Moral crisis

“ But we must never lose sight of the fact that all this is but a crisis, one of those great convulsive crises of the moral organism, from which the concept of right and the necessity of employing the only formulas truly protective of equity and justice shall emerge more vigorous than ever. ”

“ The man to meet the crisis, to join the cleft, to reduce to moral harmony this discord of right and wrong, the man who could resolve and morally unify this moral disagreement must have a soul and an understanding whose insight and moral comprehension were complete. ”

“ And so, through all the relations of society, wherever a sacred trust is abused, and a confidence outraged, and obligations rent recklessly asunder, there this self-incurred species of suffering, in a greater or less degree, exists accordingly as the moral sensibilities are blunted, or the contrary. ”

“ Dull or not, repressive or not, morality is absolutely necessary. It is better than the pain, the insecurity, the relapse into barbarism, that immorality implies. Our whole civilization, everything that makes human life better than that of the beasts of prey, would collapse without its foundation of moral obedience. ”

“ They saw great social evils, magnified their extent by the force of imagination, and, unaccustomed to any of the details of public business, perceived but one remedy for the sickness of the state, and imagined that remedy to be a panacea for all ills. Moral force was a good thing in their eyes, but physical force they thought a better. ”

“ Certainly, no one can deny that the present misery and degradation in society is a moral wrong, and [Pg 542] that it is our duty to seek some method by which it may be removed as speedily as possible. ”

“ In my former paper I spoke of suffering where the wretchedness sprang from sin at the head of the social fountain. But I now wish to notice especially misery, degradation, and moral eclipse, resulting directly from giant evils, which are tolerated in all our large cities, though known to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction ”

“ But the particularly flagrant wrongs of our day have to do with the getting and spending of money; and the peril of the near future which looms now most menacingly on the horizon is the irritation of the wronged classes to the point of civil warfare and revolution. Such a calamity might, of course, be ultimately a means of great social advance; but it is a highly dangerous and uncertain method, involving great moral damage as well as great individual suffering, and to be averted by every possible means. ”

“ The great truths which had affected many of these poor people to tears, were exactly those which, during the last eighteen hundred years, have been active in effecting so many moral revolutions in the world, and which must ultimately triumph over all error and all oppression. ”

“ The analogies that we can draw from physical to moral topics are of all others the most striking.
Does anyone yet question the possibility of inducing radical reform of moral and political evil? Does he object, from that impossibility, to the association which I propose, which I frankly confess to be one of the means whose instrumentality I would employ to attain this reform. Let them look to the methods which I use. Let me put my object out of their view and propose their own, how would they accomplish it? By diffusing virtue and knowledge, by promoting human happiness. ”

“ All conditions of life which promote right living, ethical culture and moral growth, nourish and call forth emotions of truth and honesty, pure pleasure, adoration, worship, hope, affection, love and all the higher and nobler characteristics, build up life and increase its capacity for happiness. Through the action of an equally inexorable and unswerving law, the misery and crime which poverty breeds, with its bitterness of hate, grief and despair, and all the train of other evil emotions engendered thereby, are poisonous in their nature; they tear down and destroy life. ”

“ Only after political, religious and social restraints have produced a stable community can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to145 generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results. ”

“ We are therefore constrained, forced to conclude, that the balance of our moral constitution has been destroyed; and by the derangement of a system once harmoniously attuned, our principles of action, no longer in unison, are thrown into perpetual collision: maintaining no longer their original or their relative strength, they lead us into perpetual error, and by their conflicts produce a moral discord incompatible with the happiness of man. ”

“ There is a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very embodiment of unreason and injustice. ”

“ The present moral world is in a state of chaos; every intellectualized body, attracted by a partial centre, rolls in wild confusion in the moral regions, and by perpetual and destructive collision opposes and annihilates all system of well-being and happiness. ”

“ After so deep a plunge in depravity, how difficult, how near to impossible is a return to the paths of rectitude! This is but a single instance of the manner in which moral feeling is undermined in both parties. But as our nature, destined to suffer and to mourn, and to have the heart made better by affliction, finds adversity a less dangerous trial than prosperity, especially where it is great and sudden, in all civil conflicts, the triumphant party may, with moral truth, be said to be the greatest sufferers. ”

“ The Fable of Discretionary Freedom.—The history of the feelings, on the basis of which we make everyone responsible, hence, the so-called moral feelings, is traceable in the following leading phases. At first single actions are termed good or bad without any reference to their motive, but solely because of the utilitarian or prejudicial consequences they have for the community. ”

“ The contradiction of the moral consciousness, and hence the misery of life, has reached its utmost limit, beyond which it can go no further. Life, based on principles of violence, has culminated in the negation of the basis on which it was founded. The organization, on principles of violence, of a society whose object was to insure the happiness of the individual and the family, and the social welfare of humanity, has brought men to such a pass that these benefits are practically annulled. ”

