He seems to have held that sin at least taught people to make allowances, to forgive, to love, and that this was the nearest way to the Father's heart. Christ was very critical, and relentlessly exposed those of whom he disapproved, but he was never critical of weakness.

But, we may say, the moral principles which we have won with such difficulty will collapse and fail if we do not make a resolute stand against gross faults and strike at them wherever they show their heads. It is true that we have not got on very fast, but may it not be that we have mistaken the right method? Perhaps we should have got on faster still if we had reserved our indignation for the right things--self-satisfaction, complacency, injustice, cruelty. What we have done is to fight against the faults of the weak, against the faults of which no defence is possible, rather than against the faults of the strong, who can resent and revenge themselves for our criticism. Christ himself seems not to have been afraid of the sins of the flesh, but to have shown his severity rather against the sins of the world. Would it be rash to follow his example? We can all see the havoc wrought by impurity and intemperance, and there are plenty of rich respectable people, chaste and moderate by instinct, who are ready to join in what are called crusades against them. But as long as sins do not menace health or prosperity or comfort, we easily and glibly condone them. As long as Christian teachers pursue wealth and preferment, indulge ambition, seek the society of the respectable, practise pharisaical virtues, we are not likely to draw much nearer to the ideals of Christ.


VI


There is one step of supreme importance from which a man must not shrink, however difficult it may seem to be; and that is to search and probe the depths of his soul, that he may find out what it is that he really and deeply and whole-heartedly and instinctively loves and admires and desires. Without this first step no progress is possible or conceivable, because whatever external revelations of God there may be, through nature, through beauty, through work, through love, there is always a direct and inner revelation from God to every individual soul; and, strange as it may appear, this is not always easy to discern, because of the influences, the ideas, the surroundings that have been always at work upon us, moulding us, for good and for evil, from our earliest days. We have been told that we ought to admire this and desire that, until very often our own inspiration, our true life, has been clumsily obscured. All these conventional beliefs we must discard; we may indeed resolve that it is better in some cases to comply with them to a certain extent for the sake of tranquillity, if they are widely accepted in the society in which we live; that is to say, we may decide to abstain from certain things which we do not believe to be wrong, because the world regards them as being wrong, and because to be misunderstood in such things may damage our relations with others. Thus, to use a familiar instance, we might think it unjust that a landowner should be permitted by the State to have the sole right of fishing in a certain river, and though one's conscience would not in the least rebuke one for fishing in that river, one might abstain from doing so because of the inconvenience which might ensue. Or, again, if society considers a certain practice to be morally meritorious, one might acquiesce in performing it even though one disbelieved in its advisability; thus a man might believe that a marriage ceremony was a meaningless thing, and that mutual love was a far higher consecration than the consecration of a priest; and yet he might rightly acquiesce in having his own wedding celebrated according to the rites of a particular church, for the sake of compliance with social traditions, and because no principle was involved in his standing out against it, or even because he thought it a seemly and beautiful thing. The only compliance which is immoral is the compliance with a practice which one believes to be immoral and which yet is sanctioned by society. Thus if a man believes hunting to be immoral, he must not take part in it for the sake of such enjoyment as he may find in it, or for the sake of friendly intercourse, simply because no penalty awaits him for doing what he knows to be wrong.

The only criterion in the matter is this: one must ask oneself what are the things that one is ashamed of doing, the things for which, when done, one's own conscience smites one in secret, even if they are accompanied by no social penalty whatever, even if they are forgiven and forgotten. These are not the things which one would simply dislike others to know that one has done. One might fear the condemnation of others, even though one did not believe that a particular act was in itself wrong; because of the misunderstandings and vexation and grief and derision that the knowledge of one's action might create. To take an absurd instance, a man might think it pleasant and even beneficial to sit or walk naked in the open air; but it would not be worth his while to do it, because he would be thought eccentric and indecent. There would be people who would condemn it as immoral; but it is not our duty, unless we believe it to be so, to convert others to a simpler kind of morality in wholly indifferent matters.

The sort of offences for which conscience condemns one, but to which no legal penalty is attached, are things like petty cruelty, unnecessary harshness, unkindness, introducing innocent people to evil thoughts and ideas, disillusioning others, disappointing them. A man may do these things and not only not be thought the worse of for them, but may actually be thought the better of, as a person of spirit and manliness; but if for any motive whatever, or even out of the strange duality of nature that besets us, he yields to these things, then he is living by the light of conventional morality and quenching his inner light, as deliberately as if he blew out for mere wantonness a lantern in a dark and precipitous place.

But if a man, looking narrowly and nearly into his own soul, says to himself in perfect candour, I do not desire truth; I do not admire self-sacrifice; I do not wish to be loved; I only wish to be healthy and rich and popular: what then? What if he says to himself in entire frankness that the only reason why he admires what are called virtues is because there seem to be enough people in the world to admire them to add to his credit if such virtues are attributed to him--what of his case? Well, I would have him look closer yet and see if there is not perhaps someone in the world, a mother, a sister, a child, whom he loves with an unselfish love, whom he would willingly please if he could, and would forbear to grieve though he could gain nothing by doing so or abstaining from doing so. I do not honestly think that there is any living being who would not discover this minimum of disinterestedness in his spirit, and upon this slender foundation he must try to build, for upon no other basis than genuine and native truth can any life be built at all.

But as a rule, in most hearts, however hampered by habit and material desires, there is a deep-seated desire to be worthier and better. And all who discern such a desire in their hearts should endeavour to fan it into flame, should warm their shivering hands at it, should frame it as a constant aspiration, should live as far as possible with the people and the books and the art which touches that frail desire into