1.]

VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS.

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an insubstantial pageant, and their place knew them no more. And the story of the decay and ruin of them all is substantially the same. It was no doubt from the corroding effects of luxury and self-indulgence, from the weakening of the springs of manly fortitude and heroic action, that the mighty Egyptian and Babylonian empires fell. Greek civilization was undermined by a sophistical excess of speculation which, calling in question the bases of ordered human existence, proved fatal to the permanence of all public and private relations and duties. That majestic Roman power collapsed because the foundation whereon it rested was overthrown. "Quid leges sine moribus vanæ proficiunt?" asked the poet. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire give the answer to the question. The laws remained; but the morality, which had been their life, had gone. All that noble ideal of plain living and high thinking, of virile and civic energy, which had made antique Rome what it was, had died, or survived only as "a fading verbal memory." "Faith and reverence and justice have fled from the earth to Olympus," wrote Marcus Aurelius. The verse of Euripides that "virtue is but a word, a delusion of nocturnal dreams," expressed the deep-seated popular conviction. And before many generations passed away, as Luitprand tells us, the very name of Roman became an imputation of baseness, of cowardice, of avarice, of

D

debauchery, of lying: an epitome of all vices. Thus fell that mighty creation, so consummate and unique, and great was the fall of it. To St. Augustine it seemed like the crack of doom, the crash of a dissolving world. But his habitual reflection, his biographer relates, in those dark days, when he lay dying in his beleaguered Hippo, was "Thou art just, O Lord, and Thy judgment is right." He knew well that the imperial power which was going to pieces before his eyes had been tried in the balance and found wanting.

In the light of these great catastrophes, it is not unreasonable to inquire whether we may expect that our Progress also will be succeeded by retrogression; that our civilization will suffer an eclipse. No doubt there is, in the present moral and intellectual condition of Europe, much which recalls the state of decadent Rome, and which may well give rise to the gloomiest forebodings. On all sides there is the same worship of Mammon and matter and mechanism; the same cowardly or indifferent acquiescence in established facts; the same disposition to justify anything by paradoxes; the same readiness to throw responsibility upon events, and to drift helplessly before currents of popular caprice; the same abject submission to the force of numbers. There is the same enfeeblement of customs and contempt of authority; the same decay of supersensuous beliefs; the same scepticism about the first principles of morality; the same

I.]

TOKENS OF DECADENCE.

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eagerness to reduce it from an objective fact to a subjective speculation. But morality cannot, by its very nature, be a merely individual or private guide of conduct. Universality is an essential note of it. If it is not a law of ideal relation, obligatory upon all wills, it is the emptiest of names. Duty demands fixed principles and definite rules. Without them we can attain to nothing better than the ethical relativism of which Mr. Spencer has given us a specimen-a sort of spurious probabilism, compared with which the greatest aberrations of the casuists who taught the doctrine commonly known by that name are warrantable and wholesome.* Further, professors of the physical sciences have invaded the domain of ethics in great force, and some of the most famous of them peremptorily

*It may not be superfluous to remark that I am by no means impugning the use, nay, the necessity of casuistry. True it is that in ethical inquiries we must go by fixed principles and definite rules. It is also true that we must guard ourselves against losing sight of history and circumstances, or we shall resolve morality into a species of mathematics. The normal admits of exceptions and derogations. The moral law does not change in itself. But how can it be applied except in the concrete? And has not every case its own formula, so to speak? For example, what are the principlesby which we discriminate between polygamy in a Mormon, which we condemn, and polygamy in a Musselman, which we tolerate, nay, which conceivably we might approve? Those principles exist. But they are not evident at first sight. They fall within the province of casuistry, which has been well called "a dialectic of conscience." It is the application of general rules to particular cases.

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require us to believe that virtue and vice are nothing but natural and instinctive and necessary manifestations of heredity; that we are powerless over the predispositions which our ancestors have bequeathed to us; that, in the words of the song, 'C'est la nature qui est cause de tout." If that be so, we are no more responsible for our actions than are marionettes, for we are no more moral agents than they. This new school of physical moralists simply annihilates morals. And indeed I remember one of these dogmatists frankly confessing, a few years ago, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, "We no longer know anything of ethics but only of history, nor anything of principles but only of facts: what is, has its right to be." For them man is a mero Naturwesen, bound fast in fate like Nature's other products. To blame Nero for being Nero, or Henry VIII. for being Henry VIII., or Barrère, for being Barrère, is as absurd as to blame a thistle for not being a rose, a hawk for not being a dove, a dwarf for not being a giant. Assuredly if morality be the life of nations, these ominous symptoms might lead us to anticipate a social cataclysm: a breaking up of civilisation more terrible and complete than that which Europe witnessed fourteen hundred years ago for the destroyers would not be simple and uncorrupted races, with strong broad notions of right and wrong, with keen susceptibility to the influences of religion, but decivilised men, emanci

1.]

ت

A PRINCIPLE OF RECOVERY.

37

pated from moral and spiritual restraints, and ruled solely by brute instincts and passions :

"Unfettered by the sense of crime,

To whom a conscience never wakes."

a new

There is, however, one great difference between that antique Roman world and this in which we live. In our modern society there is a principle of recovery not found in the older civilization. When Europe entered upon its fresh path after the dissolution of that mighty fabric of imperial greatness, it was guided by another spirit. And through all the generations which have passed away, that spirit has been striving to inform human society with nobler powers and higher principles. In place of the old Roman virtus," Christianity has introduced morality new, not so much in its precepts-tho various schools of philosophy had largely anticipated them-but in its spring, in its motives, in its sanctions. Age after age has experienced that severe and earnest influence. And age after age, the tide of ethical Progress has flowed on. Its advance has not, indeed, been like the advance of the physical sciences, the outcome of a necessary evolution, of an automatic development. Still it has flowed on: sometimes ebbing, sometimes rising its waves now seeking this channel, now that: "and all their sequent toil doth further