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DOGMA versus MORALITY.
.
A
REPLY TO CHURCH CONGRESS.
BY
CHARLES VOYSEY, B.A.,
INCUMBENT OF HEALAUGIT, NEAR TABCASTER.
SECOND THOUSAND.
LONDON:
TEUBNEE AND CO., 60, PATEENOSTEE EOW.
1866.
Price Threepence.
�I
�PREACHED AT HEALAUGrH,
Sunday Morning, October 21st, 1866.
1 John iii. 7.—11 Little children, let no man deceive you: he that
doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous."
The week before last, at a Congress of Bishops
and Clergy held at York, a dignitary of the
church is reported to have said, that it was
“ better to have a religion without morality than
morality without a religion,” As I have not the
exact words before me, 1 will not mention the
name of the speaker; but, as far as I could gather
from the report, the whole speech was intended to
advocate the necessity for a dogmatic creed, and
to shew the superiority of creed over practice.
Painful as such a view must be both to you and to
myself, I am not at all surprised at a Church
dignitary putting it forth, nor at the applause
with which it was received by the assembled
clergy.
For, indeed, I have often before heard it
expressed and implied, in different ways, and in
different degrees of shamelessness. Some High
Churchmen have as good as denied the possibility
of being righteous, without being baptised and
�4
partaking of the Lord’s Supper; and Evangelicals
have gone so far as to say, that a moral life was a
hindrance, rather than a help, to our reception of
the Gospel. They deserve some credit for their
candour and consistency; and if it were not for
such utterances as these, the popular credulity
would never be shaken. When, however, one more
energetic than the rest follows out the principles of
his party to their legitimate consequence, then the
people have their eyes opened to a simple question,
on which they are quite competent to pronounce
an opinion. I am, therefore, under some consider
able obligation to the speaker of that remarkable
sentence, in which he deliberately prefers religion
to morality, as he makes it all the easier for me to
carry on the delightful work of drawing you on,
step by step, to think out for yourselves a true
faith, and to shake off irrational and ill-founded
beliefs and opinions. We must, however, first try
to get a clear notion of what we are talking about,
before we can derive any benefit from the discus
sion of this unwise maxim,— “Religion without
Morality is better than Morality without Religion.”
What do the words “religion and morality”
here mean? There is no doubt about the meaning'
of “morality.” We all mean by it “ Doing what
is right to our fellow-men;” “Loving our neigh
bour as ourselves;” “Doing as we would be done
by.” Both the speaker and ourselves agree in
calling this “morality.” But I am sure we do not
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agree with him as to the meaning of the word
“religion;” simply because he contrasts in this
sentence the one with the other. He draws a
distinction and makes a choice between religion
and morality; whereas you, if you have followed
my teaching for three years, as I believe you have
done, would never have dreamt of separating
religion from morality, nor morality from religion.
Your idea of true religion is, if I mistake not,
true obedience to God’s laws; and true obedience
to God’s laws is to do what is right, to love your
neighbour as yourself. You' believe that no
amount of doctrinal belief, of lip service, or
even of long and earnest prayers and praises
to God, will do instead of our being good;
or would at all please God, if we were not,
at the same time, working righteousness in
our daily lives. So with us, true religion and
morality must go together—must be so intimately
bound together as to be one and the same. Our
religion is our duty, and our duty is our religion.
We know of nothing which God demands of us as
religious duty which is not part and parcel of
moral duty. If I made any distinction between
them it would be this:—> Religion is morality with
a conscious reference to God’s authority over us,
or with a sense of His interest in our well-doing.
You see, then, when a Church dignitary talks of
religion and morality as if they could be separated,
as if one could exist without the other, he cannot
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mean by the word “ religion ” what we mean by it.
His idea of religion cannot be the same as ours, or
else he would never have thought of such a thing
as religion without morality, or morality without
religion.
