V The Religion of Loyalty
Our first two lectures dealt with sources of religious insight well known to all of you, however unsatisfactory you may have found them. Our third and fourth lectures have led us into philosophical discussions which many of you will have found neither satisfactory nor familiar. And so, in imagination, I can hear you declaring that, if the foregoing sources of insight are indeed all that we have, religious truth seems still very far away. “The saints,” I hear you saying, “may comfort us when they tell us of their personal and private intuitions; but they perplex us with the conflicting variety of their experiences. The social enthusiasts undertake to show us the way to salvation through love; but the world of men in which they bid us seek the divine is a world that is by nature as much in need of salvation as we ourselves are. The sages point to the starry heaven of reason which, as they insist, overarches us; but this heaven seems cold; and its stars appear far away from our needy life. And if, replying to this very objection, and, incidentally, replying also to the doctrine of the pragmatists, somebody insists that this heavenly world of the reason is also an expression of the living divine will, we still remember that our deepest need is to see how the divine will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. And this is what we have not yet learned to see. The foregoing sources then appear to leave us, after all, with no vital and positive religion.”
I
Thus some of you may at this point express your discontent. If you do, I find this discontent justified. If the foregoing lectures had indeed exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight, we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will to conform itself to the laws of the master of life with whom we need to be united. In other words, all of the foregoing sources of insight, considered as separate sources, present to us problems which they do not solve, and leave the real nature of the saving process clouded by mists of ignorance. What we most need at this point is some source of insight which shall show how to unite the lessons that the preceding sources have furnished. The present lecture must be devoted to an account of such a source. I should be quite helpless to engage in this new undertaking were it not for the fact that the spiritual life of humanity’s best servants and friends has long since shown us how to overcome the difficulties by which our present inquiry is, at this point, beset. These friends and servants of mankind have used, in fact, that source of insight which I mentioned in the closing words of the last lecture, a source by means of which the results and the moving principles of individual experience, of social experience, of reason, and of will are brought into a certain creative unity to which the noblest spiritual attainments of our world are due. We shall return, therefore, in this lecture, from speculation to life; and our guides will be, not the philosophers, nor yet the geniuses of the inarticulate religious intuitions, but those who, while they indeed possess intuitions and thoughts, also actually live in the spirit.
Nevertheless, for our purpose, the foregoing method of approaching our topic has been, I hope, justified. We wish to know the sources and to see what each is worth. We must therefore consider each source in its distinction from the others. Then only can we see what brings them together in the higher religious life. We must reflect where religion itself wins its way without reflection. Had we begun our study where this lecture begins, with the effort to understand at once this new source of insight, we should have been less able than we now are to discern the motives that enter into its constitution and to appreciate its accomplishments. We have had to emphasise difficulties in order to prepare the way for our study of that source of insight which, in the history of humanity’s struggles toward the light, has best enabled men to triumph over these difficulties.
This new source has come into the lives of men in intimate connection with their efforts to solve the problem not merely of religion, in our present sense of the word, but also of duty. I shall therefore first have to tell you how the problem of duty is distinguished from the problem of religion. Then I shall show you how the effort to solve each of these problems has thrown light upon the other.
Duty and religion have, in the minds of all of you, close relations. Both have to do with our ideals, with our needs, with the conforming of our lives to our ideals, and with the attainment of some sort of good. Yet you also well know that these relations of duty and of morality on the one hand, of religion and of salvation on the other, are not relations easy to define with entire clearness. Some men in our age, as you know, tell you that they are unable, in their present state of mind, to get much help from religion. And some men who insist that the religious problems have for them no solution whatever, are ardently and sincerely dutiful in spirit. On the other hand, there are those who, in their own minds, are so sure of salvation that they actually make light of the call of duty, or at least see little that is saving in the thought of duty. In the opinion of very many, no effort to lead a dutiful life can lead to salvation unless some sort of divine grace, which is a free gift from above, intervenes to accomplish the saving process. Meanwhile, there are those who declare not only that the dutiful life tends of itself to lead to salvation, but that the persistent doing of our duty is precisely the whole of what constitutes salvation.
You will readily see that the plan of these lectures forbids any direct study of the Pauline doctrine regarding the relation of faith to works, of divine grace to human dutifulness. The mere mention of St. Paul, however, side by side with the reminder that, at many times in history, and especially to-day, there are those for whom, despite Paul’s teaching as to the vanity of mere works, there is no religion but the religion of duty, will serve to show that serious questions are here involved, and that the true relations between religion and morality are by no means self-evident.
Let me briefly distinguish between the religious interest and the moral interest. Then we may be able to recognise how closely they are related, and yet how far, under certain conditions, they may drift apart, and how sharply they may sometimes come to be opposed.
II
There is an obvious contrast between the points of view from which morality and religion consider the problem of life. Whatever may be your views as to what your duty is, it is plain that the moral interest centres about this idea of duty. That is, the moral interest seeks to define right deeds and to insist that they shall be done. It estimates the rightness of deeds with reference to some ideal of life. But however it conceives this ideal, it makes its main appeal to the active individual. It says: “Do this.” The religious interest, on the other hand, centres about the sense of need, or, if it is successful in finding this need satisfied, it centres about the knowledge of that which has delivered the needy from their danger. It appeals for help, or waits patiently for the Lord, or rejoices in the presence of salvation. It therefore may assume any one of many different attitudes toward the problem of duty. It may seek salvation through deeds, or again it may not, in the minds of some men, appeal to the active nature in any vigorous way whatever. Some religious moods are passive, contemplative, receptive, adoring rather than strenuous. It is therefore quite consistent with the existence of a religious interest to feel suspicious of the dutiful restlessness of many ardent souls.
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
Such is sometimes the comforting, sometimes the warning word that seems to many to express the religious interest.
