then be seriously inquired, what will be the probable course of events, when the multiplication of numbers shall have overtaken the resources of Nature. ἁμέραι δ ̓ ἐπίλοιποι μάρτυρες σοφώτατοι.* If there be growths of high excellence in countries so circumstanced, let it be examined whether they spring out of its prevailing institutions, or whether they owe their existence to some distinct and even antagonist influence; even as Athens was fertile of great and good men, who were almost invariably ill affected to her democratic polity. Let us now gradually contract our path until it tends to the single point which has been proposed for present inquiry, namely, political disqualification. 64. According to the foregoing principles, are the conditions of the spiritual element of national life, or any of them, to be maintained forcibly by a State? I do not mean against the fancies of this or that individual, but in cases that hazard its own social dissolution? So far as this question admits of a general answer, it must be in the negative. We may here again recur to the text-" My kingdom is not of this word; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now is my kingdom not from hence.”† Was that, which our Saviour here, as it appears, disclaimed, the doctrine, that even the objective truth of religion should be defended by force against constituted * Pindar, Ol. i. 53. St. John xviii. 36. authority? Defended of course it may and must be by inobedience or moral resistance, by refusal to act upon unlawful commands. But when we come to questions such as this, we find ourselves entangled in a maze of considerations that seem scarcely to be threaded by any such general rules as human wisdom has been able to enunciate. Is an authority transgressing its legal limits a constituted authority? I suppose then a weak tyrant whom a breath will dethrone, an oppressor of religious truth, like James the Second, on the one hand; on the other, co-ordinately constituted though inferior authorities, holding by truth and by one another, and assured, humanly speaking, of their possession of the means to remove him. In such a case there seems no great difficulty in saying that it may be done. But if we suppose the latter weak, and, though certain of the tyrant's offences against the truth, yet not certain that the social forces are so set against him that they may be exercised without hazard of anarchy; here is a difficult case, a case for cool and masculine understandings, for reverent and tender hearts, for profound supplications to God when it may arise, and one to which I can only apply an indeterminate proposition. Although it has pleased God to supply both private and political life with a better ordinary criterion of duty than the calculation of results, yet there are undoubtedly painful and difficult passages in both, in which the lineaments of abstract right are so obscured by intermediate objects, that Faith herself must be content, conscious of the heaviest responsibility, to guide her steps by an estimate of consequences, never indeed in contravention of right, yet as affording the best clue to it. 65. Before entering further into this part of the discussion, I would remark that as responsible beings we are not wholly dependent on its issue. These occasions are rare, and need not dwell much upon the mind of the individual. It is not difficult to see that the general rule of private duty is simple obedience. If there be enactments which, as the private person thinks, make him instrumental in promoting evil, let him use the powers which the constitution allows him for their removal. Then he will have discharged his own conscience before God, and he may walk at peace with a quiet mind. He is only to use force against being made to sin; he sins not by suffering what the law requires. Therefore, if I be persuaded that a given war is unmanly, shameful, cruel, wicked, still I must not refuse the taxes that are demanded for its support. I am I am unable then to conceive the case, in which individuals may hazard social order for the purpose of relieving themselves from disabilities which demand from them no agency whether direct or indirect, and cannot, therefore, involve their consciences in sin. Thus the line of private duty is usually clear, although, when it has been transgressed, the deviations from it may raise questions for the State such as defy solution. 66. But now let us examine what is the legitimate canon of the action of the State. Christian maxims, which enjoin a sufferer to bear wrong, do not permit a superior in power to inflict it. The State must not therefore disqualify, simply for the reason that the subject seems bound in the last resort to submit to disqualification. The general rule of the State must be, to seek for the discharge of civil duties the most competent men. And yet this must be with relation to circumstances; for clearly it is not obliged to secure absolutely the ablest men for all public employments, or to claim the exercise of a pre-emptive right upon the services of every individual in the nation; that then to which it is bound really is, to prefer the more able to the less, when both can be had; to apply to candidates for office all the practicable criteria of competency. According to these principles, the question which we are now considering is not whether the State has any right to injure or punish for religious non-conformity, but simply in what manner it is to provide the fittest persons for the discharge of what we have ascertained by the previous inquiry to be its duties. 67. Now a certain grade of understanding, in a form of instruction more or less professional according to the particular case, is one of these criteria. Christian holiness and purity of life is another; for surely no man will dispute that cæteris paribus political duties would be better performed, if they were always intrusted to those who make it their first study in life to follow the Redeemer. Profession of the national faith is another of these criteria; lower than the last, yet naturally and obviously tending to realise the spiritual element in the national life, both externally, and as connected with the necessary inward dispositions. A morality reaching some standard of social decorum is the last criterion that I shall name; and is requisite, according to the lowest theory of the obligations of the State, to guarantee the fidelity of the functionary himself, and to avoid public scandal. 68. Of these criteria the first and the last belong to the lower forms of nationality, the second and the third to the higher. The former pair are the most absolutely required, but also the least permanently beneficial. By them a State has material consistency and life; but with them it may sink into moral death. As, however, the second criterion of fitness is the one which ultimately would most conduce to the realisation of a perfect national life, so also it is the one which under the conditions of humanity the State can hardly ever ascertain and secure. Indeed, if this criterion were practicable, I know not whether there might not be an absolute and indefeasible obligation to apply it, and a positive sin in using any other without it. For it implies not a condition or presumption of moral excellence, but excellence itself. And as the third is, next to the second, most allied with the morality of the national life, so also it is one, the beneficial working of which absolutely presupposes a degree both of religious and also of national coherency, a moral freshness and youth, a love and a pursuit of truth among the people, keen as that of the morning hunter,* without which it can be no better than the very skeleton of a corpse long ago abandoned by its informing spirit. 69. No: God still in practice vindicates, sufficiently for full attestation, the law of national oneness, * Coleridge. |