Now, as he is not here to answer for himself the
question, “ What do you mean by religion as
separate from morality?” the only fair way of pro
ceeding is to suppose an answer, and to remember
all through that we are only supposing it. We
can only be certain of one thing, that he did not
mean by religion 'what we mean by it. That is
clear. Beyond this we can only guess. But, my
friends, if you will trust me, I will do my best to
tell you what the speaker meant by the word
“religion.” I am unhappily more familiar with
clerical notions than you are, and have dim recol
lections of having once thought and spoken as they
do now.
From the whole tenor of the speech referred
to, the speaker meant by “religion” a “ belief in
the articles of the Christian Faith.” I do not
think, as some have suggested, that he meant any
religious belief without morality to be better than
morality without any religious belief; but, espe
cially and definitely, that the maintenance of
Christian dogmas, such, for example, as the
dogmas of the Incarnation and Atonement, the
assertion of the Crucifixion, Burial, Resurrection,
and Ascension of Jesus Christ, and the dogmas
�7
about the Holy Ghost, the Church, and the for
giveness of sins—that the maintenance of all these
without morality was better than morality without
this religious belief. Incredible as it seems to you
that any minister of Christ should have so far
forgotten, or remained ignorant, of the Master’s
own religious belief and religious morality, it is
nevertheless true that hundreds of clergymen, and
some few laymen, whom they have misled, actually
prefer the maintenance of these dogmas to every
other cause in the universe. Indeed, as I told
you, the Evangelical, seeing that integrity of life
renders the mind incapable of being enslaved by
his fearful doctrines, frankly owns that a good life
is a hindrance to the reception of what he calls the
Gospel. It is indeed a hindrance, thank GodI
and if you want to be free from credulity
and superstition, begin betimes to “ amend your
lives, and live in charity with all men.” “ So
shall you be meet partakers” of that rich banquet
of truth, which God has spread for all upright
souls. So surely as you carelessly launch your
selves into the waves of sin and selfishness, you will
have to take refuge, if you ever get to land at all,
on some far distant foreign shore, terribly unlike
your own home and your native land.
Now, if the meaning of the speaker be, that
a belief in the articles of the Christian Creed
without morality is better than morality with
out this belief, I put it to you very simply, Do
�8
you think so? I frankly own that, though I
am a Churchman, I should much rather see them
put aside and torn up as rubbish, than to see
the cause of morality, which is true religion, for
a moment imperilled. I -would honestly prefer
a morality without any religious belief—nay,
even without any religious hopes and religious
consolations — than the most comforting, satisfy
ing creed without morality. I will not judge
other men — not even by their foolish words —
but I will say that God has taught me, or I
believe He has taught me, that the highest and
noblest thing to which we can aspire, is to be
righteous — to do what is right—to live and walk,
in love; that this is the Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the end of all true religion, and
that if any religion were found unfavourable to
this personal righteousness, this divine morality,
it must be a false religion and not a true one;
that if any religion could be substituted for
morality, so as to make its professors sit down
contentedly without making moral effort, satisfied
and even happy,".while they are still unrighteous,
and morally* no^better for their religion, that
religion, whether spoken by men or angels, con
secrated or not with the testimony of ten thousand
miracles, would be a curse instead of a blessing;
and what is more, [could have no abiding roots
in a world where God has placed the sons of
men. For men will be true to the nature which
�9
God has given, them, and must learn, whether
they will or not, every lesson which their bitter
experience forces upon them, with regard to the
sovereign importance of righteous dealing.
It is from statements like the one which we
are considering, that the gravest attacks are made
upon existing religious beliefs.
The reverend
speaker little knew that those few words of his
would awaken enquiry, thought, and scepticism
which no after apologies can allay. Common
men and women like you and me, dear friends,
who have our daily work to do, our many self
denying duties to fulfil, our own rough or sour
tempers to control, our homes to guard and
our dear ones to cherish and to help—who know
how hard the battle between the flesh and the
spirit really is — who yearn after eternity, not
for its rest and its joy, but for its divine promise
of perfect righteousness—when we hear an advo
cate of modern Christianity talk in these, to us,
pagan—nay, worse than pagan—Pharisaical riddles,
we feel inclined to retort—“Keep your religion
and leave us our morality. Comfort your hearts
with incessant religious rites, and stimulate your
imaginations with contemplation of wonders which
tax human credulity without healing human
wounds, which stimulate your fevered selfishness,
and narrow up the channels of the love of God;
and leave us to ourselves, and to our unaided, un
seen struggle in the darkness of our own hearts.
�10
We would rather thus fight against our daily be
setting sins, from simple sense of duty, or regard
for fellow-men, even should we have to do so with
out a ray of hope from above, than give up our
march onwards, over the stones and briars of life,
to stop playing with you by the wayside, while
you are mimicking the grand rites of Ancient
Sacrifice/ and thinking to please your Maker, or
some of His subordinate deities, by your empty
and dreary conjuring!
“ Take your religion, with its mystifications and
its impossibilities, and leave us to our excommuni
cated morality, and to the uncovenanted mercies of
God!”
Truth must be spoken, Though God forbid it
should ever be said of us, it is certain that some
have been driven by these foolish priests into
downright Atheism. And an Atheist, you know, is
one who does not believe in the existence of God
at all. Inexpressibly sad as it is to us, who rejoice
in our Maker, and whose hearts pant for the Living
God, yet there are some who cannot believe in
Him at all. Some of these are kept stedfast in
duty, pure and upright in their lives, models of
good fathers and mothers, good husbands and
wives, and fulfilling God’s own law of love, which
in mercy He has not made dependent on Creed,
* See Letter, signed C.C., on St. Alban’s Church, Holborn, in
the Times, October 19th, 1866, and the article thereon.
�11
but lias engraven on our very hearts. They are
living evidences of morality without a religion;
and if I had to choose between the lot of the
righteous man who could not believe in a God, and
the man of unlimited credulity, who cared not to
be righteous so much as to be a believer, I would
infinitely sooner be the righteous Atheist. Simply
and solely from love of God I would thus choose.
Because I believe that God would be more pleased
with any one for doing his duty to his fellow-men,
than for being merely occupied with making
prayers, and singing psalms, and filling the mind
with all sorts of profitless imaginations respecting
the unseen. Even, as a poor selfish father, if I
must choose, I would rather my children behaved
well to each other, and to their mother, than to me.
And I would much prefer their doing this, to their
coming to me all day long, and making petitions,
and saying over the same words of praise to me.
But, never fear, there is no need of our having
such an alternative set before us. God will not—
at least, so we hope and believe,—God will not
require us to choose between a religion without
morality, and a morality without religion. To
“ love our neighbour as ourselves ” is to render the
best homage of our lives to our adorable Maker,
who has written this as His law upon our hearts.
“ To do righteousness is to be righteous even as
Christ was righteous.” These are not my words,
but St. John’s. u Let no man deceive you.” Be
�12
not put off with the enticing parade of religious
ceremonies, or the long list of religious dogmas
and religious miracles, to abandon your devotion
to God in the more difficult, but more honourable
conflicts of daily life. If religious belief, and the
cause of morality, should ever come into open
•1
collision, I know well which must give way. A
Creed crowned with the victories of twice .two
thousand years cannot stand a day when brought. .Jl
into open contrast with the Eternal Law oMoff,
M
the Law of Love, which man’s deepest heart yearns
to fulfil.
Priests may howl at you, “ He that believeth not
shall be damned” but you may cheerfully and
kindly reply, “ We know that we have passed from
death unto life, because we love our brethren.”
J. Wertheimer & Co., Printers, Circus Place, Finsbury Circus.
i*
�
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Victorian Blogging
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Dogma versus morality: a reply to Church Congress
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Voysey, Charles
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 12 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Preached at Healaugh, Sunday morning, October 21st, 1866. Printed by Wertheimer & Co., Finsbury Circus, London.
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Trubner and Co.
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1866
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Ethics
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Conway Tracts
Religion and Morality