This general contrast between the two interests assumes many special forms when we consider how moralists—that is, teachers who especially emphasise the call of duty—may stand related to the two postulates upon which, as we have seen, the higher religions base their appeal. Religion, in our sense of the word, depends upon asserting: (1) That there is some one highest end of existence, some goal of life, some chief good; and (2) That, by nature, man is in great danger of completely failing to attain this good, so that he needs to be saved from this danger.
Now the first of these two postulates religion has frequently, although not always, shared with the moralists, that is, with those who devote themselves to teaching us how to act rightly. Aristotle, for instance, based his ethical doctrine (one of the most influential books in the history of morals) upon the postulate that there is a highest good. Many others who have discussed or have preached morality, have asserted that all obligations are subject to one ultimate obligation, which is the requirement to act with reference to the highest good. Yet this agreement as to the highest good turns out to be not quite universal when one compares the opinions of the teachers of religion, on the one hand, and of the moralists on the other. Popular and traditional morality often takes the form of a little hoard of maxims about right acts—maxims whose relations to one another, and to any one highest goal of life, remain obscure. Each maxim is supposed to define a duty. Of course it also tells us how to win some special good or how to avoid some particular evil. But what this special duty has to do with winning any one highest good is not thus made explicit. And since many who make traditional morality prominent in their minds and lives are unaware of the deeper spirit that indeed, as I hold, underlies every serious endeavour, these persons simply remain unconscious that their morality has any religious motive or that they are dealing with the problem of salvation. Even some professional teachers of duty are mere legalists who do not succeed in reducing the law which they teach to any rational unity. And for such people the postulate which religion makes the head of the corner is rather a stumbling-stone. They doubt or question whether there is any highest good whatever or any pearl of great price. Yet they illustrate the essential feature of morality by insisting that certain deeds must be done.
But, however it may be with the first of the religious postulates, it is the second (the postulate that we are naturally in very great danger of missing the true goal of life) which leaves open the greater room for differences of interest as between the religious teachers and the teachers of duty. Suppose that we are in agreement in holding that there is a highest good. Nevertheless, the question: How far is man naturally in danger of missing this supreme goal? is a question which, since we are all fallible mortals, leaves room for many varieties of opinion. How I myself view the matter, I told you in our first lecture. And to me the religious need seems an insistent and clear need. But many moralists are partisans of duty as a substitute for religion. And they are often much more optimistic regarding human nature than I am. In their opinion the goal can be reached, or at least steadily approached, by simple dutifulness in conduct, without any aid from other motives that should tend to our salvation.
There is, then, a pearl of great price. But—so such teachers hold—why sell all that you have to buy that pearl, when by nature you are able to win it through a reasonable effort? Dutifulness is the name for the spirit that leads to such an effort. And dutifulness, say these teachers, is as natural as any other normal function. “No general catastrophe threatens our destiny,” they insist. “Why not do right? That is in your own personal power and is sufficient for your deepest need. You need cry out for no aid from above. You can be saved if you choose. There is no dark problem of salvation.”
To such optimists the intensely religious often respond with that strange horror and, repugnance which only very close agreement can make possible. Near spiritual kin can war together with a bitterness that mutual strangers cannot share. In this case, as you see, the goal is the same for both parties to the controversy. Both want to reach some highest good. The cheerful optimists simply feel sure of being able to reach, through action, what the earnestly devout are passionately seeking by the aid of faith. Yet each side may regard the other with a deep sense of sacred aversion. “Fanatic!” cries the partisan of duty to his religious brother. “Mere moralist,” retorts the other, and feels that no ill name could carry more well-founded opprobrium. The issue involved is indeed both delicate and momentous.
The same issue may become only graver in its intensity when, in a given case, a religious man and a moralist agree as to both of the main postulates of religion, so that for both there is a highest good to seek and a great peril to avoid. For now the question arises: What way leads to salvation?
Suppose that the answer to this question seems, at any point in the development of human insight, simply doubtful. Suppose mystery overhangs the further path that lies before both the religious inquirer and the moralist. In such a case the religious interest meets at least a temporary defeat. The religious inquirer must acknowledge that he is baffled. But just this defeat of the religious interest often seems to be the moralist’s opportunity. “You cannot discover your needed superhuman truths,” he then says. “You cannot touch heaven. You remain but a man. But at all events you can do a man’s work, however hard that work is, however opposed it is to your natural sloth and degradation, however great the danger of perdition. Perhaps nobody knows the way of salvation. But a man can know and can daily do each day’s duty. He does not know how to attain the goal. But he knows what the goal is, and it is better to die striving for the goal than to live idly gazing up into heaven.” In such a case, even if the moralist fully recognises the depth of our need of salvation, and the greatness of the danger, still the strenuous pursuit of duty often seems to him to be a necessary substitute for religion. And then the moralist may regard his own position as the only one that befits a truth-loving man; and the religious interests, which appear to fix the attention upon remote and hopeless mysteries, may seem to him hindrances to the devoted moral life. Against all dangers and doubts he hurls his “everlasting No.” His only solution lies in strenuousness. He is far from the Father’s house. He knows not even whether there is any father or any home of the spirit. But he proposes to face the truth as it is, and to die as a warrior dies, fighting for duty.
But of course quite a different outcome is, for many minds, the true lesson of life. The religious man may come to feel sure that the way of salvation is indeed known to him; but it may seem to him a way that is opened not through the efforts of moral individuals, but only through the workings of some divine power that, of its own moving, elects to save mankind. In this case the classic doctrine that grace alone saves, and that, without such grace, works are but vanity, is, in one form or another, emphasised by religious teachers in their controversies with the moralists. The history of Christianity illustrates several types of doctrine according to which divine grace is necessary to salvation, so that mere morality not only cannot save, but of itself even tends to insure perdition. And in the history of Northern Buddhism there appear teachings closely analogous to these evangelical forms of Christianity. So the religious interests here in question are very human and wide-spread. Whoever thus views the way of salvation can in fact appeal to vast bodies of religious experience, both individual and social, to support his opposition against those who see in the strenuous life the only honest mode of dealing with our problem. Whoever has once felt, under any circumstances, his helplessness to do right knows what such religious experience of the need of grace means. Hence it is easy to see how the earnest followers of a religion may condemn those moralists who agree with them both as to the need and as to the dangers of the natural man. In fact the two parties may condemn each other all the more because both accept the two postulates upon which the quest for salvation is based.
