Chapter 4 The Critical Period

In 1888 I became acquainted with the work of the Ethical Movement, which was then establishing a branch in Philadelphia. The platform of the movement appealed to me strongly, because it was completely divorced from the supernatural. It emphasized the deed, and ignored the creed; or rather, it believed in the creed of the deed. I invited the leaders of this movement to address my society, and to explain to us in detail the philosophy of Ethical Culture. All five of the lecturers of the Ethical Societies in America successively occupied my platform in St.

George's hall, and I in return occupied their platforms in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia. This interchange of platforms resulted in my accepting a call from the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and three years later from the Chicago Society, which latter I served as its lecturer for five years.

The founder of the Ethical Societies was Dr. Felix Adler, the son of a Jewish Rabbi, who was expected to succeed his father as the spiritual head of the fashionable and wealthy Fifth Avenue synagogue in New York City. But all the other members of the fraternity of lecturers were either ex-ministers of the Christian church, like myself, or had, at one time, studied for the Christian ministry. In the beginning, the movement was consistently and fearlessly Rationalistic. Adler had a lecture on Atheism in which he boldly exposed the weakness of the theistic position. This lecture was printed and widely circulated. The other lecturers also openly antagonized the God idea as robbing the idea of the Good of the attention and love of man. The churches feared the Ethical Movement in those days, and denounced it as an irreligious institution.

But soon there appeared a change in the leader and founder of the movement, and gradually also in the majority of his colleagues. The lecture on Atheism was withdrawn from circulation, and Dr. Adler began delivering addresses on immortality, and exalting the character of Christ in the fashion of Unitarianism. All lectures in criticism of the fundamentals of Orthodoxy were as much as prohibited. Orthodox leaders were invited to preach from the platform of the Ethical Societies, and it became the ambition of an Ethical lecturer to deliver only such lectures as no church-goer would object to hear. I do not mean that Orthodox doctrines were promulgated by the Ethical lecturers, but nothing was to be said against them, if nothing could be said in their favor. The aim of the Movement was now defined to be solely the improvement of the morals of its members and of the public, and therefore, like the church, it began to fight "sin," studiously ignoring the debasing superstitions and the bondage of dogma which not only had bankrupted, both mentally and morally, whole nations, but which had also withered the greatest civilization the world had ever seen, and surrendered humanity to the keeping of "the dark ages" for a thousand years. This change in the program of the Ethical Societies greatly pleased the Orthodox world, and all fear of menace or danger to its theological interests from that direction was dissipated. Catholic and Protestant clergymen vied with each other in expressions of admiration for the work of the Ethical Societies, and all praised the tact which the leaders of the movement displayed in refraining from criticisms of the churches and their doctrines, to protest against the degrading effects of which, was the very object for which the Ethical Societies were organized in the first place. Thus it will be seen how completely the Movement came to abandon its original program. The Sunday lectures of the leaders of the Movement became, in time, so "harmless" that preachers recommended them to their flock, while the Ethical lecturers in return publicly declared that it was not necessary for a Trinitarian, a Papist or a Jew to leave his church before he could be admitted to membership in an Ethical Society. The Ethical Societies, in fact, did not encourage people to break away from their ecclesiastical connections, but indirectly, at least, advised them to support the new movement without withdrawing their support from the churches to which they belonged.

I cannot imagine that any one seriously believed that a devout Christian, or an Orthodox Jew, would join an Ethical Society for purposes of edification in morals. To do so would be equivalent to an admission that one's divinely appointed church was not satisfying one's highest needs, and to feel that way toward one's own church is to cease to believe in it. Only those then who had parted with the past, with its crushing and hampering freight of dogmas, would think of joining an organization that started as an "Atheistic," or at least, a non-religious society. But the invitation to join the Ethical Societies without leaving their own churches had the effect of drawing the new movement into closer relations with the religious bodies, which in our opinion has greatly handicapped the Ethical lecturers, and impaired their leadership in the world of thought. It is not my intention to bring a charge of deliberate surrender to the churches against the leaders of the Ethical Movement. It will be difficult to find anywhere a finer body of men than the lecturers of the different Ethical Societies in America. But they swerved from the path they had started to follow, and sacrificed a magnificent career to become an annex to the church. Not only the history of the Movement, but also the literature which it now puts forth, lends confirmatory evidence to the criticism I have made against a cause to which I once gave my heart.

