A PROBLEM ARISING OUT OF THE DECALOGUE.
TN the extremely thoughtful and able address which Canon MacColl delivered at the International Conference on Edu- cation, concerning the theological teaching of the Universities, —an excellent report of which is to be found in the Guardian of last week,—he dropped a hint which deserves, we think, to be developed and followed out more elaborately, since it appears to us to contain impressive evidence of the reality of a Divine Revelation. While insisting on theology as the true centre of the sciences—the science which contains the key to the purpose and order and relations of all the subordinate sciences— he remarked :—" What a different meaning physical scieace has for those who suppose it to be the puzzling-out of riddles of which no living person has the key—nay, to which, for aught we know, there may be no key—and for those who suppose physical science to be the knowledge of natural laws which had been providentially withheld from us till the far more important knowledge of moral laws had been thoroughly impressed upon us. If the revelations of physical science had preceded those of moral law, what a Pandemonium the world would have been. Surely the remarkable fact that a law like the Decalogue far preceded a sound knowledge of the laws and forces of nature, shows that there was a Power above to impress itself upon the world, before the powers which are below our own highest level had had any serious attention paid to them." Now, let us follow out a little that line of thought. Mr. Herbert Spencer, we know, maintains that the ghost theory, originally suggested by dreams of the dead, is the origin of all belief in God. Ti so, how extraordinary it is, that in the most coherent and strictly developed of all ancient religions, there is hardly a vestige of this ghost theory,—indeed, hardly a clear indication, till very late in history, of any belief in the existence of departed spirits as powers at all,—Saul's vision of Samuel in the witch of Endor's house is the only one we can at present recollect,—while nevertheless the enunciation of an authoritative moral law, far in advance of the intellectual stage of culture which would appear to correspond to it, takes place in the very nursery of the race, and in the very centre of its first great scene of trial ! Is it conceivable to anyone that the ghost of a great ancestor could have originated the Decalogue? Whence did these severe restraining precepts come, if they did not come from a real power above man ? To one who assumes the view of the purely physical origin of man, how should so early an out- break of what would, on that hypothesis, be the pure superstition of a spiritual and rigidly restraining power, be accounted for ? It has often been maintained that the conflict for existence neces- sarily, developed a competition amongst the various tribes of early history, a competition to determine which of them should act with the most solidarity, and that this competition gave a great physical advantage to the one which earliest developed a strict social morality. That would explain how the aptitude for discipline, self-restraint, fortitude, and courage displayed by the Romans secured them so long a reign, but would not explain
at all the .very early inculcation of the conscious principle in- volved in such qualities, found among the Jews, unaccompanied, as we must certainly say in the case of the Jews it was an- accompanied, by any strong practical disposition to embody those qualities in actual life. Besides, as a matter of fact, the moral law of the Decalogue is altogether based on a spiritual law of which the condemnation of idolatry is the key-note. So far is it from true that the moral conditions which secure the cohesion of a race come out most prominently in the Jewish Decalogue, that that which there comes out most prominently is the worship of a Supreme Will,—the very centre and essence of the whole moral law,—the kind of law which that Will imposes,
• . being, m one sense at least, secondary to the worship of that Will. In other words, it is because the moral law. is God's law, and because it unites those who obey it to the Divine nature, that it is so strenuously enjoined. It is not true that the Jews developed anything like the same capacity for carrying out the conditions of moral co-operation which their lawgiver had certainly displayed for apprehending those con- ditions. The Decalogue implies the inculcation of a conscious principle long before the development of any adequate capacity for embodying that principle in life ; and not only that, but for developing it expressly as the will of an invisible power which, ac- cording to the materialistic theory, did not exist, and does not exist, except in the imagination of a superstitious people. Can anything be conceived more unnatural than that a pure falsehood should be conceived as the guarantee of a set of moral truths, and these, too, moral truths which, so far from being the reflections of moral experience, were far in advance of that experience—the presages, as it were, of creative genius ? Surely the moral genius which could lay down such truths could never have superfluously ima- gined a fictitious Supreme Will by which to sanction them. And surely the superstition which would have laid a mighty falsehood as the pillar and ground of the moral and social law, would never have anticipated the true moral and social law, but would have wandered as widely from the mark in declaring that law as it had in insisting so solemnly on a false sanction for it ? If the . supposed lawgiver were a phantom, is it not certain that much of the law would have had on it the impress of a phantom origin ?
