What Is and What Might Be | Page 9

enlist those tendencies under his banner by appealing to the
highest of them--the natural leaders of the rest,--must be prepared to
overcome their collective resistance by winning to his side the lowest
of them, by terrifying Man's weaker self with threats, by corrupting his
baser self with bribes. The ruin of Man's nature, whether hypothetical
or actual,[4] has left intact (or relatively intact) only the animal base of
it. It is to his animal instincts, then, that legalism must appeal in its
endeavour to influence his conduct. In other words, the punishments
and the rewards to which Man is to look forward must be of the same
genus, if not of the same species, as the lash of the whip that punishes
the lagging race-horse, or the lump of sugar that rewards his exertions.

And with the inevitable growth of egoism and individualism in the
demoralising atmosphere with which legalism (and its lineal successors)
must needs invest human life, Man's conception of the rewards and
punishments that await him will deteriorate rather than improve. The
Jewish desire for national prosperity was an immeasurably nobler
motive to action than is the Christian's fear of the quasi-material fires of
Hell. Indeed it is nothing but our familiarity with the latter motive that
has blinded us to its inherent baseness. It is no exaggeration to say that
there have been epochs in the history of Christendom (as there are still
quarters of Christian thought and phases of Christian faith) in which the
trumpet-call that was meant to rouse the soldiers of God to renewed
exertion has rung in their ears as an ignominious "sauve qui peut."
The tendency of legalism to externalise life has another aspect. In the
eyes of the strict legalist there is no such thing as an inward state of
human worth. The doctrine of the corruption of Man's nature is
incompatible with the idea of "goodness" being measurable (potentially
if not actually) in terms of the health and happiness of the "inward
man." Goodness, as the legalist conceives it, is measurable in terms of
correctness of outward conduct, and of that only. And when life is
regulated by an elaborate Law, the rules of which are familiar to all
men, there is no reason why a man's outward conduct should not be
appraised, with some approach to accuracy, by his neighbours and
friends. Hence it is that in the atmosphere of legalism an excessive
deference is wont to be paid to public, and even to parochial, opinion.
The life of the votary of the Law is lived under strict and constant
surveillance; and a man learns at last to value himself as his conduct is
valued by a critical onlooker, and to make it the business of his life to
produce "results" which can be weighed and measured by conventional
standards, rather than to grow in grace,--with silent, subtle, unobtrusive
growth.
Were I to try to prove that the régime of the Law was necessarily fatal
to the development of Man's higher faculties--conscience, freedom,
reason, imagination, intuition, aspiration, and the rest--I should waste
my time. Legalism, as a scheme of life, is based on the assumption that
development along the lines of Man's nature is a movement towards

perdition; and to reproach the legalist for having arrested the growth of
the human spirit by the pressure of the Law were to provoke the
rejoinder that he had done what he intended to do. The two schemes of
Salvation--the mechanical and the evolutional--have so little in
common that neither can pass judgment on the other without begging
the question that is in dispute. When I come to consider the effect of
legalism--or rather of the philosophy that underlies legalism--on
education, I may perhaps be able to find some court of law in which the
case between the two schemes can be tried with the tacit consent of
both. Meanwhile I can but note that in the atmosphere of the Law
growth is as a matter of fact arrested,--arrested so effectually that the
counter process of degeneration begins to take its place. The proof of
this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master
principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form
of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count himself
to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his spiritual
achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has closed his
account with God.
Pharisaism is at once the logical consummation and the reductio ad
absurdum of legalism. It is to the genius of Israel that we owe that
practical interpretation of the fundamental principle of supernaturalism,
which was embodied in the doctrine of salvation through obedience to
the letter of a Law. And it is to the genius of Israel that we