(attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)
assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will, guided by human intelligence. man finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and the meaning of the compass. so now he takes charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.
it is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with which he finds himself confronted. the moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. if he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is going to some other part of the world. next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship on the rocks—because the helmsman persisted in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!
if life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. if man is free to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new tools and devise new processes. if it is the task of reason to choose among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws and customs and moral codes.
this is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all religions. so far as i know there is no religion which does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules. it is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.
let us see how this works out in practice. let us take, for a test, the ten commandments. these commandments were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "thou shall do no murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of controversy. if you are a quaker, you accept the former version, while if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you accept the latter. you maintain the right to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. you maintain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.
and also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. you consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the divine law. in other words, you subject this divine law to human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular infection. if he is ordered to put on the special costume of killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "c. o.," and you bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your dungeons.
or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. surely this is a law about which we can agree! but presently we discover that unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery than otherwise. therefore, our wise men meet together, and revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. but some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. the catholic church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal sin. the episcopal church does not go quite so far as that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?
or take the law, "thou shalt not steal." surely we can all agree upon that! let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." is it stealing to seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, and hand it down to your children forever? yes, of course, that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your statement. it is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and held unchangeable forever. also, we run up against the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the state, by men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.
again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? some of us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infection. again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of his starving child? the law says that this is stealing, and sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and i have heard a great many respectable americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such circumstances.
one could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk about "divine" rules for human conduct. regardless of any ideas you may hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from the task of judging and deciding. all that you do is to judge right or to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself and upon all who come into contact with you. how much more sensible, therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness and certainty!
"but," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without any guide or authority. how can human beings act, how can they deal with one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
the answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working principles. many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical purposes—the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life of many generations. we are not likely to see in our time the end of the ancient hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. the catholic church has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. indeed, science has added to gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that the drinking of wine was not merely an old testament virtue, but a new testament religious rite.
to say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. man has invented the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt a rigid set of traffic regulations. so far as i know, it has never occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of revelation for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at broadway and forty-second street, new york, at five o'clock in the afternoon. but modern science has created new economic facts, just as unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of mars!
i am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less random chapters of ancient hebrew literature. this lady will find some words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter, which say exactly the opposite. she will place the strangest and most unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely certain that her interpretation is the voice of god speaking directly to her. if you try to tell her about socialism, she will say, "the poor ye have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with divine providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. this lady is ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action of relieving it. you would think that the meaning of the sentence, "spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that god forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them "spoiled." she held this idea for half a lifetime—until it was pointed out to her that the sentence was not in the bible, but in "hudibras," an old english poem!
