There have been attempts in modern times to
question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this
movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly
investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow;
but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind,
and pronounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to
overlook a factor of great importance--the impulse of retaliation. A
pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally,
or largely, carried into practice.
But these are academic vagaries, like those of the mystic or the moral
theologian. Whatever be the future fortune of Christian legends, men are
not likely to sacrifice the peace and security of social life to such
theories of freedom any more than they are likely to expose property to
a general scramble. The instinct of sympathy is now growing deeper in
every century. Most of the great improvements of social life (in its
widest sense) during the nineteenth century, which we have inherited,
were due to that development of sympathy. It matters not whether the
reformer was Christian or non-Christian--Elizabeth Fry and Florence
Nightingale or Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill--the impulse was
sympathy with suffering fellow-humans.
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