Yet even these are not the only forms in which this tragic conflict amongst brethren often appears. I must mention still another form. Suppose that, in the opinion of the followers of some religion, not only the knowledge of the way of salvation is open, but also the attainment of the goal, the entering into rest, the fruition, is, for the saints or for the enlightened, an actual experience. There is, then, such a thing as a complete winning of the highest good. So the faithful may teach. Hereupon the moralists may adopt the phrase which James frequently used in opposing those who seemed to themselves to be in actual touch with some absolute Being. The only use of the opinion of such people, James in substance said, is that it gives them a sort of “moral holiday.” For James, quite erroneously, as I think, supposed that whoever believed the highest good to be in any way realised in the actual world, was thereby consciously released from the call of duty, and need only say:
“God’s in his heaven,
All’s right with the world.”
In such a world, namely, there would be, as James supposed, nothing for a righteous man to do. The alternative that perhaps the only way whereby God can be in his heaven, or all right with the world, is the way that essentially includes the doing of strenuous deeds by righteous men, James persistently ignored, near as such an alternative was to the spirit of his own pragmatism.
Nevertheless, it is true that there have indeed been, amongst the religiously minded, many who have conceived the highest good merely in the form of some restful communion with the master of life, merely as tranquillity in the presence of God, or merely as a contemplative delight in some sort of beauty. And it is true that some of these have said: “The saints, or at all events the enlightened, even in the present life, do enter into this rest. And for them there is indeed nothing left to do.” To such, of course, the moralists may reply: “You enlightened ones seem to think yourselves entitled to a ‘moral holiday.’ We strenuous souls reject your idleness as unworthy of a man. Your religion is a barren aestheticism, and is so whether it takes the outward form of an ascetic and unworldly contemplation or assumes the behaviour of a company of highly cultivated pleasure-seekers who delight in art merely for art’s sake and know nothing of duty.” To such believers in salvation through mere attainment of peace, James’s criticism rightly applies. In these lectures, as I ask you to note, I have never defined salvation in such terms. Salvation includes triumph and peace, but peace only in and through the power of the spirit and the life of strenuous activity.
But such partisans of the religion of spiritual idleness as I have mentioned may nevertheless return the moralist’s scorn with scorn. If they are advocates of art for art’s sake, of mere beauty as the highest good, they find the restlessness of the moralists hectic or barbarous. If they are mystical quietists, they regard mere moralism as the struggling of a soul that is not saved. If moral endeavour were the last word, they insist, we should all of us be in the Hades of Sisyphus. And no doubt their scorn, even if ill-founded, deserves consideration. For even the most one-sided emphasis upon any aspect of spiritual truth is instructive, if only your eyes are open.
Such are some of the ways in which, in the course of human history, the religiously minded and the moralists have been divided. To sum up: Certain of the lovers of religion have, upon occasion, condemned moralists, sometimes as legalists who do not know that there is any highest good, sometimes as vain optimists who ignore the danger of perdition, sometimes as despisers of divine grace, sometimes as the barbarous troublers of spiritual peace. Certain moralists, in their turn, and according as they ignore or accept the postulates upon which the religious interest is based, have condemned the devout, sometimes as the slanderers of our healthy human nature, sometimes as seekers in the void for a light that does not shine, sometimes as slavish souls who hope to get from grace gifts that they have not the courage to earn for themselves, sometimes as idlers too fond of “moral holidays.” And, as moralists, their common cry has been, ever since the times of Amos: “Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion.”
We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its good is something beyond our power to create or attain of ourselves—whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so exclusively appeals to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just as much our duty, “If we were alone upon the earth and the gods blind,” somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine grace.
Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature. What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a deeper and truer mode of living can unite. Our problem assumes a new form. Is there any mode of living that is just both to the moral and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?
Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that, in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand, does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I reply: No.
This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very high degree by some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious of humanity’s possessions. And such people may be found belonging to all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activities, and to all those peoples that have been able to do great work, and to all the faiths that contain any recognisable element of higher religious significance.
III
I can best show you what I mean by next very briefly reviewing the motives upon which the idea of duty itself rests, and by then showing to what, upon the noblest level of human effort, these motives lead.
Our moral interests have a development which, in all its higher phases, runs at least parallel to the development of our religious interests, even in cases where the two sorts of interests seem to clash. The moral problems arise through certain interactions that take place between our individual and our social experience. The reason reviews these interactions and takes interest in unifying our plan of life. The will is always, from the very nature of the case, concerned in the questions that here arise. For whatever else morality is, it is certain that your morality has to do with your conduct, and that moral goodness cannot be yours unless your will itself is good. Wealth might come to you as a mere gift of fortune. Pleasure might be brought to you from without, so far as you have the mere capacity for pleasure. The same might appear to be true even in case of salvation, if, indeed, salvation is wholly due to saving grace. But moral goodness, if you can get it at all, requires your active cooperation. You can earn it only in case you do something to possess it. Its motto reads: “Erwirb es um es zu besitzen.”
