RELIGION AND MORALITY.*

THE DRIFT OF MODERN THOUGHT. 
"If truth be with thy friend, be with them both." GEORGE HERBERT.



One of the results of the application of the comparative scientific method to the investigation of religions was to show that, and to show why, primitive religions have no reference to morality whatever. The fact is of course, familiar to every student of the religious beliefs of races in a very low stage of development. He finds not only actions of the most unjust and immoral character attributed to the deities, but he observes also an utter absence of any bearing of the religious belief on moral duties. If he seeks for an explanation of this apparent deficiency, he soon finds that what these races seek from their religions is something very different they do not want morality, but security. They rely on their religious observances for the propitiation of the often envious and malignant powers working around them, to whom they attribute the most extravagant prerogatives, pay the most abject flatteries, and offer liberal sacrifices. Primitive man finds himself surrounded by all kinds of dread influences working in the dark, and only manifested by their effects, which are mostly harsh and cruel. These he endeavours to soften and cajole by submission and sacrifices. theology in the dullest stage, as in the highest development, is the theory of the relations of man to the supernatural. But in the former stage it does not offer a moral code so much as a system of natural science. " If," says Mr Lyall in the essay we are noticing "primitive men were asked the use of their beliefs, they might in substance reply that theology is like navigation, or astrology, or any other empiric art which helps one among the risks and chances of the voyage through sensitive existence that it is the profession of interpreting, signs and tokens of the divine caprice, and of propitiating powerful deities, who take a sort of black mail upon human prosperity." The student of early religions therefore has to get rid at the outset of the idea of the necessary connexion between religion and morality, and having done so much that is puzzling and obscure in the later developments of religion will become clearer to him.

The denial of this necessary and absolute connexion is by no means tantamount to a denial of the constant relationship and action and reaction between the two modes of thought. The question of the probable effect upon morality of a decline of religious belief has recently been discussed with great seriousness as one of the most momentous problems of the present age. As a matter of fact in most civilised, and in all Christian countries the moral education of the people has been conveyed to them by a religious medium. Religion has taught the obligations of morality, has formulated its precepts and has attached to them the sanction of future punishment. It does therefore become a serious question whether, in the event of religious belief declining, morality would be able to stand without the scaffolding by the aid of which it has been reared in the mind of average mankind.

In the essay before us Mr Lyall well known for his valuable and interesting researches on the social customs and religious beliefs of the Hindoo races, propounds a question which is the above question inverted. He does not ask, "What effect has a decline in religion on morality'' but " What effect has a rise in morality on religion?' It is possible, he observes, "that some far away connexion may be recognised between the two subjects, and that the examation of one may throw some light upon the other." After indicating the great difference between the opinions of civilised and primitive men with regard to the connexion of religion and morality, he observes :—

" Nevertheless the real difference between the two standpoints may perhaps be expressed by saying that, whereas a civilised religious belief cannot do without the sanction of accepted morality, in primitive times morality (or at least expediency and utility must seek the patronage of some accepted religious belief. In Europe morality can, on the whole dictate terms to theology; and though both sides still equally dread an open quarrel yet theology has most to fear from a dissolution of partnership. In Asia theology is still the senior partner, with all the capital and credit and can dictate terms to morality being quite independent of any necessary connexion with it. Asiatic theology transacts with the gods all matters touching the material interests of humanity, and in this very speculative business as in many others morality is by no means essential ; whereas in Western Europe theology now deals almost exclusively with matters spiritual.

" Now it is well known that the primitive mind finds relief from the perplexity caused by things passing its understanding in the theory that the gods swarm all round men, and are incessantly interfering either to help or to hinder. From the promulgation of a code which is to direct society in the minutest particulars, down to the swallowing of a drug or the moment of starting on a journey, every act of life, great and small, requires the assent of the divinities, and is assumed to be done after ascertaining their good pleasure through stewards of the mysteries."

It is shown by our author that selfish material interests are often advanced by the aid of what appear whimsical superstitions, and he adds :—" Perhaps the best example of a selfish device obtaining vogue under the cloak of a necessary rite is afforded by the famous practice of a widow becoming sati, or burning herself alive with her dead husband, which is undoubtedly, as Sir H. Maine has pointed out, connected with the desire to get rid of her right, if she is childless, to a tenancy for life upon her husband's lands. It is also connected, among the great families, as may be easily observed still in certain parts of India, with the wish of an heir to free himself, by this simple plan, from many inconveniences and encumbrances entailed upon him by the bequest of a number of stepmothers who cannot marry again."

