MR. BALFOUR ON FAITH AND CONDUCT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11854, 4 January 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

MR. BALFOUR ON FAITH AND CONDUCT.

Me. Balfottk in a speech which he delivered at- Glasgow on' Church Extension gave the clergy and philanthropists ; among his audience :a, much-needed , warning. After speaking of the great change which within the last hundred years has passed over the Christian nations, and which has rendered any fresh use of the civil power, or even of the national resources, for the furtherance of religion impossible, as well as unwise, and the new "burden of effort which was thus thrown upon individuals, he warned them that for the growing tendency of the day, which is , to abandon religion as opposed to science, the I mere teaching of morality was no effective ; cure. " Ethical morality,'' he said, " was not i the business of the Christian Church,", for they " could not make of morality a substitute for religion.' He did not dwell sufficiently long upon the subject, but he succeeded in making Lis opinion clear that con-! | duct must have a base in faith. That is a | remarkable utterance from a man like Mr. Balfour, who has reflected deeply, yet has been compelled to take an active part in great affairs, and it contains, as we believe, a great truth, especially needed by those whose idea of conduct is of the loftier kind, and who ask of good men something-more than obedience to the laws. There can be no doubt that for hundreds of years, in fact from the days of Constantino down to a period within the recollection of old men, the value of " faith," that is, implicit confidence in the truth of certain dogmas, was pitched too high, so high that it almost crashed out care for the morality which should be the fruit of faith. The " misbeliever" was abhorred with a passion which the present generation can hardly understand, while the true believer was almost released from the necessity of producing the works which should have demonstrated that his faith was the Christian one. It was not that men were hypocrites, though hypocrisy abounded ; the majority really thought that heaven was earned by .faith, and that so long as men sincerely held the teaching of the Church to be absolutely true their conduct was a matter of secondary concern. It was far better to be a cruel voluptuary like most of the nobles who let themselves loose upon the Albigenses than to repudiate a single doctrine of the faith; while those who rejected all, or doubted many,, were held to be not only deserving of perdition, but outside the pale of Christian charity, rebels against God, for whom the sword and the rope were much too lenient penalties. To be lenient to them, indeed, was to insult the Creator.. Many, perhaps a majority, of those who joined iu'the hideous orgy of St. Bartholomew, of which Mr. Stanley Weyman has been giving so terrible a description in " Count Hannibal," honestly believed that their victims deserved the atrocious treatment they received. It is customary among Englishmen to hold that this view was maintained only by the priesthood, who sought in the enjoyment of power compensation for enforced celibacy, and the loss of that rapture of victory in the field which was then the grand enjoyment of mankind; but it was not so. There is plenty of evidence to prove that the laity were as bigoted as the priests, and regarded " miscreants"—i.e.. misbelievers much as Sovereigns now regard Anarchists, and the mob in each country regards overt traitors to their nationality or race. They did not think th,em human, and crushed them as we should now hesitate to crush wolves. We should not now put even wolves to slow deaths or deaths by fire. The recoil from this view, due in part to Protestantism, which by degrees allowed variety of opinion, but mainly to a softening of the European nature produced by a variety of subtle causes, one of which at least was the abolition of the right of private war, has during the last century... been ■ astoimdingly rapid. Not only have the use of torture and of the stake become abhorrent and capital punishment been restricted to murder and treason, but benevolence towards all human beings has been recognised as a virtue. Altruism, "from being for ages an abscure truth acknowledged by the specially wise and good to be embedded in Christian has come with a rush to the front, and threatens in the minds of many of its teachers to supersede Christianitw itself. It is openly taught in many pulpits, and implicitly held by a majority of the Western laity, that belief does not signify, and that conduct is all in all. It is not only that a man who will, " behave himself," as the common people say, is accepted by all Governments and policemen as a good citizen, but that even the thoughtful are inclined to doubt whether the tenets of a creed make much difference, and that the clergy themselves begin to think that their first; duty is philanthropy in the sense of increasing the physical comfort of those around them, rather than the propagation of the Christian faith. Preaching on what used to be/called " the Evidences" is regarded as wearisome, and the orator who tries to prove the truth of even fundamental doctrines, unless possessed of some rare gift of eloquence or charm, is either abused for treating his congregation "as if they were not Christian" or for neglecting the teaching which alone is considered "practical." The appointment to a great bishopric of a clergyman whose claim is the fervour of his altruism is hailed with delight, not only by the populace, but by the thoughtful; while the selection of a great "apologist," to use the old term, would be condemned either by silence or by the remark that the distributors of patronage were following a course justified only by a how inapplicable tradition. ;Ytt it is certain as anything can be which occurs in that fathomless sea, the general mind, that belief in a future state is becoming, to use the most moderate possible language, less universal, that Christ is regarded more and more as one of the greatest of philosophers, and that a curious kind of instinctive agnosticism, a belief that almost anything may be true, but that we can know only what our senses tell us, is with hundreds of thousands superseding all other faiths whatever. The defiant disbeliever is becoming rare, while the unbeliever who distrusts, but does not say, or even feel the impulse to say, "Lord, help Thou my unbelief," is daily adding himself to a great host. And it is equally certain that-if any of these"' three, tendencies prevail, conduct, which is now so exalted, will have lost its base. The altruists forget that if Christ was only a great philosopher, if He was capable of radical error as to the destiny of man, and had no right to give an order, we are all thrown back on our own thoughts as absolute guides of conduct. Will the instinctively bad think like the instinctively good? or is there the smallest chance that the majority of men, who are, we fully admit, almost driven into selfishness by the tenuity of the defences between them and hunger, will rise much beyond the -level of Calvin, who burnt an opponent for a difference of opinion, or of Marcus Aurelius, the wise philosopher on a throne, who executed perhaps ten thousand innocent persons, often with torture superadded, because their opinions, if they prevailed, might at some future date break up the order to which lie was accustomed? Does anybody sincerely •:believe that conduct would remain the same after the influence of the belief in Christ's mission had passed away, as well as the belief in Christ Himself? . He should watch the conduct of the great in pagan or Mussulman countries, and be cured for ever of his optimism.. It is because all Western societies have been based on the belief that Christ was more than a philosopher tha* the third evil we have named, the form of agnosticism which ends in secularism, has produced comparatively so little evil in our midst. Men recoil unconsciously from the conduct which belief in science only would suggest, and hold the men who in Italy, and at least one place in America, were . ready to fire on cholera patients, or who in a past generation sacrificed in the Mauritius hundreds of coolies to the fear of infection, -to be despicable cowards instead of persons" wisely protecting themselves and the majority from a frightful pest. : How long that "influence" would survive total and honest disbelief we may, we think, leave to the calculation : of our readers. If these things be true Mr. Balfour s too short statement of his belief is true also, and the clergy of the:country, Established or Nonconformist, may well reflect whether the new form of the demand: on them to " servo : tables": and preach ; altruism instead of ' Christianity : is not a ; snare. That the convinced Christian must be an ; altruist ,we cordially admit; : but without the "religion'' of Christianity, without the doctrines at its base, altruism has no foothold in a world in which an ' intelligent sense of -interest is the master key to success.. In truth,

faith without works is a barrra tree, while works without faith is a branch cut-off and stuck in the ground. It can have no continuance. There is, however, no real possibility .conflict between the each demands the other.Spectator. :