Lay Morals | Page 2

flowing from that as a fountain, the
desire of wealth and applause. Besides these, or what might be deduced

as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective
value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and
how to walk through a quadrille.
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians. It
may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive it.
As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil, it is not
the doctrine of Christ. What he taught (and in this he is like all other
teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit;
not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views, but a view. What he showed
us was an attitude of mind. Towards the many considerations on which
conduct is built, each man stands in a certain relation. He takes life on a
certain principle. He has a compass in his spirit which points in a
certain direction. It is the attitude, the relation, the point of the compass,
that is the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the
details are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by
this, and this only, can they be explained and applied. And thus, to
learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a historical artist,
think ourselves into sympathy with his position and, in the technical
phrase, create his character. A historian confronted with some
ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one pre-
occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and grope
for some central conception which is to explain and justify the most
extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma, or
perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big
words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature
appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to
point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which will be gladly
taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror of eternal fire can
teach a business man to bend his imagination to such athletic efforts.
Yet without this, all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall
understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than
broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and
the language in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in
our ears.
Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.
'Ye cannot,' he says, 'serve God and Mammon.' Cannot? And our whole

system is to teach us how we can!
'The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light.' Are they? I had been led to understand the reverse:
that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly in his
affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of repute had
written a conclusive treatise 'How to make the best of both worlds.' Of
both worlds indeed! Which am I to believe then--Christ or the author of
repute?
'Take no thought for the morrow.' Ask the Successful Merchant;
interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not
only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe, all we hope, all we
honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this
one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as
unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the 'same mind that was in
Christ.' We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else he
or we must be in the wrong. Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts
from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style
which the reader may recognise: 'Let but one of these sentences be
rightly read from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one
stone of that meeting-house upon another.'
It may be objected that these are what are called 'hard sayings'; and that
a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although it
leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this is a very gross
delusion. Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and
agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be
done. The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain,
patent and staringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and travailing
ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery