Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/346

332 last, assumes development, and which is not checked in its exposition and application of natural laws by any stereotyped creed or text?

In the new system we really have the reconciliation of self-interest and duty, for we see self-interest merging into duty, and we see duty bringing the highest rewards that self-interest could desire. To say that this system will be powerless for regulative purposes is to take a thoroughly unnatural view of human nature. It is to assume some tendency in man to evil, over and above the promptings of the self-protective instinct. Now, this surplusage of evil in human nature I, for one, strenuously deny. Every man comes into the world with a problem to solve, upon the solution of which his whole course in life depends; and that problem is the due balancing of higher and lower instincts in the interest of higher life. To suppress the lower at the bidding of the higher would, as Mr. Spencer shows, be to suppress life itself. This would be casting aside the problem, not solving it. What is important to remember is, that in the lower there is nothing essentially bad, and that the conflict between lower and higher goes on in the region of purely personal desires before it is carried into the region of social relations. An enlightened interpretation of self-interest in regard to personal matters is thus a preparation for enlightened and worthy action in the social region. For example, the man who has strenuously controlled appetite in the interest of health, and who has realized the satisfaction and happiness that come of doing so, will be better fitted to control selfish, in the interest of social, impulses than one who had never learned to control appetite at all. He comes to this higher test fortified by self-conquest, and with an increased sense of the dignity and worth of life—prepared, moreover, to believe that the path of true happiness is an ascending one. Let these truths—for they are truths—be believed and taught; let men see the path along which their moral development has lain in the past, and along which it must lie in the future, and we shall have little reason to regret the lures and terrors of the old theology. Either this, or there is some radical flaw in the constitution of things, by reason of which they tend to corruption—a belief which some may hold on theological grounds, but which I venture to say would never commend itself to any unbiased intelligence, irreconcilable, as it is, with the actual existence of good in human nature and human institutions.

The question, however, may finally be asked whether a naturalistic system of morals will ever excite the enthusiasm, ever create the same intense longing after purity of heart, that has been produced under the influence of the Christian creed. Will it ever show us the "quick eyed sanctity" which Dr. Newman mentions as a peculiar fruit of the Spirit? Will it ever call forth such a pleading for fuller and higher spiritual life as we find in Charles Wesley's hymn: