together on earth, and we cannot separate ourselves from them (p. 348). If such topics had availed with the early Christians, no martyrdoms would have been requisite, and Christendom of every age has been absurd and pernicious in her admiration of the martyr-spirit. Professor Jowett, we anticipate, would candidly reply, that that spirit has been too much and too indiscriminately admired; and if he said this, we should agree with him. Yet we cannot resign the conviction, that where the martyr-spirit is extinguished, no new and quickening morality will ever rise in a nation. On the contrary, they will ever gravitate more and more towards materialism, the love of "substantial" comfort carrying the day in each successive conflict.

Society does not like to be disturbed in its routine; men in authority are affronted if their orders are criticised by inferiors. It needed perhaps some eccentricity of mind, before an English officer at Malta objected to saluting the host at military bidding, or in India to escort the pilgrims, or pay the dancing-women at the temple of Jaganaut. It is but a little while since it would have been judged impertinent and absurd in a Chancellor of the Exchequer to object to raising money by lotteries. In short, we know not what moral evil which has once struck root into an established system could be shaken off otherwise than by foreign conquest, if each individual in turn submits his conscience to that which has grown up in the society. The first objectors are often ill-informed or extravagant, as the old Lollards and Wickliffe may seem to be; yet they are not useless; it is something to have protested; it stimulates the conscience of society, and prepares it for improvement. Nor is he always useless who, by throwing himself out of a profession, cuts himself off from many means of improvement and sources of wisdom, and seems to the eye of sense to be a puling, foolish, lost man. Take the case of the poet Cowper, who for forty years at least might naturally have seemed a lamentable instance of morbid feeling superinducing inaction and insanity; yet few will now doubt that he did more good to mankind by the moral effect of his poems than any dozen of able barristers have done by all the private lawsuits by which they have been enriched.

And what, after all, is that "walking by faith," of which Professor Jowett knows how to write so well, if it be not the resolute doing, or refusing to do, that which we see to be right or wrong,

Is it not precisely because the old religions superseded private by public conscience, that conquest was the only mode by which established vices could be exterminated?

without calculating how it is to affect the rest of our lives? Conscience goes on with us, as a lantern in a dark night, showing sometimes but one step before us, yet that one we take. If in consequence we become poorer in pocket, yet we are richer in faith, and better fitted to become lights of the world morally, than if we attained greater accomplishment of mind at the expense of damage to our conscience. Professor Jowett speaks of the tenderly conscientious as "absorbed in an eccentric fancy," and weakened by over-tension. Tension there must be, perhaps overtension, for one who has day by day to fight hard against wickedness in high places, as (we will say) a GARRISON contending against slavery in the United States. If such a man suffers some overstraining, some distortion of mind, it is only as a warrior may suffer in body from a terrible and honourable conflict. But in a majority of cases we think the "tension" and the "absorption" are fictitious. Somebody will not allow his servant to say "My master is not at home," when he is at home; he will not sign himself "your obedient humble servant" to one to whom he owes no service; or perhaps he will not eat slave sugar knowingly; these things may be trifles, but what tension and exhaustion of mind follows, we do not see. Or again, a young man's father wanted him to go into the army, his mother into the Church, but his tutor advised the bar; from scruples which Professor Jowett judges weak he refused them all. While they pressed him hard, he perhaps had struggle and tension; but from the day that his course is fixed, all occasion and possibility of this seems to vanish. Surely moral strength is earned by every sacrifice made to conscience, earned precisely by such struggles, even when ignorance and mistake mingle in our acts; nor was it by asking "How they were to live," that either Socrates, or Paul, or another who shall be nameless, or any of those of whom the world was not worthy, wrought righteousness and out of weakness were made strong.

In fine, we desire to replace Professor Jowett's practical doctrine on this head by another widely different. "Condemn your own self by the highest law which your conscience discerns, but condemn all others by the current morality of the society to which they fitly belong." We must not call our neighbours to the bar of our private perceptions; but unless we would quench within us the diviner spirit, we must cherish and obey it ourselves; and this we hold to be a truer exposition of Paul's benign and genial doctrine than the over-accommodating one which we regret to have had to combat.

MORAL INFLUENCE OF LAW.

[1860.]

