A Preface to Morals

PART I. The Dissolution of the Ancestral Order

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Problem of Unbelief 3 1. Whirl is King 3 2. False Prophecies 5 3. Sorties and Retreats 10 4. Deep Dissolution 14

II. God in the Modern World 21 1. Imago Dei 21 2. An Indefinite God 23 3. God in More Senses Than One 25 4. The Protest of the Fundamentalists 30 5. In Man’s Image 35

III. The Loss of Certainty 37 1. Ways of Reading the Bible 37 2. Modernism: Immortality as an Example 40 3. What Modernism Leaves Out 48

IV. The Acids of Modernity 51 1. The Kingly Pattern 51 2. Landmarks 56 3. Barren Ground 61 4. Sophisticated Violence 63 5. Rulers 65

V. The Breakdown of Authority 68 1. God’s Government 68 2. The Doctrine of the Keys 71 3. The Logic of Toleration 74 4. A Working Compromise 76 5. The Effect of Patriotism 78 6. The Dissolution of a Sovereignty 82

VI. Lost Provinces 84 1. Business 84 2. The Family 88 3. Art 94 a. The Disappearance of Religious Painting 94 b. The Loss of a Heritage 96 c. The Artist Formerly 98 d. The Artist as a Prophet 101 e. Art for Art’s Sake 104 f. The Burden of Originality 106

VII. The Drama of Destiny 112 1. The Soul in the Modern World 112 2. The Great Scenario 115 3. Earmarks of Truth 118 4. On Reconciling Religion and Science 121 5. Gospels of Science 125 6. The Deeper Conflict 131 7. Theocracy and Humanism 133

PART II. The Foundations of Humanism

THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM

Introduction 143

VIII. Golden Memories 145

IX. The Insight of Humanism 152 1. The Two Approaches to Life 152 2. Freedom and Restraint 153 3. The Ascetic Principle 158 4. Oscillation between Two Principles 164 5. The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties 166 6. The Matrix of Humanism 171 7. The Career of the Soul 175 8. The Passage into Maturity 183 9. The Function of High Religion 191

X. High Religion and the Modern World 194 1. Popular Religion and the Great Teachers 194 2. The Aristocratic Principle 197 3. The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation 200 4. The Stone Which the Builders Rejected 203

PART III. The Genius of Modernity

THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY

XI. The Cure of Souls 213 1. The Problem of Evil 213 2. Superstition and Self-Consciousness 217 3. Virtue 221 4. From Clue to Practice 226

XII. The Business of the Great Society 232 1. The Invention of Invention 232 2. The Creative Principle in Modernity 235 3. Naive Capitalism 241 4. The Credo of Old-Style Business 244 5. Old-Style Reform and Revolution 247 6. The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct 252 7. Ideals 257

XIII. Government in the Great Society 260 1. Loyalty 260 2. The Evolution of Loyalty 263 3. Pluralism 267 4. Live and Let Live 269 5. Government in the People 272 6. Politicians and Statesmen 279

XIV. Love in the Great Society 284 1. The External Control of Sexual Conduct 284 2. Birth Control 288 3. The Logic of Birth Control 293 4. The Use of Convention 299 5. The New Hedonism 301 6. Marriage and Affinity 307 7. The Schooling of Desire 311

XV. The Moralist in an Unbelieving World 314 1. The Declaration of Ideals 314 2. The Choice of a Way 320 3. The Religion of the Spirit 326

Appendix: Acknowledgments and Notes 331

Index 339

Part I [p001]

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER

“Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.” Aristophanes.

A PREFACE TO MORALS

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM OF UNBELIEF

1. Whirl is King

Among those who no longer believe in the religion of their fathers, some are proudly defiant, and many are indifferent. But there are also a few, perhaps an increasing number, who feel that there is a vacancy in their lives. This inquiry deals with their problem. It is not intended to disturb the serenity of those who are unshaken in the faith they hold, and it is not concerned with those who are still exhilarated by their escape from some stale orthodoxy. It is concerned with those who are perplexed by the consequences of their own irreligion. It deals with the problem of unbelief, not as believers are accustomed to deal with it, in the spirit of men confidently calling the lost sheep back into the fold, but as unbelievers themselves must, I think, face the problem if they face it candidly and without presumption.

When such men put their feelings into words they are likely to say that, having lost their faith, they have lost the certainty that their lives are significant, and that it matters what they do with their lives. If they deal with young people they are likely to say that they know of no compelling reason which certifies the moral code they adhere to, and that, therefore, their own preferences, when tested by the ruthless curiosity of their children, seem to have no sure foundation of any kind. They are likely to point to the world about them, and to ask whether the modern man possesses any criterion by which he can measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any standard he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created so much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern civilization.

These are, perhaps, merely the rationalizations of the modern man’s discontent. At the heart of it there are likely to be moments of blank misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure they are worth doing. He has been much preoccupied; but he is no longer sure he knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of pleasures; and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing, or, in fact, that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, and that even in the best of lives the thrills are few and far between. He begins more or less consciously to seek satisfactions, because he is no longer satisfied, and all the while he realizes that the pursuit of happiness was always a most unhappy quest. In the later stages of his woe he not only loses his appetite, but becomes excessively miserable trying to recover it. And then, surveying the flux of events and the giddiness of his own soul, he comes to feel that Aristophanes must have been thinking of him when he declared that “Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”

2. False Prophecies

The modern age has been rich both in prophecies that men would at last inherit the kingdoms of this world, and in complaints at the kind of world they inherited. Thus Petrarch, who was an early victim of modernity, came to feel that he would “have preferred to be born in any other period” than his own; he tells us that he sought an escape by imagining that he lived in some other age. The Nineteenth Century, which begat us, was forever blowing the trumpets of freedom and providing asylums in which its most sensitive children could take refuge. Wordsworth fled from mankind to rejoice in nature. Chateaubriand fled from man to rejoice in savages. Byron fled to an imaginary Greece, and William Morris to the Middle Ages. A few tried an imaginary India. A few an equally imaginary China. Many fled to Bohemia, to Utopia, to the Golden West, and to the Latin Quarter, and some, like James Thomson, to hell where they were

gratified to gain That positive eternity of pain Instead of this insufferable inane.

They had all been disappointed by the failure of a great prophecy. The theme of this prophecy had been that man is a beautiful soul who in the course of history had somehow become enslaved by

Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,

and they believed with Shelley that when “the loathsome mask has fallen,” man, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself, would then be “free from guilt or pain.” This was the orthodox liberalism to which men turned when they had lost the religion of their fathers. But the promises of liberalism have not been fulfilled. We are living in the midst of that vast dissolution of ancient habits which the emancipators believed would restore our birthright of happiness. We know now that they did not see very clearly beyond the evils against which they were rebelling. It is evident to us that their prophecies were pleasant fantasies which concealed the greater difficulties that confront men, when having won the freedom to do what they wish—that wish, as Byron said:

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