Therefore the moral question always takes the form of asking: What am I to do? The first contribution to the answer is furnished, upon all levels of our self-consciousness, by our individual experience. And one apparently simple teaching that we get from this source may be stated in a maxim which wayward people often insist upon, but which only the very highest type of morality can rationally interpret: “I am to do what I choose, in case only I know what I choose and am able to do it.” From this point of view, my only limitations, at first sight, seem to be those set for me by my physical weakness. There are many things that, if I had the power, I should or might choose to do. But since I frequently cannot accomplish my will, I must learn to limit myself to what I can carry out. So far, I say, our individual experience, if taken as our sole moral guide, seems at first to point out the way.
But this first teaching of our individual experience is by no means so simple as it seems. For the question arises: What is it, on the whole, that I choose to do? And, as we saw very early in these discussions, each of us is by nature so full of caprices and of various aims, that, left to ourselves, we live not only narrowly but inconsistently. Hence we spend much of our lives in finding out, after the fact, that what we chose to do at one moment of our lives has hopelessly thwarted what we intended to do at some other moment. Self-will then, left to itself, means self-defeat. That is the lesson of life. And the question: What is it that, on the whole, I would choose to do if I had the power? is a question that individual experience, taken by itself, never answers in any steadily consistent way. Therefore, as we all sooner or later come to see, one of our most persistent limitations is not our physical weakness to accomplish what we choose, but our incapacity, when left to ourselves, to find out what it is that we propose and really choose to do. Therefore, just because individual experience, taken by itself, never gives steady guidance, we have to look elsewhere for a rule.
The question: What am I to do? is never in practice answered without consulting, more or less persistently, our social experience. Being what we are, naturally gregarious, imitative, and, when trained, conventional creatures, who, indeed, often fight with our kind, but who also love our kind, who not only cannot bear to be too much alone, but are simply helpless when wholly isolated from our fellows (unless we have already learned in their company the very arts that we may be able to use while we are alone), we can give no answer to the question: What is to be my choice? without pretty constantly consulting our social interests. And these interests are indeed plentiful and absorbing. But they too are naturally conflicting. And so, taken as they come, they give us no rule of life.
To be sure, the social will in general says to us: “Live with your fellows, for you cannot do without them. Learn from them how to live; for you have to live more or less in their way. Imitate them, co-operate with them, at least enough to win such ideas as will help you to know what you want and such skill as will make you best able to accomplish whatever, in view of your social training, you are led to choose. Do not oppose them too much, for they are many, and, if stirred up against you, can easily destroy you. Conform, then, to their will enough to get power to have your own way.” And so far our ordinary social will gives us more or less consistent counsel. But beyond such really rather barren advice (the counsel of an inane worldly prudence), our social experience, as it daily comes to us, has no single ideal to furnish, no actually universal rules to lay down. For, as I go about in social relations, sometimes I love my fellows and sometimes I feel antipathy for them. Sometimes I am full of pity for their woes and long to help them. Sometimes they are my rivals; and I then naturally try to crush them. There is thus no one social tendency that, as it comes to us in the course of our ordinary social experience, gives us sufficient guidance to tell us how to escape self-defeat. For my love and pity war with my social greed and with my rivalries. I am so far left to my chaos.
Thus, then, if I sum up my position, I indeed propose to do what I choose, in so far as I am able, and in so far as I can find out what it is that I choose and can avoid thwarting myself by my own choices. And the art of learning how to choose, and what to choose, and how to carry out my will, is for me, since I am gregarious, imitative, and conventionalised, a social art. But, on the other hand, no social art that I ordinarily learn is sufficient either to teach me my whole purpose in life, or to make a consistent self of me, or to lead me out of that chaos of self-thwarting efforts wherein so many men pass their lives.
IV
You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in each morning’s newspaper may serve to illustrate. These princes and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts, these who seem for the moment to triumph and these who just now appear to be ground under the opponent’s or the oppressor’s heel, what arts of living were they and are they all following? Well, each in his way appears to have been choosing to have his own will; yet each, being a social creature, had learned from his fellows all his vain little arts of life. Each loved some of his fellows and was the rival of others. Each had his standards of living, standards due to some more or less accidental and unstable union of all the motives thus barely suggested. The news of the day tells you how some of these won their aims, for the moment, while others were thwarted. What I ask you to note, and what the reason of every man in his more enlightened moments shows him, is that each of these who at any moment was thwarted, precisely in so far as he had any will of his own at all, was defeated not only by his fellows, but by himself. For this special will of his was some caprice not large enough to meet his own ends. The career, for instance, of that man who failed in love or in business or in politics is wrecked. His reputation is lost. Well, it was his will, as a social being, to aim at just such a career and to value just that sort of reputation. Had he chosen to be a hermit, or a saint, or a Stoic, what would just such a career and such a reputation have been to him? How could he have lost unless he had sought? And his failure, to what was it due? No doubt to some choice of his own quite as much as to his rival’s skill. He wanted freedom to carry on his own speculations. He got that freedom and lost his fortune. He wanted to be free to choose whom and how to love. He had his way and defeated his own aim. He chose to follow his ambitions. They have led him where he is.
Such are perfectly reasonable reflections upon the course of ordinary social conflicts. They suggest to our more considerate moments the very sort of reflection which, at the outset of the present discussion, led us to define the religious ideal of salvation. Only now this type of reflection appears as aiming to lead us to some practical rule for guiding our active life. For our attention is now fixed, not on a condition to be called salvation, but on a rule for doing something in accordance with our own true will. This rule is, negatively stated, the following: Do not seek, either in your individual self as you are or in your social experience as it comes, for the whole truth either about what your own will is or about how you can get your aims. For if you confine yourself to such sources of moral insight, you will go on thwarting yourself quite as genuinely, even if by good luck, not quite as scandalously, as the bankrupt speculators and the strikers and the outcast oppressors, and the politicians and the murderers, and the deposed monarchs and the defeated revolutionists, of whom you read in the newspapers, have thwarted both their individual and their social will. In brief: Put not your trust in caprices, either individual or social. On the positive side, the rule here in question is: In order to find out what is your true choice, and how you can live without thwarting yourself, make your principle of life such that whatever fortune besets you, you can inwardly say: “I have not really failed, for I have acted as I intended, and also as I still intend to act, and have had my will whatever the consequences that fortune has brought to me, or however my momentary mood happens to change, or however this or that social caprice leads men to love or to despise me.” Such is the moral insight that the first use of your reason, in thus reviewing life, suggests. Or, as the moral common-sense of the wise has often stated the rule here in question: So act that, upon any calm review of the sense of your individual and of your social life, you shall never have ground to regret the principle of your action, never have ground to say: “By choosing thus I thwarted my own will.”
