The Map of Life. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

the State in the Roman Republic. Men who had made great sacrifices for it and rendered great services to it were deemed, beyond all others, the good men, and in those men things which we should regard as grossly criminal appeared mere venial frailties. Let any one who doubts this study the lives of the early Catholic saints, and the still more instructive pages in which Gregory of Tours and other ecclesiastical annalists have described the characters and acts of the more prominent figures in the secular history of their times, and he will soon feel that he has passed into a moral atmosphere and is dealing with moral measurements and perspectives wholly unlike those of our own day.[15]

      In highly civilised ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure egotism and ostentation which made that sovereign the scourge of Europe and brought down upon his people calamities immeasurably greater than the faults of his private life—although, indeed, he has spoken of those wars in language of rapturous and unqualified eulogy[16]—he had at least the grace to devote a chapter of his 'Politique tirée de l'Écriture Sainte' to the theme that 'God does not love war.' But in the eyes of Bossuet the dominant fact in the life of Louis XIV. was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the savage persecution of the Huguenots, and this was sufficient to place him among the best of sovereigns.[17]

      To those who will candidly consider the subject there is nothing in this which need excite surprise. The doctrine that the Catholic Church is the inspired guide, representing the voice of the Divinity on earth and deciding with absolute authority all questions of right and wrong, very naturally led to the conviction that nothing which was conducive to its interests could be really criminal, and in all departments of morals it regulated the degrees of praise and blame. The doctrine which is still so widely professed but now so faintly realised, that the first essential to salvation is orthodox belief, placed conduct on a lower plane of importance than dogma, while the conviction that it is in the power of man to obtain absolute certainty in religious belief, that erroneous belief is in the eyes of the Almighty a crime bringing with it eternal damnation, and that the teacher of heresy is the greatest enemy of mankind, at once justified in the eyes of the believer acts which now seem the gravest moral aberrations. Many baser motives and elements no doubt mingled with the long and hideous history of the religious persecutions of Christendom, but in the eyes of countless conscientious men this teaching seemed amply sufficient to justify them and to stifle all feeling of compassion for the victims. Much the same considerations explain the absolute indifference with which so many good men witnessed those witch persecutions which consigned thousands of old, feeble and innocent women to torture and to death.

      Other illustrations of a less tragical kind might be given. Thus in cases of child-birth the physician is sometimes placed in the alternative of sacrificing the life of the mother or of the unborn child. In such cases a Protestant or freethinking physician would not hesitate to save the adult life as by far the most valuable. The Catholic doctrine is that under such circumstances the first duty of the physician is to save the life of the unbaptized child.[18] Large numbers of commercial transactions which are now universally acknowledged to be perfectly innocent and useful would during a long period have been prohibited on account of the Catholic doctrine of usury which condemned as sinful even the most moderate interest on money if it was exacted as the price of the loan.[19]

      Every religious and indeed every philosophical system that has played a great part in the history of the world has a tendency either to form or to assimilate with a particular moral type, and in the eyes of a large and growing number it is upon the excellency of this type, and upon its success in producing it, that its superiority mainly depends. The superstructure or scaffolding of belief around which it is formed appears to them of comparatively little moment, and it is not uncommon to find men ardently devoted to a particular type long after they have discarded the tenets with which it was once connected. Carlyle, for example, sometimes spoke of himself as a Calvinist, and used language both in public and private as if there was no important difference between himself and the most orthodox Puritans, yet it is very evident that he disbelieved nearly all the articles of their creed. What he meant was that Calvinism had produced in all countries in which it really dominated a definite type of character and conception of morals which was in his eyes the noblest that had yet appeared in the world.

      'Above all things, my brethren, swear not.' If, as is generally assumed, this refers to the custom of using profane oaths in common conversation, how remote from modern ideas is the place assigned to this vice, which perhaps affects human happiness as little as any other that can be mentioned, in the scale of criminality, and how curiously characteristic is the fact that the vice to which this supremacy of enormity is attributed continued to be prevalent during the ages when theological influences were most powerful, and has in all good society faded away in simple obedience to a turn of fashion which proscribes it as ungentlemanly! For a long period Acts condemning it were read at stated periods in the churches,[20] and one of these described it as likely, by provoking God's wrath, to 'increase the many calamities these nations now labour under.' How curiously characteristic is the restriction in common usage of the term 'immoral' to a single vice, so that a man who is untruthful, selfish, cruel, or intemperate might still be said to have led 'a moral life' because he was blameless in the relations of the sexes! In the estimates of the character of public men the same disproportionate judgment may be constantly found in the comparative stress placed upon private faults and the most gigantic public crimes. Errors of judgment are not errors of morals, but any public man who, through selfish, ambitious, or party motives, plunges or helps to plunge his country into an unrighteous or unnecessary war, subordinates public interest to his personal ambition, employs himself in stimulating class, national, or provincial hatreds, lowers the moral standard of public life, or supports a legislation which he knows to tend to or facilitate dishonesty, is committing a crime before which, if it be measured by its consequences, the gravest acts of mere private immorality dwindle into insignificance. Yet how differently in the case of brilliant and successful politicians are such things treated in the judgment of contemporaries, and sometimes even in the judgments of history!

      It is, I think, a peculiarity of modern times that the chief moral influences are much more various and complex than in the past. There is no such absolute empire as that which was exercised over character by the State in some periods of Pagan antiquity and by the Church during the Middle Ages. Our civilisation is more than anything else an industrial civilisation, and industrial habits are probably the strongest in forming the moral type to which public opinion aspires. Slavery, which threw a deep discredit on industry and on the qualities it fosters, has passed away. The feudal system, which placed industry in an inferior position, has been abolished, and the strong modern tendency to diminish both the privileges and the exclusiveness of rank and to increase the importance of wealth is in the same direction. An industrial society has its special vices and failings, but it naturally brings into the boldest relief the moral qualities which industry is most fitted to foster and on which it most largely depends, and it also gives the whole tone of moral thinking a utilitarian character. It is not Christianity but Industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilised nations.

      Many other influences, however, have contributed to intensify, qualify, or impair the industrial type. Protestantism has disengaged primitive Christian ethics from a crowd of superstitious and artificial duties which had overlaid them, and a similar process has been going on in Catholic countries under the influence of the rationalising and sceptical spirit. The influence of dogmatic theology on Morals has declined. Out of the vast and complex religious