should cast off its shackles, but the heart remain in bondage.

e;

But to our parallel. Man starts, then, on his course of "becoming" with a self-regard in the basis of his life this is the negation, the ignorance which Nature is to drive him ultimately to cast out. This she does by a process analogous to that of the making of knowledge by a reductio ad absurdum. Man is made to work out the problem of trying to live on a self-basis to its bitter end, and having tried all conceivable ways of doing the impossible, he is to be brought to cast out this self, the negation in his premiss, and live, "Nature-wise," an altruistic life. His action will then be related to the being of Nature as Science is now related to its phenomeLet us trace his course towards this goal.

non.

We may roughly divide men into two classes-those who seek goodness, and those who simply seek pleasure and live to gratify their inclinations. It will not be denied that there have been in all times men who cared for rightness, and that this passion, though never so widely spread as that for pleasure, has shown itself-witness the annals of asceticism-under all religions and amongst various races, capable of sustaining the most gigantic efforts, and of overmastering every other passion of human nature. These two classes of men have one thing in common-they start from a self-basis; they pursue a different course, the one tending to vicious excess, to lawless indulgence, the other to self-torturing asceticism, to a cruel enforcement of rigid laws; they seem wide as the poles apart, each denounces the other. What keeps them asunder? Their one point of agreement, self-regard. The self-pleasing and the self-righteous man can never be reconciled but by casting out the self; then “out of twain is made one new man."

One cannot help being reminded here of the Pauline idea, destined to receive an ampler fulfilment than any as yet witnessed, of the union of Jew and Gentile in the new humanity revealed by Christ. The law-regarding Jew is to be self-righteous no longer, but is to find all law-keeping summed up in the one new command to "love one another;" the passion-led, pleasure-loving Gentile is to be brought under the law to Christ, but it is on his heart that the law is written; he indulges a 'passion," though he is no longer "self" indulgent.

These two classes are paralleled in the intellectual sphere the ignorant, who follow blindly the impressions of sense or the natural affirmations of reason, correspond to the "pleasure-led;" the makers of the epicycle astronomy, those who frame an "observation-true" science, are like the "self-virtuous." This latter intellectual class may be composed of men of the highest endowments and filled with a zeal for truth, but they are like the ignorant in one point, that (in the old instance) their non-perception of the earth's motion ruled their conclusion, forced their reason to make a sort of virtue of doing that which was repugnant to its instincts. The careful study of the appearance imposed on the man with the false thought in his premiss the necessity of believing a false theory-a wrong thing became his "duty." Just so with the "selfvirtuous man. Nature's only "right" is in the mutual service of all creatures, and the only fulfiller of this right is that "Love that makes Duty one with Delight." he in whom this love is not, who strives to be good for himself, will be driven to find some other measure and standard of right than service: he will make it to consist in the abnegation of pleasure.1 This is asceticism,

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But

1 For further explanation how a self-regard in the beginning imposes false duties upon the conscience, the reader is referred to the Essays on The Bases of Morals" and on "Others' Needs," in this volume.

a goodness held to be antagonistic to the natural desires. The ascetic ages are marked by a tendency to multiply the number of duties and restraints upon natural passion far beyond the demands of utility and practical benevolence. The perfect rule of service renders a certain amount of pleasure-restraint necessary (but even here it is by a higher pleasure that the check is imposed), but where restraint is held to be a good thing in itself, a number of artificial duties will be enforced which are often directly opposed to service. This multiplication of burdensome duties answers in the intellectual parallel to the complicated system of epicycles, which it was impossible to a "good" intellect to reject, as long as the earth's motion was ignored. The self-right is to the moral what the "observation-true" is to the intellectual process. There is the same repression in both-of passion in one, of the free play of reason in the other. And just as in the "reductio ad absurdum" process, the force was being gathered and collected (under repression) by which the false conclusions, and through them the false premiss, were to be thrown off, and thus the tyranny of the senses broken; so in asceticism, which is a reductio ad absurdum of the self-life, the force was being stored up by which the casting out of self is to be effected. Asceticism had to be broken up that a true nature-goodness might take its place. Nature has linked together pleasure and service; the self dissociates them, and in trying to follow either alone, it ensures its own destruction in the end. "O Death, I will be thy destruction." No goodness that is not happy is good enough for God. Man offers Him his difficult virtues, his mortified body and stifled affections, as an acceptable sacrifice; but God answers, "Who hath required this at your hands?" But though

1 i.e., Passion-led.

this goodness is found wanting, and asceticism has to pass away, it has done its work of slaying the self.

The triumphs of self-restraint and abnegation have not been wasted any more than were the intellectual virtues of the Ptolemaic astronomers. Self did indeed vitiate the goodness of the ascetics, since it made them enforce mischievous laws, and cherish their own saintship to the neglect of social claims (just as the sense-rule perverted the results of the best observation and logic of the astronomers to a false conclusion), yet the power of living an altruistic life was asserted in their perverted goodness, and becomes to us a prophecy of possible achievement. If man could perform such prodigies when striving against Nature, what may he not accomplish when he is working with her? Even apart from this consideration, so attractive, in some of its aspects, is the ascetic life to us who groan under an imposed rule of self-regarding luxury, stifling our best emotions, that we wonder sometimes why it could not endure, and are disposed to think that the phase into which man's moral life has since passed is a retrogression rather than an advance. The prevalence of this feeling meets us in a variety of forms-in sentimental sighings after the martyr's crown or the virgin's wreath; in the exaltation of the Cross as the sole symbol of our aspirations (while it recedes further and further from the sphere of our practical life); in the revival, among the Ritualists and elsewhere, of medieval ascetic practices. Christendom, or at least the most faithful and loving portion of it, is still exploring the empty tomb and reverentially handling the folded grave-clothes, while an angel unheeded proclaims to ears too sad to listen, "He is not here, but He is risen; why seek ye the Living among the dead? Christ could not be holden any longer by the bonds of death, because He was to open the gates of

heaven to all believers." And this is why the grave of asceticism could no longer hold the spirit which for love's sake had so willingly descended into it. His life, like His death, was for others. "To this end He both died and rose and revived-that He might be Lord of the dead and of the living." And the Church, His body, wore for a time the fetters of a dead restraining law, that she might throw open the gates of a freer, nobler life to the "Gentiles "—the passion-led pleasure-seekers (or pleasure slaves), who, though incapable of virtue as long as it meant legal restrictions and arbitrary denials of nature, might enter into a kingdom where love was at once the impelling and the restraining power. This brings us back to the parallel of the epicycles-[indeed, it requires a positive holding back of the pen to avoid speaking of one in the terms of the other. As I write, three things are before me at once-the life of Jesus as it was transacted on this earth eighteen centuries ago; the moral life of man or the Church (divesting that term of any associations which limit it to a particular set of persons arrogating to themselves an exclusive title to it); and the development of the human intellect by the creation of science; and these three are one]. For we saw just now that the laborious construction of the Ptolemaic astronomy, undertaken by a small fraction only of the race, issued in a discovery of truth which could be imparted to all, and, more than that, in an emancipation of the reason for all unborn generations. So was it also with the subjection of the moral nature to a false law by asceticism: and the issue is the same; that deliverance is made possible for a much larger portion of mankind than could ever have been induced to go through the process. How plain this is in the New Testament, where the Gentiles are represented as pressing into the