The former class can only be dealt
with by the moral force of sympathy. Now it is true that the right
action will not be performed without the operation of both these
agencies. But the moral agency is the dominant one throughout; it is
that without which the very conception of law is impossible; it
overcomes those difficulties which in the vast majority of practical
cases are the most serious. The calculating casuistical faculty is, as
it were, in its employ, and it is no more improper to call it the
law-making power, although it does not ultimately decide what action is
to be performed, than to say that a house was built by one who did not
with his own hands lay the bricks and spread the mortar.
The objection which practical men take is a very important one, as the
criticisms of such men always are, being founded commonly upon large
observation and not perverted by theory. They say that the love of
Christ does not in practice produce the nobleness and largeness of
character which has been represented as its proper and natural result;
that instead of inspiring those who feel it with reverence and hope for
their kind, it makes them exceedingly narrow in their sympathies,
disposed to deny and explain away even the most manifest virtues
displayed by men, and to despair of the future destiny of the great
majority of their fellow-creatures; that instead of binding them to
their kind, it divides them from it by a gulf which they themselves
proclaim to be impassable and eternal, and unites them only in a gloomy
conspiracy of misanthropy with each other; that it is indeed a
law-making power, but that the laws it makes are little-minded and
vexatious prohibitions of things innocent, demoralising restraints upon
the freedom of joy and the healthy instincts of nature; that it favours
hypocrisy, moroseness, and sometimes lunacy; that the only vice it has
power to check is thoughtlessness, and its only beneficial effect is
that of forcing into activity, though not always into healthy activity,
the faculty of serious reflection.
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