Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/73

48 thinker, once for a while endured, to the richer joys and sorrows of the man of the world? Have not such men actually held the pleasures of life, however dearly bought, to be better than the superhuman calm of your philosophic ideal?” Even so to the Stoic, the objector may say: “Granted that your eternal Reason does pervade all things and is our common Father, why should that cause me, who am one of his creatures, to do otherwise than I like? Who can escape from his presence? Even if I live irrationally, am I not still part of the Universal Reason? The bare fact that there is an Eternal Wisdom does not make clear to me that I must needs be very wise. My destiny may be the destiny of a being made solely to enjoy himself.” And, to the Christian doctrine, the skeptic may oppose the objection that if the truth does not at once spiritually convert all who know it, the proof is still lacking that the Christian Ideal actually appeals to all possible natures. “If I feel not the love of God,” the objector will say, “how prove to me that I ought to feel it?” Or, as human nature so often questions: “Why must I be loving and unselfish?”

Now, the simple, practical way of dealing with all such objectors is to anathematize them at once. Of course, from the point of view of any assumed ideal, the anathema may be well founded. “If you do not as I command,” so says any moral ideal, “I condemn you as an evil-doer.” “He that believeth not shall be damned.” But anathemas are not arguments. To resort to them is to give up theoretic ethics. We who are considering, not whom we shall