IT

T is a notorious fact of ancient and modern times, that very many politicians who have no belief in religion have upheld religious creeds as conducive to the national morality; and they have generally much to say that is plausible in their defence. Side by side with this, it has been maintained, upon a large survey of the world, that national morality depends very little on the avowed creed of nations; and it may be worth while to dwell for a moment on the evidence of this fact. I will begin by contrasting the Turks with the Persians. According to the testimony of a series of impartial Englishmen who have known them well, the peasants of Turkey proper are eminently upright, truthful, simple-hearted, honest, friendly; faithful and devoted in domestic relations,-the tie of parent and child being peculiarly tender and beautiful. The Persians, on the contrary, are described as prevailingly frivolous, false, cheating, and generally without conscience. Both nations are Mohammedan. It is true, that they are of different sects. The Persians regard the three first Caliphs as usurpers, and reject the "traditions of the elders" concerning the miracles of Mohammed and various observances. But none of us will for a moment impute the superiority of Turkish morality to this ceremonial difference. It undoubtedly rises out of the social organization, local influences, and mode of life, which have come down from remote times. We have a confirmation of this in the fact, that all which is best in the Turkish character is apt to be lost as soon as the individual is transplanted, and especially if he be raised into high office. Yet his Mohammedan creed remains as orthodox as before. Here then we see, that though a right creed is of course better than a wrong creed, yet social institutions have more effect on our moral state than the national religion. And now look back to Europe. Are not Ireland, France, Spain, South Germany, and Italy, under the same church? Yet how diverse are they morally! If we had time to consider separate virtues and vices, the contrasts would perhaps seem deeper the longer we dwelt on them. What greater

contrast in manliness can there be than that between Spain and Naples ? It is conceded to be immense even between the border countries, Spain and Portugal. What Frenchman, however patriotic and Catholic, will dare to extol the French women for chastity? Yet, coming of the same race, and with very much of the same temperament, the Catholic Irishman justly boasts that the honour of Irish women stands as high as that of any in the whole world. Again, for long ages past, who would have seemed uncharitable in rating very low the truthfulness of the Italians or French? Yet no one would have dared so to speak of the Catholic Germans or of the Spaniards. Again, was not England once Catholic? Yet the England of Edward III. and that of Queen Elizabeth are not in any great moral contrast. I need not go farther. I have sufficiently indicated on what ground we are forced to believe that national morality does not depend chiefly on the theoretic religion, but on those social institutions, habits, and laws which pervade daily life.

The truth which I have been stating has been often darkly felt by those who avow as their motto, "Religion has nothing to do with politics." I believe these were accurately the words for which our late eminent statesman Mr. Canning encountered much obloquy some thirty-five years ago. In his mouth it meant, that an English Catholic, had more of the Englishman in him than of the Catholic, so that the difference between his religion and that of the Protestant ought to be overlooked in Parliament; a doctrine which shortly gained a great practical triumph. My main object in now addressing you, is to point out the false theory which is founded on this movement towards a more comprehensive State. Those who desired to admit Dissenters and Catholics into civil equality with Churchmen, who claimed that the State should turn a blind eye towards the creed of an individual, were sure to condemn any public hostility to voluntary religious institutions, and very generally may have wished that all such institutions should be left without national endowments. The State being thus, in their view, neutral towards the sects, they have naturally claimed that the sects should be neutral towards the State. They have conceived of Church and State (or, if you prefer so to phrase it, the Churches and the State) as occupying two parallel lines of movement which cannot come into collision: as though the Church were something of the other world alone; as though its business were with creeds and ceremonies, feasts and fastings, chanting and prayers, ordination and sacraments, consolation in

sickness and hopes beyond the grave; but had no right to interfere with laws and customs which make men moral or immoral. To very many politicians of this class, to use religious influence against any measures of State is prima facie evidence of an ambitious and meddling Church. On the other hand, they often avow, that in the State it is an erring obtrusiveness to legislate for the morality of the nation; and that all zeal for morality should be yielded up to individuals, or to voluntary societies.

If this were not a widely prevailing theory, influencing public men, often asserted in public journals, and espoused by those who have a name as political philosophers, I should not now address you on the other side. But since I regard this as the cardinal heresy of the Liberal party in both continents,-the heresy which, in proportion as it triumphs, demoralizes nations, and makes them vacillate between anarchy and despotism; the heresy which, by the reaction from it, gives a new life to bigotry, and generates dangerous forms of socialism,-I think the close examination of it is of urgent practical importance.

I began by pointing out the evidence lying on the surface of history, that the morality of nations is more dependent on laws and institutions than on religious creed. I think I should hardly overstate in saying, that laws, enactments, institutions of property, and the social relations which rise out of them (all of which are the sphere of the State), must of necessity affect the national character for good or evil: hence the action of the State is essentially either moral or immoral. But inasmuch as the Churches, or Church, either need not exist at all, or very often exist in a feeble, cloudy, ceremonial life, their action on the national morality is apt to be but a secondary force. Hence, instead of saying with the Ultra-voluntaryist, that morality is the sphere of the Church alone, it is more true to assert, that the State has necessarily a moral action, the Church only accidentally and occasionally. And if we admit that Religion rises above a solemn mummery or a wild fanaticism, only in proportion as morality underlies it; if we are conscious that Spiritualism is the glorification of the highest Morality, and that the immoral man cannot be permanently and consistently spiritual, nor ever reap the noblest fruits and blessed joys of spirituality; if we feel that an immoral atmosphere is corrupting to the most of us, and intensely painful to the best ;-then never can those institutions and measures of State which make our neighbours and ourselves