As you hear these statements, I hope that, reduced to their very lowest terms: “So act as never to have reason to regret the principle of your action,” they express a sort of counsel for life which is not strange to common-sense, even if it has received an abstract expression in the famous ethical philosophy of Kant. Only, as you will rightly insist, this counsel is indeed a seemingly hopeless counsel of perfection when it is addressed to the natural man, who merely has taken his instincts as he found them developing, and his social world as he has felt it fascinating or disturbing him, and who has then stumbled on, more or less prudently and obstinately trying to find out what it really is that he wants to do in life. Such a man will cry out: “But how shall I discover a principle of life such that, if I hold thereto, I shall never, upon any reasonable survey of life, regret following that principle?”
V
Here at length let life itself answer the question. As I was preparing these very words, and thinking what new instance to choose, in order to illustrate afresh the very principle that I have in mind, the newspaper of the day, side by side with its usual chronicle of unreason and of disaster, reported the approaching end of a public servant. This public servant was Ida Lewis, who for fifty years was the official keeper of the Lime Rock lighthouse in Narragansett Bay. She had been known for more than fifty years for her early and later often-repeated heroism as a life-saver. And now she was at last on her death-bed. She has since died. I know nothing of her career but what public reports have told. So far as her duty required her at her post, she kept her light burning through all the nights and the storms of those many years. She saved, in all, upon various occasions, eighteen lives of those who were in danger from wreck. Her occupation thus had its perils. It had, what must have been much harder to endure, its steady call upon daily fidelity. It was, on the whole, an obscure and humble occupation; although by chance, as well as by reason of her skill and devotion, this particular lighthouse keeper was privileged to become in a sense famous. But certainly it could have been no part of her original plan to pursue a famous career. When we seek public prominence we do not select the calling of the lighthouse keeper. I do not know how she came to find this calling. She may not even have chosen it. But she certainly chose how to live her life when she had found it. What it means for the world to have such lives lived, a very little thought will show us. What spirit is needed to live such lives as they should be lived, we seldom consider, until such a public servant, dying with the fruits of her years to some extent known to the public, reminds us of our debt and of her devotion.
The newspaper in which I read of this case, in commenting upon its significance, also reported (I do not know how accurately), this incident, of which some of you may know more than I do. I quote the words:1
“Forty-one years ago, Daniel Williams, keeper of the light at Little Traverse Bay, in Lake Michigan, went out in a boat for the rescue of a ship’s crew in distress, and did not come back alive. For three days the storm continued. But his sorrowing widow did not forget other lives, and each night climbed the winding stairs and trimmed the lamp. This duty she discharged until the government learned the situation, when it authorised her to continue. And she is still at her post.”
Lighthouse keepers are not the only people who live thus. There are countless lights kept alive in homes where want or weariness or stormy sorrow have long since and often entered, and have again and again seemed about to overwhelm, but where, after many years, faithful souls, well known to many of you, are, despite fortune, still at their post, with the light burning.
And now, I ask you, What is the spirit which rules such lives? It is a spirit which is familiar in song and story; for men always love to tell about it when they meet with impressive examples of its workings. What I regret is that, when men repeat such songs and stories, familiarity breeds, not indeed contempt (for our whole nature rejoices to think of such deeds), but a certain tendency to false emphasis. We notice the dramatic and heroic incidents of such lives, and are charmed with the picturesque or with the thrilling features of the tale. And so we seem to ourselves to be dealing mainly with anecdotes and with accidents. We fail sufficiently to consider that back of the exceptional show of heroism there has to be the personal character, itself the result of years of devotion and of training— the character that has made itself ready for these dramatic but, after all, not supremely significant opportunities. Only when we in mind run over series of such cases do we see that we are dealing with a spirit suited not only to great occasions, but to every moment of reasonable life, and not only to any one or two callings, but to all sorts and conditions of men.
The spirit in question is the one which is often well illustrated in the lives of warriors who willingly face death for their flag—if only they face death not merely as brutes may also face it (because their fighting blood is aroused), but as reasonable men face death who clearly see what conditions make it “man’s perdition to be safe.” There are two tests by which we may know whether the warriors really have the spirit of which I am speaking, namely, the spirit that was also, and quite equally, present in the widow who, in all the agony of a new grief, and through the storm that had taken away her husband, still climbed the lonely stairway and trimmed the lamp which he could never again tend. The first test that the warrior and the lighthouse tender are moved by the same spirit is furnished by the fact that those warriors who are rightly filled with this spirit are as well able to live by it in peace as in war; are, for instance, able even to surrender to the foe, when fortune and duty require them to do so—to surrender, I say, with the same calm dignity and unbroken courage that Lee showed in his interview with Grant at Appomattox, and that inspired him in the years of defeat and of new toils through which he had still to live after the war. That is, the warrior, if rightly inspired, is as ready for life as for death, is as ready for peace as for war; and despises defeat as much as danger—fearing only sloth and dishonour and abandonment of the service. The other test is whether the warrior is ready to recognise and to honour, with clear cordiality, this same spirit when it is manifested in another calling, or in another service, and, in particular, is manifested by his enemy. For then the warrior knows that warfare itself is only the accident of fortune, and that the true spirit of his own act is one which could be manifested without regard to the special occasion that has required him to face death just here or to fight on this side. If the spirit of the warrior bears these tests, his faithfulness is of the type that could be shown as well by the lonely light-tender in her grief as by the hero for whom glory waits. And again, this spirit is the very one that martyrs have shown when they died for their faith; that patient mothers and fathers, however obscure and humble, show when they toil, in true devotion, for their homes; that lovers mean to express when they utter such words as the ones which we earlier quoted from Mrs. Browning. And lest all these instances should impress you with the idea that the spirit in question has to do only with brilliant emotional colourings, such as those which fill our imaginations when we think of war, and of brave deaths, and of heroic triumph over grief, and of lovers’ vows, let me turn at once to what some of you may think to be the other extreme of life. Let me say that, to my mind, the calm and laborious devotion to a science which has made possible the life-work of a Newton, or of a Maxwell, or of a Darwin is still another example, and a very great example, of this same spirit—an example full of the same strenuousness, the same fascinated love of an idealised object, and, best of all, full of the willingness to face unknown fortunes, however hard, and to abandon, when that is necessary, momentary joys, however dear, in a pursuit of one of the principal goods which humanity needs—namely, an understanding of the wonderful world in which we mortals are required to work out our destiny. It is not a superficial resemblance that the lighthouse tender and the scientific man both seek to keep and to spread light for the guidance of men.
