01 Introductory,

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.

IT is the purpose of this essay to set forth the answer contained in the Christian Revelation to the question which Moral Philosophy has asked, and must ask : What is the rationale of man’s moral nature? The answer to this question will be found in the conception of Holiness as we have it in the New Testament. What that conception is, and how it was foreshadowed in the Old Testament, I hope to shew in the following chapters. But it is obvious that it is useless to attempt to answer any question, unless the meaning of it be first apprehended. It will be necessary then to devote the earlier chapters of this essay to a preliminary enquiry into the principles of Ethics; for only so can we see the real purport of the problem, the solution of which is required. But while an incursion into the region of the science of ethics is a desideratum in order that we may get a clear notion of the question at issue, I wish to state plainly that this essay is not intended to be a treatise on ethics. It is primarily concerned with dogmatic theology, which it will utilise for the supply of an answer to the question propounded by Moral Philosophy. And it is important to make a clear distinction between ethics as a science and ethical or moral philosophy. It belongs to the science of ethics to discover from observation, including of course introspection, since it is man himself that is to be observed, what man’s moral nature is, and to come at the facts of the moral life. This is science. But moral philosophy, starting from an already acquired knowledge of the facts, proceeds to question their meaning, and to come at their reason. And in speaking of their reason we mean something other than their cause. Science concerns itself with cause and effect; philosophy seeks to penetrate into the reason of things, to come at their meaning, their teloj (telos)?

Confusion must inevitably arise when science and philosophy are not clearly discriminated. It is the function of both of these to enter into the reason of things; but this word ’ reason ’ is somewhat elastic, and care must always be exercised to have clearly before the mind the sense attaching to it in any particular connection. When we speak of the scientific reason of any thing, we mean what we may call its reason retrospectively; but the reason of things as philosophy has to do with them is their prospective reason. When science questions the Why of a phenomenon, it is that it may discover its cause, and the means by which it has come about; but when philosophy asks the Why of things, it seeks rather to know whereto they are directed, for what purpose they are. We might illustrate the distinction by saying that a reason of the eye to the philosopher is sight; but this would not be a scientific reason for the eye. For science would want rather to get at the stages by which the eye came to be, and to know why, the eye being formed, it is formed as it is; and why, being what it is, it is an instrument of sight. We sometimes say that we do not see the reason of a phenomenon, and by this we mean that we do not understand its cause, what has made it to happen. This would be the reason in the scientific sense of the word. But when we say that we do not see the good or use of something in nature, we express our ignorance of the philosophical reason of it.

Now it may seem to some minds that philosophy is pure speculation, and that we can never know whether the conclusions of the speculation are correct or not. Science on the other hand is sure, and its results verifiable. It is the case that some scientific minds are prejudiced against philosophy which it seems to them but waste of time to pursue, carrying us, as it does, into regions where we are lost through our inability to verify what we have guessed at. But the fact remains that the human mind is naturally philosophical, and we can no more refuse to satisfy the craving after a knowledge of the reason of things than we can decline to heed the pangs of hunger when we feel them. For it must be remembered that the reason of things includes the reason of ourselves. We naturally want to know what is meant by ourselves, what we are here for, and what is our destiny. It is absurd to prejudge the case and to say that no answer to these questions can be found. As a matter of fact, looking back over the world’s history, we see that when man has found an answer to the question as to the reason of him- self, he has been able to live more truly than before. Life has become richer and nobler; and we count ourselves qualified in some measure to judge of its richness and nobleness. This is a fact that moral science has to take account of.