“ The very chaos we deplore is the result of outraged moral laws, neglect of which brings a sure Nemesis in its train. Just in so far as the world has forsaken abiding standards of justice, truth, and mercy, the world has been stricken down. We are perishing to-day owing to failures in principle, and health can only return when principle is no longer flouted but resumes its reign over men’s souls. The tricks and turns of an opportunist policy cannot stem the rising flood of restlessness and disgust. ”

“ Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of CREATING in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. ”

“ What does the voice of common humanity say to us? Can we feel for human woe, and not be moved at the spectacle of wretchedness and despair which the intemperance of this country presents? Let us imagine the condition of the hundreds of thousands who are now burning with the hidden flame, and hastening to utter destruction by this most pitiless of all vices; let us embrace in one view the countless woes inflicted by the cruel tempers, the deep disgrace, the hopeless poverty, and the corrupting examples of all these victims, upon wives, children, parents, friends, and the morals of society ”

“ The dry rot of individualism, which always seems to those affected by it an evidence of health and manly vigor, was corrupting their moral nature, and preparing the way for the destruction of the State. ”

“ Some, reared under laws that are loose, may withstand this barrier breaking and be no worse for the change; but in the case of those with whom this barrier of their moral belief stands securely between conscience and forbidden paths, let it fall, and all the best of them will fall with it. ”

“ What if I should undertake to show humanity attacked in its very source, and even in the most sacred of all ties, in which fortune is consulted before nature, and, the disorders of society confounding all virtue and vice, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and a refusal to give life to a fellow-creature, an act of humanity? ”

“ Every believer in the wise government of the world must have sometimes realised with a crushing or at least a staggering force the appalling injustices of life as shown in the enormous differences in the distribution of unmerited happiness and misery. But the disparity of moral circumstances is not less. ”

“ What accumulated miseries arise from the want of due regulation of the animal propensities, in the various forms in which it degrades the character of rational and moral beings.—What evils spring from the love of money, and from the desire of power;—from the contests of rivals, and the tumults of party,—what envy, hatred, malignity, and revenge.—What complicated wretchedness follows the train of ambition,—contempt of human suffering, countries depopulated, and fields deluged with blood. ”

“ Human society: it is an attempt- so I teach- a long seeking: it seeks however the ruler!-
-An attempt, my brothers! And no "contract"! Destroy, I pray you, destroy that word of the soft-hearted and half-and-half!
26. O my brothers! With whom lies the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?-
-As those who say and feel in their hearts: "We already know what is good and just, we possess it also; woe to those who still seek thereafter!
And whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm! ”

“ Such difficulties of thought regarding moral distinctions, motives good and bad, conflicts of conscience, the justice and expediency of laws and governments, as usually arise as people begin to reflect seriously upon the ways of the better social life, have been considered, besides many practical questions regarding self-control, elevation of feeling and thought, and the part of wisdom in every-day affairs. ”

“ Thus those courses, which, if men would fairly attend to the dictates of their own consciences, they would see to be corruption, excess, oppression, uncharitableness; these are refined upon—things were so and so circumstantiated—great difficulties are raised about fixing bounds and degrees, and thus every moral obligation whatever may be evaded. Here is scope, I say, for an unfair mind to explain away every moral obligation to itself. Whether men reflect again upon this internal management and artifice, and how explicit they are with themselves, is another question. ”

“ In times of moral darkness and chaotic social conditions, when men are [358] guided by a few rude principles, things are done that afterwards appal themselves, and yet may become an example for future outbreaks. ”

“ I hold it to be of prime importance for the understanding of this matter to observe that from the poorest and crudest beginnings, morality is the massing of interests against a reluctant cosmos. Life has been attended with discord and mutual {15} destruction, but this is its failure. The first grumbling truce between savage enemies, the first collective enterprise, the first peaceful community, the first restraint on gluttony for the sake of health, the first suppression of ferocity for the sake of a harder blow struck in cold blood,—these were the first victories of morality. ”

“ We make no comment upon this portion of his essay, but we end our review with a few lines from his closing paragraph which it will do us Americans, at the beginning of our new century, no harm to take to heart: “In all countries, in all times, under the most diverse historical and economical conditions, the moral laws which govern human society are unchanging and inevitable. ”

“ There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the ease with the despotism of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living. ”

“ It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of being viewed together, and largely even treated together. ”

“ But the inner reason of the failure is often that there has been a moral degeneracy going on, and a weakening of the fibre of character on one side, or on both sides. The particular dispute, whether it be about money or about anything else, is only the occasion which reveals the slackening of the morale. ”