Reason not merely approves, but enjoins, the cultivation of sentiment.
When the sentiment in question is one that shows a power of transforming
life and impelling men to struggle against pain and evil, reason
applauds it as one of the most valuable forces we can cultivate. Such,
plainly, is the sentiment of sympathy. We look back to-day with horror
on the industrial and social condition of England in the earlier part of
the nineteenth century: the burdened lives and few gross pleasures of
the workers, the horrible cellar-homes of the poor, the ghastly
treatment of child-workers, the stupid and brutal herding of criminals,
the tragedies of asylums and workhouses, the fearful political
corruption and despotism, the subjection of women, the revolting
proportions of the birth-rate and death-rate. We have still much to do
to redeem our civilisation from medieval errors, but when one
contemplates the social revolution that human sympathy has brought about
in the life of England, one feels that this, and not the long-futile
teaching of Christianity, is the hope of the future. Christian preaching
of virtue has been individualistic. Even in our time the clergy hesitate
and are divided in face of social problems which plainly involve moral
principles. But the humanitarian ethic is essentially social, and this
passion of sympathy is its chief root.
We wish, then, not to substitute any creed or organisation for
Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations
about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote
themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of
peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the
murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree
that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious
transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put
rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts,
in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the
greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few
years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and
showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read
with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the
nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment
and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour
does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read
of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for
Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors
to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands
of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and
children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the
superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and
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