" Other instances might be given, but though this habit of lending the names of the gods to dubious transactions and conspiracies to defraud has always prevailed more or less, yet it may be affirmed that on the whole we find the primitive deities almost as often patronising good as evil. Theology is usually well pleased to grant its patents to improvements and to adopt simple discoveries, in expediency or even in ethics, so long as the inventor or moralist is abjectly submissive and ascribes all the glory to the proper quarter. And this is readily done in a state of society when no sort of venture or enterprise has the slightest chance of being well received or becoming popular unless the gods appear in the prospectus. A good example of the address with which elementary science avails itself of theological protection may be taken from the practice of medicine, which has to be carried on entirely under the name and colours of theology, which is here so confidently supreme that it does not even condescend to stipulate for any concealment of the material processes. One may observe the native practitioner, learned in charms and simples openly mixing a drop of croton oil with the ink with which he indites his charm for a purge, and the patient swallows the paper pill in cheerful reliance upon the combined effect. Many other practices, ascertained experimentally to be fit and expedient have become in course of time so overgrown and concealed by the religious observance in which they were originally wrapped up that it is now very difficult to extract the original kernel of utility, and one only hits upon it by accident, when, in trying to abolish what looks like a ridiculous and useless superstition the real object and reason are disinterred, and sometimes prove worth knowing. If vaccination could only be ordained theologically it would have an immense success in India, but the English insist on explaining it otherwise and thereby of course act theology against it raising grave suspicion of witchcraft which is as the sin of rebellion. All elementary methods of natural science which are practised independently of theologic authority are thus stigmatised and as the gods gradually require some tincture of morality, my very discreditable and mysterious misfortunes to pious and innocent people are traced to the same source. Men attribute their failures and mishaps to the gods ; the gods pass on to the sorcerer the blame of those accidents which it is not quite convenient to explain. The system is not favourable to a development of self reliance but the people are not by any means so blindly superstitious as they pretend to be, and both gods and sorcerers yield like prudent ministers to an advance of public opinion. "

Mr Lyall dwells on the " elasticity and accommodating changeableness of primitive religion in its actual working. " So long as the single principle of the supreme authority of the gods is left undisputed, it may be invoked for the sanction or support of any practice or belief upon which men are tolerably agreed." He proceeds :— 

" Comte has noticed the manner in which a religious belief adapts itself to genuine social and political needs ; and personal observation proves that this goes on rapidly and incessantly in the loose incoherent formations of the earliest times. As the state of society improves, the religious beliefs seem to develop themselves by a sort of natural selection. We may here put aside mere ritual and the innumerable forms of worship, which are only devices for propitiating the unseen, and which continue to be used, like the telegraph, just as long as people have reason to believe that their messages arrive and are answered, but no longer. The early religious beliefs are not only propitiatory, but contain rules of conduct by which a man is to guided in all circumstances of his existence, the main difference between earlier and later religion being that the first looks almost as entirely to man's material, as the second does to his spiritual, well-being. And, as it has been truly remarked in regard to the latest and highest religion that any religious movement is doomed to sterility if it cannot assimilate some philosophical element if it is not what the age calls moral and reasonable, so also, in early religions, an ordinance or rule of conduct will only endure and develop if it is founded on some true notion or conjecture of material utility or expediency If it is useless or harmful, a simple caprice of inspiration, it will not last In the midst of countless random and whimsical guesses at what is fit and suitable, among various tricks and pretexts meant to give a religious colour to some selfish interest those religious commands alone survive long and develop which are or have been somehow connected with the real needs of the people to whom they were delivered. The moral and material progress of a country goes on pushing before it the religious beliefs, and shaping them to suit it in exigencies ; while theology slowly and reluctantly repeals and disowns the rules which become obsolete, or which are found to have been issued under some very inconvenient error of fact. Morality is not yet essential to religion, but if an inspired command turns out to be a blunder as well as a crime, it is short lived and will soon be amended by a fresh ruling. Nevertheless the gods in no way admit themselves to be bound by human views of morality, and the functions of religion very much resemble in their highest range, the functions of a modern government ; its business is confined to procuring material blessings warding off evil and codifying rules of social utility which have been verified by experience. As the scene of operation of an early religion is the visible world only, there is no scheme of future rewards or punishments ; for such a scheme must not be confounded with vague beliefs in places of refuge for disembodied spirits which maybe either different kinds of limbo from which the ghost issues forth and meddles again with the world, or Elysium shades for heroes, or an Olympus to which dead magnates ascend on special promotion to apotheosis. There are heavens and hells in Indian theologies ; but it is remarkable that a doctrine which in highly civilised religions is usually regarded as the most important, and is certainly the most impressive upon the masses, is in primitive religions of almost insignificant effect, and makes no mark upon popular imagination. The reason is that the Indians, as a mass, still consider religion as the supreme authority which administers their worldly affairs, and not as an instrument for the promotion of moral behaviour.

