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Page 14
Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and
appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in
the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of
man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and
just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work
evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what
man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his
conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none
left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which
only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your
consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will
feel a pricking sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part
of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell
you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with
in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered
spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.
Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal
nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But
you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. God keeps the
keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends
which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked
within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot,
therefore, be transgressed. But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness,
is emphatically "he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man
shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth." All the secret recesses
of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision.
You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and
no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very
consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond
which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing
existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands,
two faculties have been given as a substitute for the unconscious
necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we
call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher,
and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate
your faculties and functions in their true order of relative
excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the
decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a
necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not,
therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a
disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies
into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appetites
according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that
infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at
times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and
his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may
occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been
left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the
difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and
infuriated brute.
"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appetites are to
be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the
dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is
necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by
habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The
habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at
first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and
prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher
conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only
from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and
imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the
least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may
have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural
disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.
This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the
constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and
appetites, to his social environment which so complex a state of society
as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary
circumstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the
conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom
of God, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least
partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing
into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and
appetites, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness,
with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to
subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high
and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for
whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and
perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his
passionate devotion to the search after truth--the kingdom of God as
revealed in the order of the universe--exclaimed testily that he had no
time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of
self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient
quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his
brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a
printless snow-peak, has not to control an appetite sharpened by
mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the
cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise. The man who has
a noble passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has
cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the
lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society,
and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace,
has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them
or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is
removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the
sacrifice of the weak by the strong, whilst in him the lower life may be
left to settle itself, as in the unconscious birds of the air. "Love
God," as St. Augustine said, "and do what you will." "Be a child of the
water, and you may be a child of the wind, blowing where it listeth."
"Seek the kingdom of God first, and all these things shall be added to
you."
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