That the publications of the Ethical Society as well as the Sunday lectures of the leaders, show decidedly reactionary tendencies, it will not be difficult to prove. They do this, first, by maintaining a significant silence on questions the free discussion of which would offend the churches, and in the second place, by indirectly endeavoring to bolster up, by new interpretations, the discredited dogmas of the popular religions. Either of these charges, if true, will be enough to prove that the Ethical Movement has not remained faithful to its original intentions.

It is not a secret that the lecturers of the Ethical Societies no longer publicly condemn the false teaching of the churches. These false teachings, in our opinion, form an essential part of both Christianity and Judaism, which have to be exposed and attacked vigorously and without compromise, if morality is ever to make any permanent progress in the world. It should be as impossible to reconcile Ethical Culture with the churches, as it is to reconcile theology with science, and yet, that is precisely what the Ethical lecturers think they Have accomplished. I have only to quote from authoritative Christian sources to show how prejudicial to the interests of morality is the teaching of the churches. For an Ethical Movement systematically to ignore the evil which the churches do by sacrificing reason to dogma is in the nature of treason to its own principles. The whole trend of Christian teaching is that Ethics is secondary. How can the Ethical Societies afford to ignore so fundamental an untruth? Both the established and the non-conformist churches explicitly and officially declare and teach that, "They also are to be accursed that presume to say, that every man shall be saved by the Law, or the sect that he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the Light of Nature. For Holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the name of Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved." * Clearly, then, for the churches it is not ethics, but faith in Jesus, a disputed personage at the very best, which represents the highest interests of the race.

* Eighteenth Article of the Church of England.

That the same unethical doctrine forms the basis of the Reformed churches will be seen from the following:

"Much less can men not professing the Christian religion be saved, be they ever so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature; and to ascertain and maintain that they can is very pernicious and to be detested." *

The same indifference, if not contempt for morality is shown by the leading exponents of Christianity. When I was a lad of about fifteen, one of the books placed in my hand, and which I was made to regard almost as inspired as the Bible, was, Paleys Evidences of Christianity. Speaking on the scope of the Christian religion, in the second part of his book, he writes: "Moral precepts or examples, or illustrations of moral precepts, may be occasionally given, and be highly valuable, yet still they do not form the original purpose of the mission." The meaning is clear: Christ did not come to make men moral, he came to save those who shall believe in him. And this is also the teaching of leaders like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon and General Booth. The burden of Luther's message was that "Christ had come to abolish the Moral Law." The liberty which Luther proclaimed assured the believer that even the decalogue shall not be brought into account against him, "nor its violation be allowed to disturb the conscience of the Christian." ** In the same spirit, Spurgeon cried in his London Tabernacle, Sunday after Sunday, for nearly half a century: "Thirty years of sin shall be forgiven, and it shall not take thirty minutes to do it in." And this doctrine that faith in Christ can in one instant make a man who has led a life of crime and corruption, one of God's saints, Spurgeon and his fellow-clergymen learned from Christ himself, who opened the gates of paradise to the malefactor on the cross, and in one minute wiped out all his past. This example from the gospels shows that, the preachers and the creeds in giving to morality a secondary place, are not misrepresenting the teachings of Christ. What need has a religion which can change men miraculously,-and which makes faith the sole condition of salvation,-for Ethical Culture?

* Westminster Catechism.

** Moehler's Works, quoted by Cotter Morison, Service of

Man, page 51.

What is true of Christianity is equally true of its parent, Judaism. The full stress of the Old Testament is on the necessity of the Ceremonial and not the Moral Law. While the Jews were not only permitted, but were ordered to break every Ethical commandment in the decalogue, to commit theft, murder, massacre, and acts of oppression and brigandage,-every departure from the ritual of Israel was visited by immediate and clamorous punishment. Both Judaism and Christianity make their special objective, not character, but the creed. How, then, can a movement the motto of which is "The deed, not the creed," maintain so profound a silence, or refrain even from calling attention to the positive hurt which the old religions do to the cause of righteousness? What is the defense of Ethical Culture against this charge?

If it be answered that, the churches no longer take their creeds or bibles, seriously, notwithstanding their official professions, then the Ethical lecturers should, instead of silently endorsing the hypocrisy which professes one thing and believes another, thunder against it with all their might. This should be done not from motives of hatred or combativeness, but in the spirit of faithfulness to the best interests of man. It is error, and not its victims, against which the Rationalist directs his straight and sounding blows. It was Paine's kindly advice in the French convention to kill the king and spare the man. It is the desire of Reason to destroy false teachings and to help enlighten the teacher.