"As the confirmed perceptions of utility develop moral sentiments, these colour slightly the notions of the gods, who are soon credited with some indignation at wrong doing, at any late when the sufferer is one of their constituents. But the idea is still that the gods punish or avenge in this life by material curses, or aid by lending a material hand at critical moments ; and as they begin to be affected by the sight of a good man struggling with adversity the feeling develops that virtue ought to be divinely helped against vice. Nevertheless, the primeval thinkers very soon observed that as a matter of fact the gods seem to be often on the side of the wicked, or at least against the innocent ; and here comes in the complication between sin and evil which runs through all phases of religious speculation, from Job and Buddha to J. S. Mill. The earliest and most simple attempts to account for evil are by assuming that the gods must have in some mysterious way been offended ; whence come the institution of the scapegoat so well known in India in plagues of cholera, which embodies that idea of expiation which has had such immense development in the history of religions, and the various receipts for discovering Jonah, the man with a contagious curse, not necessarily a moral offender, but only a vessel of wrath, who is also common throughout all Asia. Next follows the advanced notion that this offence against the gods is not only some insult or sacrilege, as when Ulysses killed the sacred oxen, but is a moral sin, an offence against society of which the gods take magisterial cognisance.  Job's comforters try hard to prove to him that he must be reaping the fruits of his own guilt, and in all times the early theologian has made desperate endeavours to connect misfortune with misconduct, though often driven to explain the connexion by references to ancestral sin, or to something done in a previous existence. But the more vigorous and daring minds rejected these subterfuges ; and finding themselves landed in the dilemma between the omnipotence and the perfect justice of divinity, they solved it in different ways. "

The great difference insisted upon between the position of the mind of Europe and of the East in reference to this subject is that in the former the position of morality is assured, and any religion where this is the case necessarily conforms to the demands of morality.

But in India "morality has never been strong enough to demand of theology a satisfactory explanation." We may some day find in India, as elsewhere, theology reduced to the humiliating necessity of applying to morality for its warrants and passport ; indeed, there are already indications of a tendency towards this inversion of original parts, though the material impediments to be surmounted are still considerable.

"Here it is obvious that the acknowledgment of the duty of moral government must expose the old divinities to great danger ; they are very much in the same predicament with hereditary despotic rulers who are forced to admit the rights of man ; there is no knowing how the admission will be used against authority and prescription. The analogy from nature, which is the root of all natural religions, becomes gradually subjected to a severe strain because it is difficult to reconcile this analogy with a moral purpose, and yet this analogy is really what makes all early religions credible, since they are built up out of actual observation and experience of the stern and incomprehensible working of natural laws. This is a solid and for the time being an incontestable basis for inferences about supernatural beings who administer the visible world, whose acts and behaviour prove them to be careless and cruel ; but on the other hand these observations disagree widely with a presumption of moral government, and so whenever the ethical reformer attempts to take his stand on morality as a divine institution, he is instantly challenged to show his authority for any such belief. A theological authority of course he must have, or he must give up all hope of popularising his teaching ; while in times of material distress and disorder, and in countries where 'the amazing waste in nature, the destruction and misery' are quite unaccountable and prevail on a large scale, the difficulty of making credible the moral government and benevolence of divinity is perhaps rarely realised by people in more comfortable and enlightened parts of the world. So the analogy from nature constantly trammels the advance of morality, and drags back the higher moral teaching, into the slough of despond ; because the people still insist upon inferring the nature of the gods from their experience of the misery and disorder of human life, which the gods are supposed to regulate. In a country subject to wars, famines, cyclones, pestilences, and scandalous tyrannies, and in a state of thought which attributes directly to the divinities all the remarkable accidents or events of life, the resistance offered to an advancing morality by natural religion is constant and powerful, it is the incessant gravitation of the earth-born deities whom morality endeavours to lift up. 

"It is only when, as time goes on, the gradual perception of the order and sequence of things withdraws from the divinities by tacit consent a great deal of direct responsibility for the course of affairs, that the road ahead is cleared for morality to advance without parting company with theology. The old gods may either fall below the raised level of public opinion and become discreditible, or they may be provided with an improved set of attributes. Some powerful religious reformer steps in, and strikes a religious note above the ordinary level. His strength lies in this—that he collects, and, as one might say, edits, puts into popular shape and effective form, all the ideas and feelings about purer morals and worship which have been floating about, usually in the form of sayings and maxims, on the highest surface of the popular mind ; these he delivers as his message from heaven, and sanctions it by a more refined ritual. Nevertheless, the difficulty of a religious reform lies always in this, that to improve religion at is also necessary to rehabilitate the divinities, and to achieve this without parting company with them, seeing that no reformer will be listened to at all by the masses unless he can prove his warrant from the powers that be, and can produce his signs and tokens. When Elijah challenged the priests of Baal, he put the authenticity of his authority upon a palpable and immediate issue to be judged by all men. And as in certain states of society the ordinary visible facts are usually against any one who attempts to prove that the gods are good, while the extraordinary signs and tokens are not always on the better side, the reformer runs great danger if he pushes ahead too fast. He exposes his communications with natural religion, and endangers his theologic base ; orthodoxy closes in round him with all the strength of prescription and of the sacred writings that have recorded in ancient days the words of gods speaking with men ; so that the new notions have to fight hard to keep their ground. Yet they do keep it if the conditions of existence are favourable, for the influence upon general morality, and thus upon theology, of changes in the material conditions of a people's existence is very observable.  J. S. Mill writes in his autobiography that he is 'convinced that no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought ;' but to those who see the effect upon Indian modes of thought of simple peace and good government the converse view seems equally true and even more important. A great improvement in the lot of a people begins immediately to affect the sources of their ideas, while it must obviously touch the springs of natural religions which simply reflect and record mankind's lot upon earth, represented as the ways of gods with men. It is probable that some substantial improvement in the national condition of a people is a necessary antecedent to any wide or lasting intellectual advance. The problem, then, for all these indigenous beliefs which have grown up and been moulded by their environment is to admit the influence of morality brought about by change of circumstance and mental atmosphere, and to rise gradually without losing their footing upon their native earth or their authority derived from religious prescription. And the problem, conversely is for morality to raise and shape these beliefs without disowning them or breaking off from them ; for the stay and sanction of theology are still absolutely essential, and the morality which lets go its hold of them must fall. It is not necessary however, as it is in many parts of Europe, to conform to a powerful orthodoxy, and to allow the moral or material improvements to be stamped with the one trade mark without which no principles are genuine—the Brahmins are ready enough to say of any new discovery or doctrine that it is 'the same concern,' and the law of patents in theology is very loose. But a moralist must not go so far as to deny altogether the prescriptive authority, or he will surely be attacked in a way which will make it very hard for him to hold his ground coram populo. A very good example of the danger of too rapid an advance over the Balkans of superstition may be drawn from the fortunes of a well known sect called the Brahmo Somaj. This sect professes an exalted deism, which was imported from Europe by its founder about 50 years ago, and has taken some root in Bengal, where it suits the taste of the educated classes, to whom orderly government and the comforts of civilisation have suggested a refined and mild ideal of the divine governor of their world. At first the Brahmists attempted to hold by the Vedas, but this involved them in sundry inconsistencies, and the more advanced section has now staked its belief upon pure a priori assumptions of a just and benevolent deity. The consequence has been that the sect has made no substantial progress beyond Bengal, because it can appeal to no authoritative warrant or prescriptive sanction ; while throughout the greater part of India experience and observation of the natural world tell directly against the assumption that the deity is either just or benevolent. 'The argument from the analogy of nature which Butler applied so unanswerably to the deism of his time is as effective when used by Hinduism against the optimistic speculations of India ; indeed in India the deist is very much more puzzled than in England to explain upon his theory the condition and prospects of mankind ; for if the visible world is directed by the divinities, as both sides agree, there can be no doubt that in Asia the system and purpose are at least very incomprehensible. And between the two explanations offered, of terrible and capricious or of just and benevolent deities, the probabilities to simple folks appear very much on the side of the former ; so that we can begin to see that Butler's famous argument from the analogy of nature is really connected with the ideas that lie at the roots of all religions which have grown up out of this very analogy, that is, of all natural religions. He revived in logical form the unconscious train of thoughts out of which all beliefs are more or less evolved ; he proved that the incomprehensible and pitiless working of natural laws warranted the inference of any degree of stern severity in the character of the administrator ; and it is precisely in this demonstration that the strength of all natural religions lies. Butler set this out for the first time forcibly and scientifically, and the position is doubly impregnable when held by those who are not concerned, as Butler was, to prove that moral and beneficent government of the world is nevertheless credible. Wherever morality and the refinements of an improved state of life begin to press in upon the older and rougher conceptions of divinity, we shall always find theology entrenched behind the undeniable concordance of what is recorded about the gods with what is seen of their doings in the visible world—so long, that is, as they are allowed to be responsible for what is done.  Morality can carry this entrenchment either by relieving them of this responsibility or by dissolving connexion with them—both very perilous manouvres for morality to attempt in almost every part of the world as it now is, and certain to be ruinous in Asia. On the other hand, theology, if not openly bombarded, is accessible to terms, compromises, and propositions for an alliance, and will even consent to march several stages on the same road with morality, provided that theology has nominal command of the whole force.