The lighthouse tender, the mother, the warrior, the patriot, the martyr, the true lover, the scientific investigator—they all may show, I insist, this same essential spirit,
“Patient through the watches long,
Serving most with none to see;”
superior to fortune because something that is worthier than any fortune seems to call them to their task. Such are undismayed in defeat. So Newton was undismayed when he looked for the needed confirmation of his theory in the motion of the moon and for the time failed. He worked on steadily, without any effort to win renown by hasty publication of possible explanations, until new advances of science showed why confirmation had so far been lacking and brought him what he needed. So Lee turned to the new life after the war. So the widow climbed the lonely stairway, despite her lost one, and because of her lost one. So the martyrs faced the lions. These all were sustained through long toil, or bewildering grief, by a spirit that tended to make them masters of their own lives and to bring them into unity with the master of all life.
We have illustrated the spirit. We now ask: What is the principle which dominates such lives? Is it or is it not a principle such, that one at any time wholly devoted to it could thereafter, upon a reasonable review of life, wisely regret having chosen to live thus? If it is not such a principle, if on the contrary it is a principle such that any reasonable view of life approves it, let us know what it is, let us detach it from the accidental conditions which at once adorn and disguise it for our imagination, let us read it so as to see how it applies to every sort of reasonable life—and then we shall be in possession of the solution of our moral problem. Then we shall know what it is that, if we are indeed rational, we really choose to do so soon as we learn how to live.
VI
If we consider carefully any such faithful lives as I have just exemplified, we see that, however simple-minded and unreflective some of the people may be who learn to live in this way, the motives that guide them are such as will bear a great deal of thoughtful reflection.
The people whom I have in mind, and of whom such instances teach us something, are, in the first place, individuals of considerable wealth and strength of personal character. They certainly are resolute. They have a will of their own. They make choices. And so the contribution of their individual experience to their moral purpose is large. It would be wrong to say, as some do, that they are characterised by mere “altruism,” by utter “self-forgetfulness,” by “living solely for others.” If you were on a wreck in a storm, and the lighthouse keeper were coming out to save you, you would take little comfort in the belief, if you had such a belief, that, since he was a man who had always “lived for others,” he had never allowed himself the selfish delight of being fond of handling a boat with skill or of swimming for the mere love of the water. No, on the contrary, you would rejoice to believe, if you could, that he had always delighted in boating and in swimming, and was justly vain of his prowess on the water. The more of a self he had delightedly or with a just pride trained on the water, the more of a self he might have to save you with. When we are in desperate need, we never wish beings who, as some say, “have no thought of self” to help us in our plight. We want robust helpers who have been trained through their personal fondness for the skill and the prowess that they can now show in helping us. So individual self-development belongs of necessity to the people whose faithfulness we are to prize in an emergency. And if people resolve to become effectively faithful in some practical service, their principle of action includes individual self-development.
In the second place, people of the type whom I here have in mind have strong social motives. Their faithfulness is a recognition of the significance, in their eyes, of some socially important call. And this, of course, is too obvious a fact to need further mention.
But in the third place, these people are guided by a motive which distinguishes their type of social consciousness from the chance and fickle interests in this or that form of personal and social success which I exemplified a short time since. A peculiar grace has been indeed granted to them—a free gift, but one which they can only accept by being ready to earn it—a precious treasure that they cannot possess without loving and serving the life that has thus endowed them—a talent which they cannot hide, but must employ to earn new usury—a talent which seems to them not to belong to themselves, but to their master, who will require it of them, increased. This grace, this gift, is what may be called their Cause. Sometimes it appears to them in winning guise, seen in the depths of the eyes of a beloved one, or symbolised by a flag, or expressed through a song. Sometimes they think of it more austerely, and name it “science,” or “the service,” or “the truth.” Sometimes they conceive it expressly as a religious object, and call it, not unwisely, “God’s will.” But however they conceive it, or whatever name they give to it, it has certain features by which you may easily know it.
