THE ETHICS OF RELIGION.

THE word religion is used in many different meanings, and there have been not a few controversies in which the main difference between the contending parties was only this, that they understood by religion two different things. I will therefore begin by setting forth as clearly as I can one or two of the meanings which the word appears to have in popular speech.

First, then, it may mean a body of doctrines, as in the common phrase, "The truth of the Christian religion;" or in this sentence, "The religion of Buddha teaches that the soul is not a distinct substance." Opinions differ upon the question what doctrines may properly be called religious; some people holding that there can be no religion without belief in a god and in a future life, so that in their judgment the body of doctrines must necessarily include these two; while others would insist upon other special dogmas being included, before they could consent to call the system by this name. But the number of such people is daily diminishing, by reason of the spread and the increase of our knowledge about distant countries and races. To me, indeed, it would seem rash to assert of any doctrine or its contrary that it might not form part of a religion. But, fortunately, it is not necessary to any part of the discussion on which I propose to enter, that this question should be settled.

Secondly, religion may mean a ceremonial or cult, involving an organized priesthood and a machinery of sacred things and places. In this sense we speak of the clergy as ministers of religion, or of a state as tolerating the practice of certain religions. There is a somewhat wider meaning which it will be convenient to consider together with this one, and as a mere extension of it, namely, that in which religion stands for the influence of a certain priesthood. A religion is sometimes said to have been successful when it has got its priests into power; thus some writers speak of the wonderfully rapid success of Christianity. A nation is said to have embraced a religion when the authorities of that nation have granted privileges to the clergy, have made them as far as possible the leaders of society, and have given them a considerable share in the management of public affairs. So the northern nations of Europe · are said to have embraced the Catholic religion at an early date. The reason why it seems to me convenient to take these two meanings together is, that they are both related to the priesthood. Although the priesthood itself is not called religion, so far as I know, yet the word is used for the general influence and the professional acts of the priesthood.

Thirdly, religion may mean a body of precepts or code of rules, intended to guide human conduct, as in this sentence of the authorised version of the New Testament: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world" (James i. 27). It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between this meaning and the last, for it is a mark of the great majority of religions that they confound ceremonial observances with duties having real moral obligation. Thus in the Jewish decalogue the command to do no work on Saturdays is found side by side with the prohibition of murder and theft. It might seem to be the more correct as well as the more philosophical course to follow in this matter the distinction made by Butler between moral and positive commands, and to class all those precepts which are not of universal moral obligation under the head of ceremonial. And, in fact, when we come to examine the matter from the point of view of morality, the distinction is of course of the utmost importance. But from the point of view of religion there are difficulties in making it. In the first place, the distinction is not made, or is not understood, by religious folk in general. Innumerable tracts and pretty stories impress upon us that Sabbath-breaking is rather worse than stealing, and leads naturally on to materialism and murder. Less than a hundred years ago sacrilege was punishable by burning in France, and murder by simple decapitation. In the next place, if we pick out a religion at haphazard, we shall find that it is not at all easy to divide its precepts into those which are really of moral obligation and those which are indifferent and of a ceremonial character. We may find precepts unconnected with any ceremonial, and yet positively immoral; and ceremonials may be immoral in themselves, or constructively immoral, on account of their known. symbolism. On the whole, it seems to me most convenient to draw the plain and obvious distinction between those actions which a religion prescribes to all its followers, whether the actions are ceremonial or not, and those which are prescribed only as professional actions of a sacerdotal class. The latter will come under what I have called the second meaning of religion, the professional acts and the influence of a priesthood. In the third meaning will be included all that practically guides the life of a layman, in so far as this guidance is supplied to him by his religion.

Fourthly, and lastly, there is a meaning of the word religion which has been coming more and more prominently forward of late years, till it has even threatened to supersede all the others. Religion has been defined as morality touched with emotion. I will not here adopt this definition, because I wish to deal with the concrete in the first place, and only to pass on to the abstract in so far as that previous study appears to lead to it. I wish to consider the facts of religion as

we find them, and not ideal possibilities. "Yes, but," every one will say, "if you mean my own religion, it is already, as a matter of fact, morality touched with emotion. It is the highest morality touched with the purest emotion, an emotion directed towards the most worthy of objects." Unfortunately we do not mean your religion alone, but all manner of heresies and heathenisms along with it: the religions of the Thug, of the Jesuit, of the South Sea cannibal, of Confucius, of the poor Indian with his untutored mind, of the Peculiar People, of the Mormons, and of the old cat-worshipping Egyptian. It must be clear that we shall restrict ourselves to a very narrow circle of what are commonly called religious facts, unless we include in our considerations not only morality touched with emotion, but also immorality touched with emotion. In fact, what is really touched with emotion in any case is that body of precepts for the guidance of a layman's life which we have taken to be the third meaning of religion. In that collection of precepts there may be some agreeable to morality, and some repugnant to it, and some indifferent, but being all enjoined by the religion they will all be touched by the same religious emotion. Shall we then say that religion means a feeling, an emotion, an habitual attitude of mind towards some object or objects, or towards life in general, which has a bearing upon the way in which men regard the rules of conduct? I think the last phrase should be left out. An habitual attitude of mind, of a religious character, does always have some bearing upon the way in which men regard the rules of conduct; but it seems sometimes as if this were an accident, and not the essence of the religious feeling. Some devout people prefer to have their devotion pure and simple, without admixture of any such application-they do not want to listen to "cauld morality." And it seems as if the religious feeling of the Greeks, and partly also of our own ancestors, was so far divorced from morality that it affected it only, as it were, by a side-wind, through the influence of the character and example of the gods. So that it seems only likely to create confusion if we mix up morality with this fourth meaning of religion. Sometimes religion means a code of precepts, and sometimes it means a devotional habit of mind; the two things are sometimes connected, but also they are sometimes quite distinct. But that the connection of these two things is more and more insisted on, that it is the key-note of the apparent revival of religion which has taken place in this century, is a very significant fact, about which there is more to be said.

As to the nature of this devotional habit of mind, there are no doubt many who would like a closer definition. But I am not at all prepared to say what attitude of mind may properly be called religious, and what may not. Some will hold that religion must have a person for its object; but Buddha was filled with religious

feeling, and yet he had no personal object. Spinoza, the godintoxicated man, had no personal object for his devotion. It might be possible to frame a definition which would fairly include all cases, but it would require the expenditure of vast ingenuity and research, and would not, I am inclined to think, be of much use when it was obtained.

Nor is the difficulty to be got over by taking any definite and well-organized sect, whose principles are settled in black and white; for example, the Roman Catholic Church, whose seamless unity has just been exhibited and protected by an Ecumenical Council. Shall we listen to Mr. Mivart, who "execrates without reserve Marian persecutions, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and all similar acts?" or to the editor of the Dublin Review, who thinks that a teacher of false doctrines "should be visited by the law with just that amount of severity which the public sentiment will bear"? For assuredly common-sense morality will pass very different judgments on these two distinct religions, although it appears that experts have found room for both of them within the limits of the Vatican definitions.

Moreover, there is very great good to be got by widening our view of what may be contained in religion. If we go to a man and propose to test his own religion by the canons of common-sense morality, he will be, most likely, offended, for he will say that his religion is far too sublime and exalted to be affected by considerations of that sort. But he will have no such objection in the case of other people's religion. And when he has found that in the name of religion other people, in other circumstances, have believed in doctrines that were false, have supported priesthoods that were social evils, have taken wrong for right, and have even poisoned the very sources of morality, he may be tempted to ask himself, "Is there no trace of any of these evils in my own religion, or at least in my own conception and practice of it ?" And that is just what we want him to do. Bring your doctrines, your priesthoods, your precepts, yea, even the inner devotion of your soul, before the tribunal of conscience; she is no man's and no god's vicar, but the supreme judge of men and gods.

Let us inquire, then, what morality has to say in regard to religious doctrines. It deals with the manner of religious belief directly, and with the matter indirectly. Religious beliefs must be founded on evidence; if they are not so founded, it is wrong to hold them. The rule of right conduct in this matter is exactly the opposite of that implied in the two famous texts: "He that believeth not shall be damned," and "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed." For a man who clearly felt and recognised the duty of intellectual honesty, of carefully testing every belief before he

received it, and especially before he recommended it to others, it would be impossible to ascribe the profoundly immoral teaching of these texts to a true prophet or worthy leader of humanity. It will comfort those who wish to preserve their reverence for the character of a great teacher to remember that one of these sayings is in the well-known forged passage at the end of the second gospel, and that the other occurs only in the late and legendary fourth gospel; both being described as spoken under utterly impossible circumstances. These precepts belong to the Church and not to the Gospel. But whoever wrote either of them down as a deliverance of one whom he supposed to be a divine teacher, has thereby written down himself as a man void of intellectual honesty, as a man whose word cannot be trusted, as a man who would accept and spread about any kind of baseless fiction for fear of believing too little.

So far as to the manner of religious belief. Let us now inquire what bearing morality has upon its matter. We may see at once that this can only be indirect; for the rightness or wrongness of belief in a doctrine depends only upon the nature of the evidence for it, and not upon what the doctrine is. But there is a very important way in which religious doctrine may lead to morality or immorality, and in which, therefore, morality has a bearing upon doctrine. It is when that doctrine declares the character and actions of the gods who are regarded as objects of reverence and worship. If a god is represented as doing that which is clearly wrong, and is still held up to the reverence of men, they will be tempted to think that in doing this wrong thing they are not so very wrong after all, but are only following an example which all men respect. So says Plato:1

"We must not tell a youthful listener that he will be doing nothing extraordinary if he commit the foulest crimes, nor yet if he chastise the crimes of a father in the most unscrupulous manner, but will simply be doing what the first and greatest of the gods have done before him.

"Nor yet is it proper to say in any case-what is indeed untrue-that gods wage war against gods, and intrigue and fight among themselves; that is, if the future guardians of our state are to deem it a most disgraceful thing to quarrel lightly with one another: far less ought we to select as subjects for fiction and embroidery, the battles of the giants, and numerous other feuds of all sorts, in which gods and heroes fight against their own kith and kin. But if there is any possibility of persuading them, that to quarrel with one's fellow is a sin of which no member of a state was ever guilty, such ought rather to be the language held to our children from the first, by old men and old women, and all elderly persons; and such is the strain in which our poets must be compelled to write. But stories like the chaining of Here by her son, and the flinging of Hephaistos out of heaven for trying to take his mother's part when his father was beating her, and all those battles of the gods which are to be found in Homer, must be refused admittance into our state, whether they be allegorical or not. For a child cannot discriminate between what is allegory

1 Rep. ii. 378. Tr. Davies and Vaughan.