"After this manner, therefore, does the gradual and constantly interrupted advance of moral and material improvement influence the religious beliefs, which adapt themselves good humouredly to newfangled ideas upon decency and the like so long as their infallibility is not openly defied."

Mr Lyall, in conclusion, admits that—

"In all this there is, of course, nothing very new. Religion has in all countries at one time been the basis of society ; and the divine right of kings is not a very old story in England. Morality and religion everywhere act and react upon each other ; everywhere the slow improvement of the world has produced dynastic revolutions among gods and kings, and the traditional beliefs must accommodate themselves to the change of circumstance. But in India the peculiarity of the situation is that very primitive religious beliefs are being unexpectedly overtaken by an unusually high tide of public morals and spreading knowledge, which has come upon them without due warning ; and the nature gods are confronted by penal codes and modern education in a sudden way that is hardly fair. They have no time to reform, hardly time to change their costume, it is even questionable whether they will easily manœuvre their retreat out of the material into the spiritual world, give up the distribution of material blessings, and fall back upon future states of existence over which their power cannot be tested. . . . Nevertheless, if these beliefs are prematurely submerged, we may have an awkward break in the continuity of theologic development, to which they appear usually necessary ; and it is not quite clear how this may affect morals. We may after all find morality in India, as elsewhere, looking dubiously at the ladder she has kicked down, and seriously alarmed at the decline of religious beliefs which has been the necessary consequence of her own rise. Or it may be that those are right who insist that Asia has always been too deep a quicksand for Europe to build upon it any lasting edifice of morals, politics or religion ; that the material conditions forbid any lasting improvement ; that the English legions, like the Roman, will tramp across the Asiatic stage and disappear, and that the clouds of confusion and superstition will roll up again. Then after all the only abiding and immovable figure in the midst of the phantasmagoria will be that of the Hindu ascetic and sceptic, looking on at the incessant transformation of men into gods and gods into men, with thoughts that have been caught by an English poet, and expressed in lines that have a strange Asiatic note—     

All ye as a wind shall go by as a fire shall ye pass
and be past ; 
Ye are gods, and behold, ye shall die—and the waves       
be upon you at last. 
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in   
the changes of things, 
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps and the world
shall forget you as kings.'"

*The Influence upon Religious Beliefs of a Rise In Morality. By A C Lyall. "Fortnightly Review,"     April, 1878

 The Argus 29 June 1878,