Lay Morals | Page 4

his mind
must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of
method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his
parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false
witness; for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.
Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is case law at the
best which can be learned by precept. The letter is not only dead, but
killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered, alone is true
and helpful. This is trite to sickness; but familiarity has a cunning
disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty from the
mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead upon the
ear after several repetitions. If you see a thing too often, you no longer
see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear it. Our attention
requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a
thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an
equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar means. The whole

Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has
become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet
and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue
to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the
old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their
composure. And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit. It is
quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of
us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less: that while
the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to mark out the
boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never
so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of
the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made
the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be compared,
not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance
is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact
than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are
renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole
world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.
Look now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is this a place for you?
Have you fitted the spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages
when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of man? Now
when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is filled with an
innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing;
and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or
your heart say more?
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life;
and although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every
step of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me
what definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood,
or from both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but
the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was; and you
yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men and
circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed of
which no earthly hurricane affords an image. What was the best
yesterday, is it still the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?

Will your own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what
hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside us on
their unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different
gales, doing and suffering in another sphere of things?
And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do
you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions? For
the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather with
matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT
COVET, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere long.
The Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of