Again, as a matter of history, we know that philosophy, speculative unaided philosophy, failed to discover a reason for man himself which gave true satisfaction to the human mind and heart. And at last philosophy was glad to welcome the light which revelation was able to throw upon those very problems with which philosophy had concerned itself. Dogmatic theology claims to give an authoritative answer to the question which philosophy raises. It supplies a philosophy which appeals to the human reason as does speculative philosophy, which rests on no other authority than its own intrinsic reasonableness. And it is a presumption in favour of revelation being what it claims to be, if it furnishes such an answer to the questions philosophy has already asked as will commend itself to the human reason as likely to be correct. A point which will here be contended for is, that the answer given by revelation or dogmatic theology to the question proposed by moral philosophy as to the reason of man’s moral nature is intrinsically reasonable; that it is indeed far more reasonable than any answer which speculative philosophy, ignoring the aid of revelation, is able to give. I know that to many the very epithet ’ dogmatic ’ will sound terrible. Dogmatism is the very last thing that people care for to-day. They ask for argument and reason, not for dogma, I recognise the justice of their request, and I here state that I am not going to dogmatise but to reason. The argument is this: Men ask for some reason of themselves; to what end they are what they are, and so forth. They want to know what to make of themselves. They seek a philosophy of life. Has any been given which can satisfy them? There is a philosophy of life contained in the New Testament which claims to be authoritative, claims that is to be divinely given. Let us ignore at first its claims of authority, and ask only what this philosophy is. Let us examine it as we should examine any other system of philosophy and study its reasonableness. In doing this we are not troubling ourselves as to whether man thought out this philosophy or whether he received it from heaven. The point is : What is it? Is it reasonable? There are no anathemas compelling us to believe it against our reason. The appeal is essentially to the reason. And this record of revelation contained in the New Testament, with its philosophy of human life, also claims to give some knowledge of God. Now respecting the Divine life man can of course know nothing a priori, but of human life he does know something, and, if we may so say, he has a right to an opinion about it. Dogmatic theology, as we have it in the Christian books of the New Testament, is partly concerned with man and partly with God. It is true that the derivation of the word ’ theology ’ suggests that this is all about God and not at all about man; and it is possible that the popular objection to dogmatic theology arises from a notion that in it man is puzzling himself about questions which he is incapable of understanding, that he is pretending to comprehend what he cannot comprehend. However this may be, let it be explained that by dogmatic theology is not here meant merely what the New Testament professes to reveal about God, but also what it reveals about man; it includes, that is to say, a philosophy of human life. As then we know something of man apart from revelation, let us simply ask what the so-called revelation has to say of the meaning, the reason of this something we know. Does it throw any light upon it? It will be found that it sheds a most welcome light on what would otherwise be unexplained. And further, the philosophy of human life as it is supplied by dogmatic theology is not only speculatively reasonable; it supplies also a working hypothesis of life. This hypothesis not only can work but it has worked; and the Christian Church, spite of all its imperfections (and they are many indeed), is the proof of this. History tells us what has been the effect upon the world of the Christian philosophy of life. In spite of the fact that there have been among professing Christians many travesties of this philosophy, it yet remains true that what men count good in the world to-day is to be traced to the Christian view of human life. And if the holding of the Christian philosophy has for its result the making of man into just that which his philosophy sets before him as his reason or meaning in the scheme of the universe, we have a further proof of its reasonableness. Is there then anything unreasonable in putting ourselves voluntarily to school under the authority that has given us this philosophy of life whose reasonableness we have once allowed? If Jesus Christ has so revealed God as that the Divine character is itself the explanation of man’s moral nature according to the highest demands of reason, shall we say that it is unreasonable to take His word about God Himself, of Whom we should otherwise be ignorant? For we can know nothing of God apart from a revelation He may make of Himself.

It may seem that we are here adopting an entirely new apologetic, and that we are tacitly assenting to the principles of Rationalism. But a candid reflection on the line here taken will make it clear that while an appeal is here made to the reason, no claim is made that the reason of itself is able to get at the meaning of the universe and man’s place therein. Rationalism repudiates authority altogether, but true reason can accept an authority which has once justified itself to reason. But we have passed from speaking of the reason of things to the human reason, and it is desirable to have clearly in our minds what this transition involves; and we must enquire whether there is a proper connection of thought between what we have called the reason of things and the human reason.

What do we mean by human reason? First of all we may say that we do not mean something separable from the human personality. There is not an Ego and a reason; but there is an Ego who reasons. Reasoning is a power, a function of the Ego, and the power to reason we call the reason. But there is no such thing as reason. It has not substance. It is only an abstraction. We know that we are and that we reason, and so we say that we have reason. Reason then is an element of our personality and inseparable from it save in thought. When we speak of appealing to a man’s reason, we really mean appealing to the man himself as one capable of reasoning. A man is not at one time a reasoning being, and at another a moral being, and at another something else. He is always himself, and when he reasons it is himself reasoning, himself, all the time that he is reasoning, a moral being. I do not think it necessary to stop now to speak at length of what is meant by saying that a man is a moral being. To that we shall come in the next chapter. What is now insisted on is that, whatever abstractions we may make of man’s powers these are but abstractions and not realities save in relation to the Ego. When then man reflects on the reason of things, it is the man and not the reason of man that is reflecting. The very power he has to reflect on the reason of things, whether the scientific or philosophical reason of them, we call his reason, but it is not reason but a man reflecting, a man with all his powers.

It may be questioned how far it is justifiable to speak of the reason of animals lower in the scale of creation than man. Some would say that animals have intelligence but not reason. But it seems to me that some animals are endowed with reason in an elementary degree. They have a certain power to discern cause and effect, and this may be called reason. But it is very much a matter of definition. I do not see why it should be considered necessary that reason should be conscious of itself to be entitled to be called reason. Reason does not of course come to maturity until the being in possession of it knows of his possession. Man has what the brutes have not, both speculative and moral reason; but men have these in very varying degrees, and the savage may have no consciousness of an endowment of moral reason and yet his action may be affected by it. We may say that man in general has a power to form ideals but the power is slight in the savage. The power to form ideals arises from the possession of moral reason.

What I am here calling moral reason will be seen to include what Kant calls " practical reason." Practical reason, according to Kant, is reason determining the will. But moral reason, while it does this, does something more. By it we are able to judge of the dignity or worth of being, and even to speculate on the divine character.

There is reason determining action but not the will, reason determining, that is to say, action as distinguished from conduct. We speak of the action of brutes but not of their conduct. The term conduct is applicable to man because he is endowed with moral reason. The end of all action with the brutes is determined by instinct, but the means whereby the instinct is to be satisfied may be partly reasoned. With man the end of conduct is determined by moral reason, but there must be, I believe, also an accompanying instinct. Of this more in later chapters.

What I am anxious to make clear here is that man’s estimate of the reason of things is necessarily conditioned by the fact that he is endowed with moral reason and not simply with speculative reason, which is that whereby he discerns cause and effect and traces the universal reign of law and order.

I shall speak in the next chapter of the relation of conscience to moral reason, but it will be seen at once that there is no necessary antagonism either between reason and faith, or between reason and authority. Indeed I should go so far as to say that the highest form of faith would be quite impossible to a being who had not moral reason, and some degree of faith would seem to be a necessary accompaniment of moral reason. Nor again can any reasonable being exercise faith to order, impelled that is by authority, until that authority has first justified itself to reason. And even when this justification has been made, it needs to be constantly renewed. If what purports to be a divine revelation contains what is contrary to reason, its authority is inevitably weakened in men’s minds. Whatever we find in Revelation as new and un- discovered before by reason, we shall believe just so far as we believe the Revelation to be divinely given and so authoritative. If we find ourselves unable to believe the contents of the Revelation, our faith in it will be shaken. Our belief then in the Revelation, our acceptance of it as authoritative, may be weakened or strengthened by examination of its contents. But it is most important to judge of it first of all by what it says of something about which we know, and not by what it has to say of something of which we know nothing. But it will be said that it is a new line of defence which is being here adopted, and it will be asked whether the appeal to miracles is to be entirely superseded. What is the value of miracles to prove that a revelation is divine? This is really the question that has to be faced.

Paley’s argument, of the insufficiency of which I am more and more convinced, is this : If a revelation is to be given it can only be by miracles. Let then the reality of the miracles be established and you have a proof that the revelation of which they were the seal is divine.

I am quite ready to acknowledge that Paley has proved satisfactorily that according to the belief of the first propagators of the Christian religion miracles really had taken place. But Paley has not shown, nor could he have shown, that those who, as he says, " passed their lives in labours, dangers and suffer- ings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of those accounts," believed the Revelation to be divine because of the miracles they had witnessed. Nor can you convince men to-day that the Christian Revelation was divinely given by arguing that miracles prove it so to be. And even if miracles help to convince those who witness them, the same cannot be said of their effect on those who hear of them eighteen hundred years afterwards and are themselves not eye-witnesses. If men are to be con- vinced by miracles at all, these must be miracles which they themselves witness. I am disposed to agree with Hume that "a miracle can never be proved so as to be the foundation of a system of religion." But it may be said : Is not the miracle of the Resurrection the foundation of the Christian religion? Unless the Resurrection is a fact of history where is the value of the Christian faith? To such questions as these, supposing them to be put, I should answer that to attempt to prove the miracle of the Resurrection apart from the moral appeal made by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ would be futile. A system of religion, while it must rest on fact and not on fiction to be of any value, must yet appeal to man’s moral reason.

It is just here as it seems to me that Paley’s Evidences and Moral Philosophy fail. He regards the Creator as benevolent and as providing for the good of his creatures, but he looks upon Revelation as simply a making known of what God wills men to do in order that they may attain to happiness in the next life. But there seems to be in Paley’s teaching an utter lack of the thought that Revelation is a Revelation of God and not simply a Revelation given by God of human duty. Characteristic of his utterances is the following passage from his Moral Philosophy [Book V., Chapter ix.] : " Had Jesus Christ delivered no other declaration than the following, ’ The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth : they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation’; he had pronounced a message of inestimable importance, and well worthy of that splendid apparatus of prophecy and miracles with which his mission was introduced and attested; a message in which the wisest of man- kind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts, and rest to their enquiries. It is idle to say that a future state had been discovered already : it had been discovered as the Copernican system was; it was one guess among many. He alone discovers who proves; | and no man can prove this point, but the teacher who testifies by miracles that his doctrine comes from I God." This passage is thoroughly characteristic of the writer. If we suppose that Jesus Christ had, accord- ing to the author’s hypothesis, spoken no other words than those quoted above, they would have been meaning- less according to Paley’s philosophy. For he does not make it clear how men could interpret what would be meant by ’doing good’ and ’doing evil’ respectively, seeing that he dismisses the question of man’s " moral sense " by saying : " This celebrated question there- fore becomes in our system a question of pure curiosity; and as such, we dismiss it to the determination of those who are more inquisitive than we are concerned to be about the natural history and constitution of the human species." [Moral Philosophy, Book I., Chapter v. ]

Thus ’ doing good ’ and ’ doing evil ’ would mean, according to Paley, acting according to the commandments of God and acting contrary to those commandments respectively, such commandments being given by the utterance of some prophet of God who must confirm his message by a miracle. God’s will is made known to man only when it is sealed by miracle. In this case it seems strange that we are not permitted to be ourselves the witnesses of miracles, instead of depending on the testimony of witnesses who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago.

There must be something very unsatisfactory in a philosophy which can dismiss the question of the ’moral sense’ as Paley does and substitute for the Revelation which God has given of Himself, and which appeals to man’s moral reason, as I hope presently to argue, a mere making known of what God requires of man under pain of eternal punishment. But it is only when we have understood Paley’s so-called moral philosophy that we see the real defects of his Evidences of Christianity.

These Evidences are, it seems to me, right so far as they go. Paley proves conclusively on the assumption that the New Testament Scriptures are authentic, a point which he himself investigates that those who first propagated the Christian religion themselves believed that they had witnessed miracles; but that, the miracles were an attestation of the divine origin of the revelation associated with them, this he does not [prove; nor could he by his own methods give proof of this, seeing that lying signs and wonders are possibilities contemplated in the Gospel. How then is the true to be discriminated from the false unless an appeal be made to the moral reason?

If it were the case that anyone not already pre- disposed to accept the Christian faith should be convinced by Paley’s reasoning, I do not think he would " obey the Gospel " with any sense of freedom. For it would seem that Paley’s philosophy is quite deficient, and his view of the end of divine revelation far removed from that of Him who appealed to His disciples not as slaves but as friends. But I do not wish it to be thought that this essay is intended as a treatise on Christian Evidences any more than it is a treatise on Ethics. My desire rather is to extricate Christian evidences from their association with what seems to me to be no true philosophy at all, and most certainly is not the Christian philosophy of the New Testament. The book on the evidences of Christianity suitable to the temper of the present time and sufficient to meet the demands of modern thought has yet to be written. If ever it comes to be written it will have to appeal to that department of the human reason which is conveniently classed as moral.

It is quite remarkable how few writers there have been in recent times ready to treat of moral philosophy from the standpoint of dogmatic theology, that is to say, regarding the Christian revelation as authoritative. There are, however, not wanting signs of an improvement in this respect; and the attention which is now being paid to the study of social questions makes it imperative that the very foundations of morality should be properly investigated from a Christian standpoint. The old "Moral Governor of the Universe " theory which, however much it may represent the Creator and Governor of the world as working for the happiness of His creatures, yet forgets the essentially Christian doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, is wholly insufficient. The so- called religious " sanctions " of morality, which mean the prospect of rewards and punishments, the one for obedience and the other for disobedience to divine commands, are a mere travesty of Christian doctrine. Where the Moral Governor of the Universe is substituted for the Divine Father whom Christ revealed, there can be no wonder that many are repelled by what claims to be Christian teaching from Christianity itself. On the other hand, if the truth of the Divine Fatherhood be insisted on without due regard being paid to the complementary truth of the Divine holiness, an easy-going system of life is the inevitable result. Unless these two truths are rightly balanced and blended together, Christian teaching becomes but a caricature of its true self. Let us at least be clear what Christ and His apostles really did teach, and what was the philosophy of human life implicit in their doctrine.

It is my purpose then in this essay to set forth as clearly as I can what I believe to be the Christian teaching about God, and of man’s relation to the Supreme Being. I do not disguise at the outset that my object in doing this is essentially practical. I regard speculation on these subjects as useless unless it ultimately makes demands on life. It is a rationale of life, which will make life truer and better, that men are really asking for. And a mere speculative discussion, to whose conclusions we are more or less indifferent, is of no avail. On the other hand, I recognise that we have to be careful not to assume as true what we only wish to be true. The a priori method must be carefully checked by a knowledge of the facts of life. At the same time it seems to me that through the moral reason we have d priori intuitions and that these are of real value, that they are not deceptive. I do not mean of course to suggest that a priori intuitions are possible to us through the moral reason except as following upon knowledge and experience. We cannot form moral judgments without the experience of life. What these words imply will be better understood as the argument of the essay proceeds. To this argument we had better proceed at once. First of all, in the two next chapters, we must investigate the elementary notions of ethics contained in the four words Duty, Virtue, Right, and Good. It is essential to clearness of thought to have some definition of these four. In the fourth chapter I propose to examine the relation of conscience to reason. On this point there is, as it seems to me, a good deal of confusion. In the fifth chapter I shall discuss the place assigned to Happiness in Utilitarianism.

It is not until we reach the sixth chapter that the subject proper of the essay is reached. The first five chapters rather point to the need for the introduction of the notion of holiness into ethical or moral philosophy. I shall try in Chapter VI. to trace the growth of the ethical conception of holiness in the Old Testament, not without the help of others, and particularly of the late Robertson Smith, whose fear- less sifting of the Old Testament is now bearing fruit on all sides. The persistence of the notion of holiness throughout the Old Testament and from the Old Testament into the New has to be explained; and I shall try to shew in the seventh chapter how the doctrine of Jesus Christ completely transformed the notion according to the tendency which had already been manifest in the development of Old Testament doctrine. This will lead up to the central thought of the book, which will be found in the eighth chapter, for which I have borrowed a title from Bishop Westcott, but without any desire to make him in any way responsible for the views there expressed. The four remaining chapters of the book will show the consistency of this Gospel of Creation with the general drift of New Testament theology, and the reader must judge for himself whether or not he agrees with the writer that we have here a consistent whole which removes many difficulties, and is not alien to the demands of modern thought.