No Refuge but in Truth | Page 8

it is to be everlasting, concedes the final victory to evil.
We discard all ghost stories and spiritualist apparitions as at most signs
of a general craving. We resign all reasoning like that of Butler, who
describes the soul as indiscerptible, assuming that it exists separately
from the body. Nor can we be said to have anything that bears the
character of Revelation. That the Founder of Christianity looked for a
future life, with its rewards and punishments, is evident. But he brought
no special message, lifted not the curtain of mystery, did nothing to
clear our minds upon the subject. His apologue of Dives and Lazarus
shows that to Him as to us the other world was a realm of the
imagination.

Is there anything in man not physical, or apparently explained and
limited by the transient conditions and necessities of his present state,
anything which gives an inkling of immortality? Our utilitarian
morality is the offspring and adjunct of our condition here. But is there
not an aspiration to character which points to something more spiritual
and higher than conformity to the utilitarian code? Heroism and
self-sacrifice are not utilitarian.
We can hardly allow the investigation to be closed by the mere mention
of the talismanic formulary Evolution. There may be something still to
be said on that subject. Evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor does it
seem capable of infallible demonstration. It no doubt postulates vast
spaces of time for its action. But within the space of time of which we
in any way have knowledge, apparently no case of spontaneous
evolution has taken place. Rudimentary likeness between the frame of
the ape and that of man seems hardly in itself a proof of the generation
of man from the ape.
On no subject, however, does one who is not a man of science or a
philosopher feel more intensely his deficiency, and his need of having
his paths lighted by the perfectly free while reverent inquiry, to pray for
which has been the object of these letters.
August 11th, 1907.

VII.
IS THERE TO BE A REVOLUTION IN ETHICS?
A revolution in theology and in our conception of the government of
the universe such as we are undergoing is sure to draw with it a
revolutionary movement in ethics. There lies before me a review article
giving an account of a number of books on ethics which are widely at
variance, it appears, with the ethics of Christianity. The general
tendency of the authors seems to be to reject altogether the Christian
type of character as artificial and weak, and to aim at substituting for it

something more robust and, it is assumed, more in accordance with
nature. One theorist is represented as regarding humanity in its present
form only as transient material out of which is to be wrought the
"Superman." In what respect, so far as our conceptions extend, has
Christian ethic failed? It has given birth to the patriot as well as to the
martyr, to the virtues of the softer as well as to those of the stronger sex.
Communities which have kept its rules, as well as individuals, have
been happy.
The Christian ideal of character and life went essentially unchanged
through the violence of the Middle Ages and the vices of the Papacy. It
was somewhat perverted by asceticism; but it was radically the same
character in Anselm or in St. Louis, as it is in their counterparts now.
Nor does it seem to lose by renunciation of theological dogma. The
moral principles and aspirations of good free thinkers or Positivists
remain still essentially Christian.
The ethical ideal which is now being set up against the Christian
apparently, is that of the Greeks. In literature and art Greece, or rather
Athens, or, to speak still more correctly, a limited number of free
citizens in Athens, was pre-eminent: but its pre-eminence, if we may
trust its own moralists, hardly extended to morals.
May 3rd, 1908.

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