Again, as Canon MacColl says, if the true origin of man be found in physical and material forces, how is it that the discovery and proclamation of the moral law seems to have run ahead so much of the discovery and proclamation of physical laws ? If the physical constitution is the root of man, why did not the growth of the curiosity of the senses preeede the growth of the curiosity of the conscience ? Indeed, why should there have been any conscience, or any curiosity of the conscience at all, if man is the growth of material conditions, and if the mastery of those conditions be really the key to his earthly salvation ? If the moral nature be a mere secondary thing, and the first and chief thing about man be his physical organisation, how is it that the problem of civilisation was not primarily a problem of the adaptation of physical means to physical ends— a problem primarily of the sciences and the arts, instead of a problem of the conscience and the will What one would expect from the development of an intellect founded on the senses, would have been the steady growth of the effort to deal with the difficulties of human existence from the intellectual side, —to manceuvre the passions rather than to control or subdue them ; to utilise the resources of external nature, and to strain to the utmost the elasticity of man's tastes and capacities, in order to increase the range of the conditions within which he could enjoy existence. Something of this type of character we see shadowed forth in early Greece, where the crafty, the resourceful, the pliant man seemed to be at one time likely to take pre- cedence of the true, the good, and the great man, until other and nobler ideals won upon the susceptible Greek imagination. If the intellect had been really developed merely out of the physical constitution, we should have seen such a type of character as this, gaining on all others. Shame at poverty of resource would have taken the place of that iibbler shame which men feel at easy and adroit concession to the importunity of circumstance. The man of elastic intelligence, of many shifts and wiles, would have been valued ten times as much as the man of dignity, fortitude, constancy, in one word characier ; for character only means that there is a standard of inward life to which men must adhere even at the cost of the outward life itself. That implied assumption, however, is everything. It is equivalent to the assumption of a moral law for man which anticipates, and overrides, and moulds his dealings with physical law.' We can, perhaps, in part imagine what a great curiosity and a pliant intellect, exerted chiefly to interrogate the outward conditions of our life, and to adapt, as the phrase is, our wants to our" environment," and our environment to our wants, would have made of man,—a sort of potent mental chameleon, now shrink- ing to external conditions, now bending external conditions to his needs, without a dream or thought of any absolute internal standard to which it is needful to conform himself. Instead of that, we find that at one of the earliest of the epochs of human history an inflexible standard of character was laid down, and laid down as the command of the invisible God, a standard which was not to be trifled with and moulded and bent to suit the exigencies of the hour. The inquisitive mind itself was to pursue its ingenious questionings under the restraints of this law ; what was called civilisation was declared sound only so far as it observed this law ; it was this law which kept discovery from transforming not only the realm of knowledge, but the very ends and aims for which the realm of knowledge was to be used, just as opportunity might dictate. It was this which made man man, and pre- vented him from passing through an earthly metempsychosis of adaptation to the universe, which would have eliminated all the unity from human history, and all the definiteness from human progress. Without a fixed background of conscience, the shuttle of events, manipulated by an ever active and elastic intelligence, would have made the man of one age a totally different creature from the man of another. And this back- ground of conscience was not only given us, but it was given by an asserted revelation before the development of scientific intelligence had reached any high level. The moral law was scored deep in human nature before science had fairly begun its lively career. We were told in many respects what we ought to be, long before we found out what we were. Now, could that be
• conceivable, if (1) there were no character in existence higher than our own to impose its law upon us, and if (2) there were nothing, and never had been anything in existence, except an endless chain of cause and effect under the shadow of which an " onght" becomes impossible since nothing could ever be other- wise than as it is P It seems to us perfectly certain that the early incorporation of such a law as the Decalogne in human history is an 'incontrovertible proof, first, that physical law is not the root of human character, but moral law ; and next, that the moral law was revealed to us, and in us, long before the intellect had begun to stride forward with anything like its full power; in other words, that, instead of being the mere fruit borne by that power, it was the ultimate guide and ruler and director of that advancing intelligence which now claims to be its master. That seems to us, we confess, utterly inconsistent with a merely physical and material constitution of things.
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