Let us now, in the last place, inquire how the Christian law of right conduct has approved itself in the history of society since the first institution of the Church. And we seem certainly justified in starting here with the expectation that, moved by such a fervid steam-power, strengthened with such lofty sanctions, and displaying a scheme of virtues at once so manly and so gentle--virtues not preached merely in sermons or discussed in ethical treatises, but set forth in the living epistles of two such opposite and yet both eminently Christian types of character as St. Paul and St. John--so accoutred surely, and clad with the perfect panoply that belongs to a great moral warfare (Eph. vi. 13), Christianity could not but go forth conquering and to conquer, especially when the living faith in extraordinary, and miraculous demonstrations everywhere accompanied its march; and if it has in any considerable degree failed to fulfil its bright promise in regenerating the { 241} face of the moral worlds this, in those who accepted the religion, must have proceeded mainly from one of three causes: either because the ideal was too high for them, as we are accustomed to observe that certain nations are not socially far advanced enough for free constitutions, and thrive best under despotism; or from, the neglect of a regulative force which might check the natural tendency to excess, extravagance and one-sidedness, to which all human movements are liable; or again, from the disturbance of the proper healthy action of the regenerative virtue of the doctrine by the admixture of certain foreign, incompatible, and corrupting elements. Of the first cause of failure nothing need be said; it is with high morality as with high art, it is and it always must be above the average reach of the great mass of men; and it may be that in morals, as in art, some nations have tacitly agreed to let the high standard drop, and content themselves with attaining a manifestly inferior but more generally attainable ideal. But however such compromises and refuges of despair may be the necessary wisdom of politicians and of lawyers, who have to deal practically with the selfish element in the masses of mankind, in the theory of morals, as of art, they can certainly find no place. The Church and the Academy must always set up the highest ideal; if they fail to do so it is only because the inspiration which created them was originally feeble, or has waxed faint; and if the members of the Church or the scholars of the Academy fail to realize in their lives and in their works the perfect pattern which has been set before them, it is the defect of the learner, not the fault of the teacher. No one thinks of elevating the character of art by lowering { 242} the standard. And so if Christianity is too good for mankind it must just remain too good, till in the slow process of the ages men shall become more worthy of it. But the two other causes of failure require to be looked into more seriously. To the danger of excess Christian morality is peculiarly liable, just because its steam-power is so very strong and its action so efficacious. I read but the other day in a newspaper of a girl, studious, as girls are apt to be, of personal beauty, who, having picked up somewhere a fact well known to horse-dealers, that arsenic has a specific beneficial action on the skin, set to work of her own motion to mingle her daily potations with an infusion of the potent metal, and did this so assiduously that in a very short time, instead of improving her complexion, she had well-nigh removed herself for ever from the society of the living. Now this is exactly what has happened with Christian Ethics. Men have taken too much of a certain virtue, say Reverence--which is the virtue most closely bound up with religion--and have changed it into stupidity. That which was meant to elevate human beings out of their finite littleness has been used to depress them below the level of their meanest selves. And not only have Christians by the excessive culture of favourite virtues turned them into caricature, but they have assumed that because they have learned to be Christians they should forget to be men. There are certain human instincts, either purely physical, or closely connected with our animal existence, so strong that the first preachers of the evangelic ethics seem to have thought they might be safely left to take care of themselves; but these same instincts certain high-pressure Christians { 243} who came afterwards, with more zeal than sense, thought it their duty studiously to repress, or even violently to extirpate. The result has been that we have seen Christianity set at work systematically to maim that humanity which it was intended to heal.