VII

SUBSTITUTE FOR CONSCIENCE:

A

CONVENTIONAL MORALITY

KIN to the evil of blindly following the dictation of others in determin

ing our conduct is that of substituting for the voice of independent conscience conventional morality, or the mere allowances of society. If there were some universally settled social code it would be less dangerous for the ordinary individual to follow it, for the maxim, Quod semper, quod ubique et quod ab omnibus, is too near the truth to be ignored. Edmund Burke said, "A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment than condemn his species."

But there is no universal agreement upon the laws of conduct. The social code varies with the habits of the people who make up the various grades. Upper-tendom has some "good forms " which the grace of a natural conscience would feel to be contortions. City club life has its own brands of good fellowship, which only an acquired moral taste can relish. College custom labels cowardly hazing “manliness," blazons the honor of the class coat-of-arms with orange or blue paint on public works of art, and, with a chivalric

sense of decorum that might have been borbowed from medieval villeins rather than from knights, lounges in dirty sweaters at the feet of the "Ladies Faire." The Bowery has its etiquette of slang and slouch, as marked of its kind as the intonation borrowed from the English snob, or the high hand-shake of another aristocracy. There is an "honor among thieves," those of the pawn-shop and those of the bucket-shop, those who sell "green goods" and those who deal in stocks which they either know to be worthless or endeavor to make worthless by squeezing their value into the pockets of their promoters. The eyes which were dazzled by the lightnings of Sinai soon looked with worshipful awe upon the gleam of the Golden Calf. This moral gregariousness, even if it were of a persistent and uniform sort, would be as remote from true manhood as that which goes on all-fours.

A great evil resulting from this substitution of conventional morality for the originating conscience is that it tends to lower the conventional standard itself. Every variation from the absolute right is a subtraction, as every change in a perfect statue is a mutilation. Society is preserved only through the exalted lives and teachings of individuals who are great enough to lift themselves above their generation, and to voice again the teaching of native manhood. Prog

ress is thus always re-formation, restoration to the ideals which men have lost, and which here and there a seer finds in himself as he searches his own heart. You cannot see the sun's shape in a thousand broken waves, but the orb lies clearcut in the tiniest bit of smooth water.

So there are souls strong enough, sufficiently self-restrained and self-contained to have quiet hearts amid the turbulence of popular thought, unaffected by its "winds of doctrine" and its currents of custom. These souls are the springs of the world's divination. These men are the prophets. Observe how throughout the Bible ages they all speak one truth, one morality, making the various Books of the Bible, written in different ages, one Book for all ages. Observe how the sages of the heathen-not themselves heathen, as their words prove-agree with those of Israel and Christendom; the writers of the Shu-king and the Vedas, Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohammed-when he rises above his sensuality-Socrates, Plato, Seneca, the moral thoughts of these men are as like to the inspiration of the great Word as scattered particles of gold are like the solid vein which lies near by.

Every Christian is, in his own community, such a prophet, seer, restorer, renovator, regenerator, as he himself has become regenerate by the power of the Spirit. His commission is not merely to fight gigantic evils, but to press with all the

energy of his truer conscience against this fatal subsidence of the common virtue. He himself, joined in covenant with the Eternal Righteousness, is like the rib of rock on the mountain side, which holds back the landslide. He is the spring of fresh virtue which saves the stream of humanity, of which he is a part, from stagnation, and purges it of the poison that would generate in dead waters.

Men in all ages have approved the moral heroism of those who rebuked the conventional customs of their day by exemplifying some finer judgment of the individual conscience. Amid the ruins of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus there was recently found a bronze tablet inscribed to the eternal honor of Agathocles, son of Hegemon of Rhodes, who arrived in the harbor with three ships laden with fourteen thousand measures of wheat, at a time when a syndicate of speculators had forced the price of food up to the starvation line for poorer people. Agathocles refused to countenance this imposition, sold his grain at a reasonable profit, and broke the corner in the market." We suggest that the governors of the Chicago Produce Exchange purchase this relic, and build it into the wall of their building.

The need of an absolutely independent conscience is emphasized by the changing views of virtue and propriety even in the more stable religious communities. Some reader will smile

at his recollection of the Puritan Sabbath, while he thanks God for the knowledge of the Bible and the habits of heavy thinking which it imparted, and which have proven a splendid discipline for life, making him a better business man, citizen, and Christian. So we smile at the big helmets, breastplates, and two-handed swords in our museums, while we envy the old warrior the tremendous strength of muscle he developed in carrying them. But whether for better or worse, ideals of conduct are changing. Many Christian people now feel justified in seeking recreation at the theater, but fifty years ago it was not an uncommon thing to hear sermons against the reading of Shakespeare, and the actor's profession was regarded as a Mephistopheles cloak hiding the hoofs and tail of the Devil. About forty years ago a generous patron of one of our leading universities offered to build a gymnasium and equip it with bowling alleys and billiard tables. The gift was declined, on the assumption that the wooden balls always rolled hell-ward, and the zigzags of the ivory balls suggested the maze of a lost soul. A professor within the present generation lectured on the virtual blasphemy of backgammon, on the ground that, there being no such thing as real chance, the tossing of the dice was a direct appeal to God, and was related to good morals only as profanity is related to prayer. It is not thirty years since a religious book by a