The effect upon the prosperity of the Ethical Societies, both in America and Europe, of this policy of silence, has been really disastrous. Like Unitarianism, the Ethical Movement has drifted into the sheltered harbor where it hugs the wharves made fast by posts and ropes. Both these movements started out for the sea, but not a vessel flying their flags can now be encountered at any distance from the coast. Thirty years ago there were four Ethical Societies in America; there are now these same four and no more, and three of them are without any lecturers.

But not only by their silence on the injurious teachings of both Judaism and Christianity, which strike at the very foundations of moral health, but also by their attempts, incredible as it may seem, to discredit science and to seek in metaphysics, or in a sort of attenuated theology, the origins and sanctions of Ethics, the Ethical lecturers have given to decaying dogmas the support they owed to Rationalism.

In a contribution by Dr. Adler, head of the fellowship, on one of the fundamentals of the Movement, we see full traces of this deplorable effort to divorce Ethics from science, and wed her to theology.

In discussing "The Religion of Duty," the professor, instead of explaining duty in the terms of science, tries to make of it a deeper mystery even than the thrice veiled dogmas of the churches. "Duty," he says, "becomes religion when we recognize that it is not a law or a command that has a merely sensible origin, or can be explained in terms of sensible experience, that we can get to the bottom of it and thoroughly penetrate it with our understanding, or see fully the use of it. * * * It is then that we come to realize that in the moral command there is something awful." The language is not very clear-perhaps because the thought is not very clear-but we believe its meaning is that, a moral command is awful because we cannot understand it. Prof. Adler seems to make of duty a new kind of a god. The qualities and attributes of the deity he bodily transfers to his successor-Duty. Accordingly, Duty becomes just as mysterious and awful as God, and we can no more get at the "bottom" of Duty than we can understand the Deity. Duty no more than the Deity can be "expressed in terms of sensible experience," hence it is inexplicable; and the only way we can feel "the majesty and inexplicable augustness of it," says the professor, "is to draw back the curtains and see," and then "we shall find that out of this relation we suddenly get religion." I fear we get it a little too suddenly. Such rapid transformations suggest a deus ex machina.

There is serious danger of making a fetish out of the word duty. The thinking world has abandoned theism because of the impossibility of explaining in terms of sensible experience, the existence of a personal infinite; but now Prof. Adler wishes to surround his new deity, Duty, with the same "clouds and darkness" which have so long hung about the ancient divinities.

In what sense is it a compliment to the moral law to say that it cannot be "explained in terms of sensible experience"? What is gained by putting a dead wall or "curtains" between the intelligence of man and his conscience? Why sneer at the scientific explanation of the origin and growth of the moral sense by calling it "narrow, secular, materialistic and paltry," as Prof. Adler does in this lecture-when no better explanation is offered than a mere rhetorical recommendation "to draw back the curtains and see the majesty and inexplicable augustness of it"? What are these curtains? Who put them there to hide such "augustness"? If the scientific explanation of the origin of the moral sense is a "flat failure," quoting from the professor again, what is his explanation? We are really grieved to see so influential a public leader taking sides against science, the only dependable teacher we have, notwithstanding its many limitations.

Again, in his criticism of the evolutionary view, the professor says: "As against the scientific evolutionary view, I plead for what I would call the moral evolutionary view, which asserts that the moral law is a law of our nature, and in so far, the universal nature. * * * We leave the issues to work themselves out; we leave them to mightier powers than we, whose ways we wot not of." Here surely is theology-cap, cassock and all.

But what is the difference between the scientific evolutionary view and the moral evolutionary view? If the scientific view is not in accord with the known facts, then it is not scientific. But if it is in harmony with the facts, what do we gain by rejecting it in preference to the "moral evolutionary view"? If on the other hand the "moral evolutionary view" is not scientific, what is its value?

According to the generally admitted scientific explanation, morality is just as much the result of evolution as is music or language. Morality is the slow product of the accumulated experience of humanity. But that does not seem to be Prof. Adler's theory. "There is," he says, "a voice that speaks in us out of the ultimate reality of things." But if this voice is not the inherited instincts of the race, what is it? If it is a ready-made, or made to order voice, or a voice not made at all-but, well, an unfathomable something commanding us in tones of the categorical imperative-who placed it there? God, or chance? If conscience, in straight words, is a natural product in the same sense that the brain or the human hand is, then there is no good reason for throwing a mystic veil over this one faculty or sense, or in decorating it with fallacy trimmings and jingling bells in order to make it look exceptionally awful and august. Just as the foolish overpraise of Jesus has nearly ruined him as a living force in the life of the world today, so there is danger of making an idol or a mummy out of morality by taking away all its beautiful naturalness.

