Mr. Gladstone grants that “there is every reason to suppose that around Abraham in ‘the land Moriah,’ the practice of human sacrifice as an act of religion was in full vigor,” and he does not fall into the error of ordinary Biblical apologists in pretending that the practice of human sacrifice was confined to “false “religions.
Mr. Gladstone fairly states that the command received by Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a human sacrifice was not only “obviously inconsistent with the promises which had preceded,” but “was also inconsistent with the morality acknowledged in later times.” I submit that this statement is really a condemnation by Mr. Gladstone of the divine command, in that it is a declaration that such a command would—in times later than Abraham, in fact, in our own times—be an immoral command. Here there ought not to be any question raised of changed conditions, for the command is from “the Lord,” that is, from the assumed immutable, omniscient Omnipotent. Mr. Gladstone, it is true, contends that “though the law of moral action is the same everywhere and always, it is variously applicable to the human being, as we know from experience; and its first form is that of simple obedience to a superior whom there is every ground to trust.” As in the article Mr. Gladstone has given no definition of what he means by morality, I have no right to go beyond his statement. Following Bentham and Mill, I should personally maintain the utilitarian definition of morality, i.e., “that that action is moral which is for the greatest good of the greatest number with the least injury to any.” But this would not in any fashion fit in with Mr. Gladstone’s contention, which in the case of a Russian, would make the act moral which is of simple obedience to the Czar, even though that act happened to be the knouting of a delicate woman; or in the case of a Roman Catholic would declare the act to be moral which was performed in simple obedience to the Pope, even though it were the applying the fire to the faggots piled round Giordano Bruno; or in the case of an English sailor would make the act moral done in obedience to the commander of his ship, even though it should be the placing a destructive torpedo in contact with a crowded vessel of an enemy; or in the case of an Irish constable, though the act should be the shooting, on the command of his superior, from the window of a Mitchelstown barrack, even though the result was the murder of an unoffending old man.