What Is and What Might Be | Page 8

to the heart of Man or has any meaning for his higher reason,
will crush his life down, slowly and inexorably, beneath their deadly
burden. "At every step, at the work of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at
home and abroad, from early morning till late in the evening, from

youth to old age, the dead, the deadening formula"[3] will await him.
The path of obedience for the sake of obedience speedily degenerates
into the path of mechanical obedience; and the end of that path is the
triumph of machinery over life.
For it is to the letter of the Law, rather than to the spirit, that the strict
legalist is bound to conform. The letter of the Law is divine; and
obedience to it is within the power of every man who will take the
trouble to learn its commandments. What the spirit of the Law may be,
is beyond the power of fallen Man to determine; and were an attempt
made to interpret it, the result would be a state of widespread moral
chaos, for there would be as many interpretations of it as there were
minds that had the courage and the initiative to undertake so audacious
a task. As it is with the Law as such, so it is with each of its numerous
commandments. The man who professes to obey the spirit of a
commandment is in secret revolt against its divine authority. For he is
presuming to criticise it in the light of his own conscience and insight,
and to limit his obedience to it to that particular aspect of it which he
judges to be worthy of his devotion. From such a criticism of the
Fourth Commandment as "the Sabbath is made for man, not man for
the Sabbath" to open violation of the letter of the commandment (on
this occasion or on that) there is but a single step. The whole structure
of legalism would collapse if men were allowed to absolve themselves
from obedience to the letter of the Law, out of regard for what they
conceived to be its spirit. To interpret a commandment, in the sense of
providing for its application to the fresh cases that may arise for
treatment, is the work, not of poets and prophets but of Doctors and
Scribes. The path of literal, and therefore of mechanical, obedience is
the only path of safety; and the more punctiliously the letter is obeyed,
the more perfect will be the machinery of salvation, and the nearer will
legalism get to the appointed goal of its labours,--the extinction of
spiritual life.
As is the life that legalism expects us to lead, so is the scheme of
rewards and punishments by which (as we have already seen) it
constrains us to lead it. The materialisation of life that takes place
under the sway of the Law is accurately matched and measured by the

materialisation of the doctrine of moral retribution. The general idea
that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is profoundly true. But the
idea is easily misinterpreted; and it necessarily shares in the
degradation of one's general conception of life. Virtue rewards the
virtuous by making them more virtuous. Vice punishes the vicious by
making them more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope
and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and
spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and
punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism. It is not
by becoming more virtuous that we are saved. It is not by becoming
more vicious that we are lost. We are saved by obedience, we are lost
by disobedience, to the formulated rules of a divinely-delivered law. To
appeal to Man's higher self, when there is no higher self to appeal
to,--to set before him as the supreme reward of virtue the development
of his better nature, when his nature is intrinsically evil,--would be an
obvious waste of labour. And as, apart from the presumed repugnance
of the "natural man" to the presumed delights of the Law, the intrinsic
attractiveness of the life that legalism prescribes must needs diminish in
exact proportion as the authority of the Law becomes oppressive and
vexatious, and the letter of it tends to establish itself at the expense of
the spirit,--it is clear that a scheme of rewards and punishments will
become, in effect as well as in theory, the only weapon in the armoury
of the legalist. It is also clear that there will be much work for that one
weapon to do. The central tendencies of Man's nature, besides being ex
hypothesi evil, are antagonistic de facto to the galling despotism and
the irrational requirements of the Law; and the lawgiver, far from being
able to