"I simply think of the moral law within us," says Dr. Adler, "as a hand laid on us. * * * I like to think of the moral law * * * as of a hand; the face we do not see, but the hand we feel." Is not this an attempt to make ethics as mystifying as theology? If this "hand," of which the professor speaks, is endowed with unerring intelligence, how shall we account for the missteps, disastrous in their consequences, which man has taken with this "hand" laid on him?

However, this "hand" which we are told "is heavy upon our shoulders as Atlas," is not infallible, what is its worth? Is it necessary to perplex an audience with visions of a "hand," and "a face that belongs to the hand which we do not see," in order to impress it with the beauty and duty of obedience to the dictates of the enlightened and emancipated conscience?

But this confusion is the result of the commerce of Ethical Culture with Churchianity and Judaism, in other words, with the supernatural. A teacher who is trying to convince both Christian and Jew that without discarding their obsolete and obstructive dogmas they can join the Ethical Movement, is compelled by the very exigencies of the mesalliance to tarry in the region of fog and obscurity. And this confusion in thought, this lack of decision and clarity in one's concepts, this metaphysical vagueness and bewildering rhetoric is the price Orthodoxy exacts before it will bestow its smile upon a prodigal teacher seeking to return to the fold.

We could not agree with the head of the Ethical Movement that it was worth our while to try to win the favor of the churches, or to seek their co-operation. In our opinion such a rapprochement would only redound to the glory of an institution that has proven itself not only incapable of saving the world, but of positively hindering its salvation. This indictment is not voiced in haste, or in malice, but because it is based upon careful observation and study.

The church can never become a great moral power until it is rationalized. In this age of enlightenment the church can not be honest and Orthodox at the same time. We recommend this thought to the consideration of the Ethical lecturers. And no institution can make others honest, if it is dishonest itself. Is the church honest with science? Is it honest with history? Is it honest with the Bible? Mark these brave words of Huxley:

"When Sunday after Sunday, men who profess to be our instructors in righteousness, read out the statement that 'In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is,' in innumerable churches, they are either propagating what they may honestly know, and, therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities; or if they use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral standard of the much-abused Jesuit."

How refreshing!

To the average thinker the inconsistency of advocating Ethics as the supreme good, on the one hand, and on the other, of maintaining a deliberate silence on the demonstrably false teaching of the church which makes belief the greatest of all virtues, has only to be pointed out to be comprehended. And it is Kant, the patron-saint of the American Ethical lecturers, who set them the example of inconsistency. With a rigour which even in a dogmatist of the theological schools would be considered excessive, Emanuel Kant argued that so imperative was the duty to tell the truth that, even to save one's self or another from murder, there must be no departure from it. If you saw an assassin with a drawn dagger running after a man or a woman, and he asked you, "which way the fugitive ran," if you answer him at all, insists Kant, you must tell him the truth. And yet this same philosopher encouraged openly the Lutheran clergy of his day to go on deceiving the people with beliefs which they themselves had discarded, on the score that populus vult decipi, and that the clergy are excused by their profession for playing a false part.

Is it then from policy or from principle that the Ethical lecturers, starting as they did, by denouncing the supernatural as the destroyer of character, later on came to ignore altogether the existence even of degrading superstitions, and were content to be a moral improvement association merely, somewhat after the pattern, as Marie-Jean Guyau states, of a Christian Temperance Society? *

* L'Irréligion de L'Avenir.

The battle of progress is to be fought in the mind. An intellectual awakening must precede all real and permanent moral improvement of the world. On the tree of enlightenment alone can ripen the fruit of righteousness and peace. And there can be no enlightenment under the church. Even as the light of the sun can not enter a dungeon, the light of knowledge can not penetrate the mind which it has been the aim of the church to keep shut. The condition of the spread of knowledge as of the sunlight is the same-freedom. Yet freedom is anathema where there is a Revelation. A thousand Ethical Societies could not help Russia unless she began by striking, without sparing or wavering, at the teachings of the Greek church.

The new edifice cannot rise side by side with the old-it must rise on the ruins of the old.

Can there be any real moral advance in a community in which the following is accepted and taught as a divinely revealed truth: "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works and deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort." *

* No. XI. of the Articles of the Church of England. All the

other Christian churches teach to young and old the same

doctrine.

Only by self-stultification can an Ethical Society refrain from combating so injurious a teaching with all the earnestness and courage at their command.

Nothing would please the priests and rabbis more than to be assured that the efforts of the new teachers will be confined strictly to giving moral exhortations, and that they will leave church and dogma respectfully alone.

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