Theology and Morality

“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”—Micah vi. 8.

The passage: God has shown you, O man, what is good. What does the Lord ask of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

These words are often quoted with respectful admiration by people who regard what they take to be the Bible’s theology with indifference or contempt. “Here,” they say, “is a true witness to the morality that lies hidden beneath the forms and doctrines of the different religions, and that must in the end replace them. It is essentially the same in all of them, but particular tribes have narrowed and localized it, and the cunning and self-interest of priests have kept it out of sight and often flatly contradicted it. The religious coverings of these universal and permanent truths have become as much a cause of strife, division and hatred as the truths themselves, if believed and acted on, would be a cause of union.” The inference is plain. The philosopher and philanthropist should be invited to pull these maxims out from under the overlying mass and give them the prominence now given to dogmas that are intricate and lead to evil or to nothing. Nor should he stop at vindicating what was good in the old time. He should illustrate it from modern discoveries about the laws under which man and the universe exist, and from our experience of what our species needs for its well-being. This wisdom will take the dryness from the old sayings and connect them with our actual life and work.

Those who speak this way have much to say for themselves, brethren, and God forbid that we should deny it. Our misfortune, and theirs, is that we have had so much to say, when by their account as well as ours what we most need is to do. The Prophet says “Do justly,” not “Talk about justice”; “Love mercy,” not “Understand what a lovely thing mercy is”; “Walk humbly with your God,” not “Discourse learnedly about humility and about God.” Let us grant that priests have again and again darkened counsel with words without knowledge. Scripture says so, and Micah says so in this very passage. We who believe our Lord was put to death by the priests and rulers of His nation can neither deny nor conceal that truth. The whole story of His life says it: the Jews’ struggle against Him was the struggle of men who had laid down a system of belief and rules of action for themselves and their disciples against One who believed and actually worked, and who gave faith and the power to work to His followers. But if so, let us ask ourselves honestly how we are to escape their sin and their curse. We shall not do it by swapping one dogmatism for another, Sadducean unreality for Pharisaic unreality, phrases about moral principles and philosophical truths for phrases about religious opinions and feelings. For human beings the question is always to be or not to be, to do or not to do. If we can find no ground for action and no power to act, every scheme we try will be equally useless, frivolous and mischievous. So I gladly take the Prophet’s words as my guide; they deserve all the honour they have received. But they ask for no compliments. They are addressed in earnest to each of us: “What does the Lord require of thee?” And I own the answer sounds terrible to me, and tempts me to hand the Prophet back his fine words.

Does God really require all this of me, to act justly, love mercy, walk humbly? This thing I have found unspeakably hard all my life? If I had been asked for ten thousand rivers of oil, perhaps that could have been supplied. But the service of a whole life is another matter. I would have to resist tendencies to be unjust, unmerciful and proud that I find at work in me every moment, stronger with each new development of my powers and each new complication of society. That is a heavy demand to make of a creature like me. Is there no dispensation, no royal road, no way of trading some of the good things I have been given for some of the wrong I am inclined to do? Can long prayers not make up for lack of justice, mercy and humility? Will it not count for something to speak of them to others, or to denounce others for lacking them? If I try to set the world right, surely He will not search out what I am? Must I myself be all this? Cruel Prophet, I will flatter you no more. Your words were sweet in the mouth, but received within they are bitter as gall. Unless you can tell me more, you had no business telling me so much. If I cannot learn how I can be just, merciful and humble, to be assured that I am bound to be so is an intolerable oppression.

Men have felt this in all times, brethren, and are feeling it now. Mixed with contradiction as it is, the feeling is not false. They would have a right to complain of us and of the Bible if we handed them a set of precepts, the best in the world, and did not tell them where to find the strength to obey. They could say, “You are laying heavy burdens on men’s shoulders. You know nothing of yourselves if you do not know how hard it is to lift them, and how often it seems impossible.” They could say, “By doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly you do not really mean those things. You mean what passes for them in your class: not breaking the rules and customs you have set up for your convenience. Your justice is not stealing from other men’s hoards when you have plenty of your own. Your mercy is overlooking offences that do not disturb your comfort. Your humility is submitting to superiors it would be unwise to offend, or not denying opinions you hold to be right and wholesome. These virtues are mere decency, respectability and conventional propriety, virtues for summer weather. In any shipwreck of society, or even an ordinary storm, they are shaken to pieces. They cannot stand the shock of the most vulgar temptation, and they fail to resist the craving for gold even in those who have had most of it.” All these charges are true, and will prove true of our morality unless it has a deep underground basis. What is that basis? I answer that you must look for it in the very theology of the Bible which you thought it such a deliverance to cast aside. There and only there is protection against the narrow, local, artificial dogmas of priests, and against the dry, hard, scarcely less artificial and often more heartless dogmas of philosophers. There is protection against the flimsy, conventional morality of classes and ages. And there you will find a meaning for “Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly,” and a power to turn those words into life.