The Cause, for people of this spirit, is never one individual person alone, even if, as in the lover’s case, the devoted person centres it about the self of one beloved. For even the lovers know that they transfigure the beloved being, and speak of their love in terms that could not be true, unless that which they really serve were much more than any one individual. The Cause for any such devoted servant of a cause as we have been describing is some conceived, and yet also real, spiritual unity which links many individual lives in one, and which is therefore essentially superhuman, in exactly the sense in which we found the realities of the world of the reason to be superhuman. Yet the cause is not, on that account, any mere abstraction. It is a live something: “My home,” “my family,” “my country,” “my service,” “mankind,” “the church,” “my art,” “my Science,” “the cause of humanity,” or, once more, “God’s will,”—such are names for the cause. One thinks of all these objects as living expressions of what perfectly concrete and needy people want and require. But one also thinks of the cause as unifying many individuals in its service, and as graciously furnishing to them what they need, namely, the opportunity to be one in spirit. The cause, then, is something based upon human needs, and inclusive of human efforts, and alive with all the warmth of human consciousness and of human love and desire and effort. One also thinks of the cause as superhuman in the scope, the wealth, the unity, and the reasonableness of its purposes and of its accomplishments.
Such is the cause. That the individual loves it is, in any one case, due to the chances of his temperament and of his development. That it can be conceived and served is a matter of social experience. That it is more worthy to be served than are any passing whims, individual or social, is the insight which the individual gets whenever he surveys his life in its wider unities. That to serve it requires creative effort; that it cannot be served except by positive deeds is the result of all one’s knowledge of it. That in such service one finds self-expression even in and through self-surrender, and is more of a self even because one gives one’s self, is the daily experience of all who have found such a cause. That such service enables one to face fortune with a new courage, because, whatever happens to the servant of the cause, he is seeking not his own fortune, but that of the cause, and has therefore discounted his own personal defeats, is the result of the whole spirit here in question.
For such a practical attitude toward such a cause I know no better name than the good old word Loyalty. And hereupon we are ready for a statement of the principle which dominates loyal lives. All the foregoing cases were cases of loyalty. In each some one had found a cause, a live spiritual unity, above his own individual level. This cause is no mere heap or collection of other human beings; it is a life of many brethren in unity. The simplest statement of the principle of the loyal person was the maxim: “Be loyal to your cause.” Somewhat more fully stated this principle would read: “Devote your whole self to your cause.” Such a principle does not mean “Lose yourself,” or “Abolish yourself,” or even simply “Sacrifice yourself.” It means: “Be as rich and full and strong a self as you can, and then, with all your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength, devote yourself to this your cause, to this spiritual unity in which individuals may be, and (when they are loyal) actually are, united in a life whose meaning is above the separate meanings of any or of all natural human beings.”
Yet even thus the principle which actually inspires every thoroughly loyal action has not been fully stated. For, as we have seen, the warriors, despite the fact that their duty requires them to compass if they can the defeat of their foes, best show their loyal spirit if they prize the loyalty of their foes and honour loyalty wherever they find it. We call such a spirit that honours loyalty in the foe a spirit of chivalry. You and I may remember that Lee was the foe of that Union in whose triumph we now rejoice. Yet we may and should look upon him as, in his own personal intent, a model of the spirit of true loyalty; for he gave all that he had and was to what he found to be his cause. Such an insight into the meaning of the loyalty of the foe, chivalry requires. Therefore, the true spirit of loyalty, including, as is reasonable, this spirit of chivalry, also requires us to state the principle of loyalty in a still deeper and more universal form. The true principle of loyalty is, in fact, an union of two principles. The first is: Be loyal. The second is: So be loyal, that is, so seek, so accept, so serve your cause that thereby the loyalty of all your brethren throughout all the world, through your example, through your influence, through your own love of loyalty wherever you find it, as well as through the sort of loyalty which you exemplify in your deeds, shall be aided, furthered, increased so far as in you lies.
Can this principle be acted out? Can it direct life? Is it a barren abstraction? Let the life and the deed of the lonely lighthouse keeper give the reply. Who, amongst us, whatever his own cause, is not instructed and aided in his loyalty by the faithful deed of such a devoted soul? Such people are then, in truth, not loyal merely to their own private cause. They are loyal to the cause of all loyal people. For, to any enlightened survey of life, all the loyal, even when chance and human blindness force them at any moment to war with one another, are, in fact, spiritual brethren. They have a common cause—the cause of furthering universal loyalty through their own choice and their own service. The spirit of chivalry simply brings this fact to mind. The loyal are inspired by the loyal, are sustained by them. Every one of them finds in the loyal his kindred, his fellow-servants. Whoever is concretely loyal, that is, whoever wholly gives himself to some cause that binds many human souls in one superhuman unity, is just in so far serving the cause not only of all mankind, but of all the rational spiritual world. I repeat then: The true principle of all the loyal is: So be loyal to your own cause as thereby to serve the advancement of the cause of universal loyalty.
Now of the principle thus formulated I assert that it is a principle fit to be made the basis of an universal moral code. There is no duty, there is no virtue whose warrant and whose value you cannot deduce from this one principle. Charity, justice, fidelity, decisiveness, strenuousness, truthfulness, efficiency, wise self-assertion, watchful self-restraint, patience, defiance of fortune, resignation in defeat, your daily social duties, your individual self-development, your personal rights and dignity, your obedience to the calls of duty, your justified self-sacrifices, your rational pride in the unique moral office to which you have individually been called—all these, I assert, can be rightly defined, defended, estimated, and put into practice through an accurate understanding and development of the principle of loyalty just laid down.
Since I am, indeed, speaking of sources of insight, and am not portraying at any length their results, you will not expect of me a deduction of such a moral code here. But this assertion of mine is no mere boast. I have repeatedly endeavoured, elsewhere, to portray loyalty and to apply its principles to life. For the moment it suffices to ask you to consider the lives of the loyal, in such examples as I have suggested to you, and to try for yourselves to see what they teach. To help you in such a consideration, I may here simply remind you that when one is not only loyal but enlightened, one cannot finally approve or accept any cause or any mode of living that, while seeming in itself to be a cause or a mode of living such as embodies the spirit of loyalty, still depends upon or involves contempt for the loyalty of other men, or a disposition to prey upon their loyalty and to deprive them of any cause to which they can be loyal. No loyalty that lives by destroying the loyalty of your neighbour is just to its own true intent. And that is why charity and justice are fruits of the loyal spirit. And that is why, if your cause and your loyal action are rightly accepted and carried out, the common interests of all rational beings are served by your loyalty precisely in so far as your powers permit. Whatever your special cause (and your special personal cause—your love, your home, or your calling—you must have), your true cause is the spiritual unity of all the world of reasonable beings. This cause you further, so far as in you lies, by your every deed.
