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Page 1
Must religion and morals go together? Can one be taught without the
other? It is a practical question for educationists, and France tried
to answer it in the dreariest little cut and dry kind of catechism ever
given to boys to make them long to be wicked. But apart from education,
the question of the bedrock on which morals rest, the foundation on
which a moral edifice can be built that will stand secure against the
storms of life--that is a question of perennial interest, and it must
be answered by each of us, if we would have a test of Right and Wrong,
would know why Right is Right, why Wrong is Wrong.
Religions based on Revelation find in Revelation their basis for
morality, and for them that is Right which the Giver of the Revelation
commands, and that is Wrong which He forbids. Right is Right because
God, or a [R.][s.]hi or a Prophet, commands it, and Right rests on the
Will of a Lawgiver, authoritatively revealed in a Scripture.
Now all Revelation has two great disadvantages as a basis for morality.
It is fixed, and therefore unprogressive; while man evolves, and at a
later stage of his growth, the morality taught in the Revelation becomes
archaic and unsuitable. A written book cannot change, and many things in
the Bibles of Religion come to be out of date, inappropriate to new
circumstances, and even shocking to an age in which conscience has
become more enlightened than it was of old.
The fact that in the same Revelation as that in which palpably immoral
commands appear, there occur also jewels of fairest radiance, gems of
poetry, pearls of truth, helps us not at all. If moral teachings worthy
only of savages occur in Scriptures containing also rare and precious
precepts of purest sweetness, the juxtaposition of light and darkness
only produces moral chaos. We cannot here appeal to reason or judgment
for both must be silent before authority; both rest on the same ground.
"Thus saith the Lord" precludes all argument.
Let us take two widely accepted Scriptures, both regarded as
authoritative by the respective religions which accept them as coming
from a Divine Preceptor or through a human but illuminated being, Moses
in the one case, Manu in the other. I am, of course, well aware that
in both cases we have to do with books which may contain traditions of
their great authors, even sentences transmitted down the centuries.
The unravelling of the tangled threads woven into such books is a work
needing the highest scholarship and an infinite patience; few of us
are equipped for such labour. But let us ignore the work of the Higher
Criticism, and take the books as they stand, and the objection raised
to them as a basis for morality will at once appear.
Thus we read in the same book: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any
grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be
unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself, for
ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." "Sanctify yourselves therefore
and be ye holy." Scores of noble passages, inculcating high morality,
might be quoted. But we have also: "If thy brother, the son of thy
mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy
friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly saying, let us
go and serve other Gods ... thou shalt not consent unto him nor hearken
unto him; neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare,
neither shalt thou conceal him, but thou shalt surely kill him; thine
hand shall be first upon him to put him to death." "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live." A man is told, that he may seize a fair woman
in war, and "be her husband and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be
that if thou hast no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither
she will." These teachings and many others like them have drenched
Europe with blood and scorched it with fire. Men have grown out of
them; they no longer heed nor obey them, for man's reason performs its
eclectic work on Revelation, chooses the good, rejects the evil. This
is very good, but it destroys Revelation as a basis. Christians have
outgrown the lower part of their Revelation, and do not realise that
in striving to explain it away they put the axe to the root of its
authority.
So also is it with the Institutes of Manu, to take but one example
from the great sacred literature of India. There are precepts of
the noblest order, and the essence and relative nature of morality is
philosophically set out; "the sacred law is thus grounded on the rule
of conduct," and He declares that good conduct is the root of further
growth in spirituality. Apart from questions of general morality, to
which we shall need to refer hereafter, let us take the varying views
of women as laid down in the present Sm[r.][t.]i as accepted. On many
points there is no wiser guide than parts of this Sm[r.][t.]i, as will
be seen in Chapter IV. With regard to the marriage law, Manu says:
"Let mutual fidelity continue unto death." Of a father He declares:
"No father who knows must take even the smallest gratuity for his
daughter; for a man, who through avarice takes a gratuity, is a seller
of his offspring." Of the home, He says: "Women must be honoured and
adorned by their fathers, husbands, brothers and brothers-in-law who
desire happiness. Where women are honoured, there the [D.]evas are
pleased; but where they are not honoured, any sacred rite is fruitless."
"In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife and the
wife with her husband [note the equality], happiness will assuredly be
lasting." Food is to be given first in a house to "newly-married women,
to infants, to the sick, and to pregnant women". Yet the same Manu is
supposed to have taken the lowest and coarsest view of women: "It is
the nature of women to seduce men; for that reason the wise are never
unguarded with females ... One should not sit in a lonely place with
one's mother, sister or daughter; for the senses are powerful, and
master even a learned man." A woman must never act "independently, even
in her own house," she must be subject to father, husband or (on her
husband's death) sons. Women have allotted to them as qualities, "impure
desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct". The Sh[=u][d.]ra
servant is to be "regarded as a younger son"; a slave is to be looked
on "as one's shadow," and if a man is offended by him he "must bear it
without resentment"; yet the most ghastly punishments are ordered to be
inflicted on Sh[=u][d.]ras for intruding on certain sacred rites.
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