I. The Lord requires you to “do justly.” This sentence raises the whole question of the ground of moral obligation. It seems to tell me that Someone commands a course of action which I must follow because He commands it, and the course is called “doing justly.” Is justice then nothing in itself? Are actions made right only because a certain Power insists on them? So far as it touches human conduct, the main controversy between the mere priest and the mere philosopher lies here. The priest has always been tempted to say that an Omnipotent decree makes good what would not be good without it, and makes evil what would otherwise be indifferent. The philosopher has always been trying to find what makes an action or habit just or unjust, true or false: its own nature, its effect on the doer, or its influence on society. Conscience cries out for a Ruler, so it listens to the priest. It exists only in affirming that right and wrong are eternally opposed, so it listens to the philosopher. Experience shows the priest prone to raise maxims of temporary expediency to eternal laws, so conscience protests against him. Experience shows the philosopher has no standing-ground from which to act on individuals or society, and must either borrow one from their opinion or build his own above both, so conscience protests against him too. “The Lord,” says Micah, “requires thee to do justly.” Did Micah think the Lord was a mere Power commanding certain things done and certain things left undone? If he did, he set at nothing the Law and History he confessed to be divine. They declared that the I Am, the Righteous Being, had revealed Himself to creatures made in His image and said to them, “Be ye holy, for I am holy.” The Bible’s theology starts from this ground and declares every other untenable. The heathen worshipped gods of power. The powers that acted on them in Nature were many, so the gods were many. Some influences were beneficent and some malignant, so some gods were beneficent, some malignant, or the same god now one and now the other. It was unreasonable to think the same arguments could move a god of the hills and a god of the valleys, or that they would delight in the same things, so worship and offerings were local. The priest had to learn from tradition or guesswork which offerings were likely to be acceptable, and enforce them with threats of terrible penalties. The worshipper’s conscience aggravated those penalties and gave them new reality. The rivers of oil had to be poured out, and the first-born given for the sin of the soul.

Then comes the message: “He has shown thee, O man, what is good.” From whom? How has the sender shown me what is good? If He has not told me what He is, the tidings are worth nothing and the good has not been shown. We are then turned loose among all the schemes of men to frame gods after their own conceptions, or, if not gods, laws, customs and theories as useless and tyrannical. If you want a Universal Morality, there must be the Revelation of a Moral Being. If you want the command “Do justly” in place of a weight of rules, observances and ceremonies, Justice must be set before you not in words, formulas and decrees but livingly, personally, historically. You must learn what the Just Being is by seeing what He does, and what He does for you. He must set before you His government over the armies of Heaven and, since you can know that only through what you feel and He is always the same, over the children of men. And you must know how His methods may become yours. He wants you to be like Him, so He must tell you how He makes you so. Any book that commands us to do justly without imparting this knowledge is, I say again, a hard-hearted book, one that demands bricks without straw, and insists that we be what its writers must have known we could not be. We complain of the Bible precisely for not being such a book, for not being a book of mere moralities, which would be utterly useless for any moral purpose. Take away its theology and that is what it becomes. For its theology is the unveiling of the Righteous Being to the heart and conscience of the only creature capable of being righteous, because the only creature capable of departing from righteousness. It is an invitation, first to a man, then to a family, then to a nation, to trust this Righteous Being who has shown He cares for them and will not forsake them. At last it is the manifestation to all nations of the Original Righteousness that was the root of all righteousness in them: the Divine Righteousness shown in a Man who came into the world to reconcile men to His Father, so that they might receive His Spirit and be able to be just as He is, and to do justly as He does.