And that also is why the principle of loyalty, once rightly defined and served by you—served with the whole energy and power of your personal self—is a principle that, upon any enlightened survey of your life you can never regret having served. This, then, is what we were seeking—an absolute moral principle, a guide for all action.
But even this is not the whole meaning of what the spirit of loyalty has to teach you. Your cause, thus concretely and yet universally defined, is something of which you can always, and now truthfully and without any pathetic fallacy, say, what Browning’s lover said in the lyric that I quoted in our second lecture:
“World, how it walled about
Life with disgrace,
Till God’s own smile came out
That was thy face.”
For your cause can only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to love this unity of the spiritual life. This presence will come to you in a beloved form, as something human, dear, vitally fascinating. It may be a person—a face—or a living community of human beings that first reveals it to you. You can, indeed, choose it as your cause. Your will is needed. Loyalty is no mere sentiment. It is the willing and practical and thorough-going devotion of a self to a cause. But you can never choose your cause until you have first found it. And you must find it in human shape. And you must love it before you can choose its service.
Therefore, however far you go in loyalty, you will never regard your loyalty as a mere morality. It will also be in essence a religion. It will always be to you a finding of an object that comes to you from without and above, as divine grace has always been said to come. Hence loyalty is a source not only of moral but of religious insight. The spirit of true loyalty is of its very essence a complete synthesis of the moral and of the religious interests. The cause is a religious object. It finds you in your need. It points out to you the way of salvation. Its presence in your world is to you a free gift from the realm of the spirit—a gift that you have not of yourself, but through the willingness of the world to manifest to you the way of salvation. This free gift first compels your love. Then you freely give yourself in return.
Therefore, the spirit of loyalty completely reconciles those bitter and tragic wrangles between the mere moralists and the partisans of divine grace. It supplies in its unity also the way to define, in harmonious fashion, the ideal of what your individual experience seeks in its need, of what your social world, groaning and travailing in pain together, longs for as our common salvation, of what the reason conceives as the divine unity of the world’s meaning, of what the rational will requires you to serve as God’s will. Through loyalty, then, not only the absolute moral insight, but the absolute religious insight, as you grow in grace and persist in service, may be and will be gradually and truthfully revealed to you.
For loyalty, though justifying no “moral holidays,” shows you the will of the spiritual world, the divine will, and so gives you rest in toil, peace in the midst of care. And loyalty also, though leaving you in no mystic trance, displays to you the law that holds the whole rational world together; though showing you the divine grace, calls upon you for the strenuous giving of your whole self to action; though requiring of you no philosophical training, tells you what the highest reason can but justify; and, though concerned with no mere signs and wonders, shows you the gracious and eternal miracle of a spiritual realm where, whatever fortunes and miracles and divine beings there may be, you, in so far as you are loyal, are and are to be always at home.
And all this is true because the spirit of loyalty at once expresses your own personal need and reason, and defines for you the only purpose that could be justified from the point of view of one who surveyed all voluntary and rational life. This is the purpose to further the unity of whatever spiritual life you can influence, and to do this by your every rational deed, precisely in so far as your powers permit. This is a law for all rational beings. No angels could do more than this.
There is a famous word that Chaucer put into the mouth of his Griselda at the moment when her husband tried her patience with his last and utmost cruelty. That word, uttered by a woman to a mere individual human creature who happened to be her husband, seems helplessly pathetic and slavish enough. Yet Chaucer himself warns us that the old tale, truly interpreted, should be viewed as an allegory of the deeper relations between the soul and God. Even so, to many of our leading modern minds the allegory, when interpreted in this way, may seem harsh enough. Mere moralists may make light of it, because it seems opposed to the dignity of the moral spirit of individual self-respect. Only the partisans of a divine grace, administered through inscrutable divine decrees, would, you might suppose, still see any worth in so cruel an allegory. Nevertheless, this judgment of the allegory is false. Let a truly loyal being—our lighthouse keeper, for instance—our patriot or martyr, let Lee or Newton, let whoever is filled with the right spirit of loyalty—whoever, through the light that he trims, intends to lighten and to unify so much of the spiritual world as he can ever reach by his deed—let such a loyal being utter Griselda’s word. Let him utter it as in the presence of the master of life, who offers to all the loyal the divine grace of finding themselves through their devotion to their cause. Let him address this word
“As unto one that hears
A cry above the conquered years.”
Let him utter this word as the summary and confession of his whole life of loyalty. And then Griselda’s word is no longer slavish. It is full of the resolute courage, of the splendid contempt for mere fortune, of the unconquerable spiritual self-assertion, yes, it is full of the deathless will, which are of the very essence of loyalty, and which, indeed, must overcome and, in the eternal realm, do overcome the world.
Griselda’s word was this:
“But certes, Lord, for none adversitie,
To dien in this case it shall not be
That I in herte and minde should aye repente,
That I you gave my soul with whole intente.”
Whoever thus addresses his word, not to a human individual, but as unto the master of life, and then. sincerely and persistently and lovingly, lives that word out in his life, has solved the religious paradox. From out the lonely and darkened depths of his personal finitude, from out the chaos of his social promptings and of his worldly ambitions, amid all the storms of fortune, “midst of hell’s laughter and noises appalling,” he has heard the voice of the Spirit. He has heard, and—however unlearned—he has understood. His own lamp is burning, and through his deed the eternal light shines in the darkness of this world.
Notes
1 Boston Evening Transcript, October 23, 1911.