CHAPTER II.

PERFECTIBILITY OF MAN.

CHRIST said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Nor could he ask of us less than perfection. He started from a state of perfection; from the example set by an all-good as well as an all-wise and all-potent God; he came down from heaven and reascended to heaven; his mission to man was to fit man for a heaven not in this world but in the next. To demand perfection from man was consistent with his scheme of salvation; to demand any less would have been inconsistent with it.

The command of science is a very different one. Science does not allow us to aim at perfection, or even to hope for perfection. Its injunction is a much more humble one, and because more humble perhaps more practicable and less hopeless; it may be summed up in the word improvement.

Science, in asking for improvement, points to the history of man for encouragement; religion, in demanding perfection, could only derive from that history despair. Science demonstrates that step by step evolution has, by proceeding from lower to higher

types, stealthily but surely scored success; religion would have, on the contrary, to record an uninterrupted succession of failures.

It is well to set a high standard, but a standard is too high if it is beyond our range of vision as well as beyond our range of hope. This is the mistake that science avoids. It moves slowly from one known order of facts to another, from the development of the protozoön to that of the mollusc, from that of the invertebrate to that of the vertebrate, from that of the savage to that of the civilised; it argues that what has happened can go on happening, and because development has not, so far as we know, proceeded by leaps and bounds in the past, we have no right to expect that it will proceed by leaps and bounds in the future, though that it can be made to advance, and advance in the direction of improvement, seems to be indicated by the whole scheme of Nature as it becomes more and more unfolded to us.

Nor is there any conflict here between the dictates of religion and those of science. Religion, consistent with her rôle, deriving her language as well as her inspiration from the exaggeration of the East, overstates her case. Science, less dogmatic because less authoritative, proceeding cautiously from fact to fact, taking nothing for granted, fearing to err by claiming too much, hoping to attain by claiming little, understates. Thus religion tells us, if slapped on one cheek to turn the other also; if robbed of a coat to offer the cloak also. Science teaches the doctrine of resistance, inculcates justice, orders reparation.

Religion teaches us to despise the body and care only for the soul. Science answers, "Mens sana in corpore sano." The ascetic who, yielding to religious temptation, outrages his body by too little love of it is to the eye of science as immoral as the gourmet who, yielding to his appetites, outrages his body by too much love of it. There are no lights and shadows in the teaching of religion. She loves to clothe her orders in set rules and commandments; she uses the imperative; she consents to no exceptions; she admits of no compromise. Science is less positive. She recognises the complexity of man, his transitional. condition, the weakness of his body, the limitations of his strength. And yet both unite in enjoining the same rules of conduct: "Love your neighbour as yourself," and "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you."

Nor can we as yet dispense with the religious method even where it seems to depart most from common sense. Not only is every individual man a complex thing, but humanity is complex also. Ethical rules coldly reasoned out by science may be sufficient guides to philosophers; they will be caviare to the general. The uneducated must be treated with authority, they must be impressed by ritual, they must even be coerced by fear. Let, then, religion continue to do its work with those who cannot be reached by science, but let those who have outgrown swaddling clothes prepare themselves to stand alone; let them recognise that perfection is not for our generation, and yet not in this recognition abate

one jot of effort towards self-improvement; let them rather, by setting their standard within their comprehension and within the limits of human attainment, live up to it, and by the hourly effort of every day form character able to resist in the hour of temptation.

But to do this we must be clear as to what indeed constitutes our duty. We must be able to distinguish between science that is true and science that is false, between theories that are sound and those that are unsound; for if religion misleads us sometimes, science may mislead us sometimes also. There is no monopoly of wisdom in this world. We are all seeking light. We probably never see the whole of any ethical question. Our organs of ethical vision are not yet complete; in some of us they are absent altogether. We have the same consciousness of ethical truths as earthworms have of light. The whole of one end of an earthworm is sensitive to or conscious of light, and this consciousness enables him to grope to the surface of the earth, but he has no eye, he can distinguish no object. Just as the eye has developed from a mere sensitive surface, so our consciences have to develop from such dim notions of right and wrong as to-day confound as well as guide us.

Now it is believed that there are certain great principles which will, when recognised, help us in our efforts to improve the ethical sense; and having disembarrassed ourselves of the hopeless struggle to be perfect, it may be less difficult to recognise these principles, which, alas, are not consistent with such a

struggle. So long as we are bent on nothing less. than perfection, so long are we unable to recognise the limitations which make perfection impossible and the new rules of conduct which are consistent with those limitations. When we have learned to fly, then, perhaps, may we begin the attempt to reach the fixed stars; but until we have learned to fly we had best leave the fixed stars alone.

It has been necessary to point out the religious mistake of aiming at perfection; it next becomes necessary to relieve the ethical student of the paralysing doctrine so often taught by scientific men under the name of determinism; for it is an essential part of the question involved in the perfectibility of man to know how far, if at all, men are themselves factors in their own perfectibility. If, indeed, man is "an iron balance in which to weigh pleasure and pain," then there seems no room for ethical effort, no reason for ethical discussion, and we are left to the hopeless alternative proposed by Herbert Spencer-philosophic calm.