II. But the Prophet says the Lord requires men to “love mercy.” This is a higher obligation still, and harder. I may be told to do certain acts, and I may go through them slowly and reluctantly against the whole bias of my nature. They will not be just acts by the Scriptural idea of righteousness, which supposes the man to be good before he does good things, but they may be just by some legal, philosophical or priestly rule. Can any such rule explain how I am to love because it is desirable that I should? Mercy is certainly beautiful; all religions say so, and when it comes out in life men are generally ready to pay it frank, unquestioning homage. But the admiration has a limit. If Mercy meets an unmerciful habit of mind in us, its works will be explained away. The Pharisee will say, “He casts out devils through the Prince of the Devils”; the Sadducee will say, “He deceives the people.” The people themselves may come to prefer an insurgent leader, a brigand, to the One who has shown them the most royal mercy: “Not this Man, but Barabbas. Let Him be crucified.”

So Mercy is not necessarily loved when shown in its fullest and most perfect form, in the most gracious and serviceable acts. Men may cry out for it on another ground. They may feel that they have resisted the Divine Righteousness and are at war with it, and may invoke Mercy to avert the punishment they believe Righteousness wants to inflict. The evil conscience readily suggests this notion of a war between Righteousness and Mercy, and the priest often confirms it, devising arts for enlisting the one against the other. The philosopher protests that the separation endangers morality, but he cannot root out the moral evil that caused it. He even sanctions it: he sets Justice above Mercy, as the conscious sinner sets Mercy above Justice. He cannot teach us how to do justly and love mercy both.

Again you must turn to the theology of the Bible to remove the contradiction. There Christ is set forth as the Image of the Father, not in one quality but in His whole character, and is said to show the Righteousness of God in the forgiveness of sins. Regard Him only as a wonderfully gracious and merciful man, and you can only feel that the evil in man triumphed over the good. Those who nailed Him to the tree will have proved a hopeless, invincible principle of opposition to goodness in men. Regard Him as God manifest in the flesh, meeting with a divine Love stronger than Death, Sin and Hell that unkindness and hardness of heart which knew not what it did and hated not only the Son but the Father, and you feel that man indeed needs Mercy because he has sinned. But you feel too that this Mercy has the power to put away sin, cover it and extinguish it, and to transform the creature who was sin’s subject and slave into a new creature who can love mercy and do justly. Believe that the Spirit of Mercy and Forgiveness does proceed from the Father and the Son, and you see how the very Forgiveness shown to man becomes a principle in him, able to overcome his unforgiving nature and go out in acts of forbearance and gentleness.

III. Lastly, the Prophet says the Lord requires man to walk “humbly with Him.” About humility there is as much strife as about justice and mercy. The priest tends to extol it as the cardinal excellence to which all others are subordinate. But in his practice, as in his theory, does it not often seem to destroy moral purpose and intellectual effort? Can it be intended that a man should think meanly of the nature and powers God gave him? The more nobly he judges his humanity, says the philosopher, the more noble he himself will be.

Men are grievously torn between these opinions. They embrace first one, then the other, and each experiment makes them suppose the course they have not chosen must be the right one. “Oh for intellectual freedom!” cries the victim of priestly rule. “Oh for an absolute, infallible guide!” cries the man who has known no government but his own.

It is quite true, brethren, that if we try to cultivate by artificial methods what is called the grace of humility, it may become another name for meanness, for abandoning manliness and dignity, a nominal self-denial compatible with much inward self-exaltation. What, then, is the humility that our consciences witness to be true and divine, and that we rightly demand of every earnest searcher after truth and every brave man? Micah’s words contain the answer. We are humble only when we walk with God, remembering that we are in His presence, that He goes with us where we go and stays with us where we stay. This thought lays a man in the dust, for then he is under the eyes of the One in whose sight the angels are not clean. It also raises him to a height he never dreamt of, for the Lord God has been mindful of him, come near to him, and fitted him for converse with Himself. Once more, then, the theology of the Bible explains its morality and lets us know what we ought to be, and be what we would wish to be. If we believe that He who was in the form of God humbled Himself, made Himself of no reputation, and took the form of a servant, in order to raise us to be sons of God and sharers of His Nature, then we can understand how the poor in spirit may be heirs of the Kingdom of God. We can confess that we have been grovellers because we have been proud, that we have undervalued the glory of our race because we were lifted up in our own conceit, and that we have despised our brethren because we have not aspired to intercourse with Him who despises nothing and cares for all. We may ask to be made like Him who stooped to the death of the Cross, so that we may have the likeness of the Eternal God of Justice and Mercy, who dwelt in Him bodily.