DREAMS AUD REALITIES. 



541 



A belief in a future world is necessary, so we 

 are told, to morality. We reply that the future 

 world owes its conformation in great part to the 

 play of the moral instincts. We agree that it 

 once provided the only mode through which 

 those instincts could find expression. We main- 

 tain that, in this sense, hell, with all its fantastic 

 horrors, has yet been associated with the most 

 vital of all regenerative forces. But, then, in 

 that very fact lies the danger of prolonging the 

 association when the belief has become a mere 

 effete shadow. You would still frighten men 

 into virtue by bugbears. To make your threats 

 effective at all, you must exaggerate the dream 

 indefinitely to compensate for its unreality. Then 

 it shocks and revolts instead of governing the 

 conscience, and you imagine expedients for soft- 

 ening the shock which you have produced- They 

 are seen to be immoral because arbitrary and un- 

 real, and you then try to deprive the nightmare 

 of its horrors. You will find that a mere rose- 

 colored dream fails to satisfy the deepest in- 

 stincts which lie at the root of your religion. 

 And meanwhile the whole vision has become so 

 shadowy and uncertain that its hopes and its ter- 

 rors cease alike to have any tangible influence. If 

 the other world is to supply the sole adequate 

 motives of morality, then morality is to be based 

 on a foundation more vague and shifting than 

 the spectre projected upon a mountain-cloud. 



The substance of morality is distorted as well 

 as its supposed sanction. In dream-land we get 

 rid easily enough of all the pressing material 

 wants of life. If to be moral is to fit ourselves 

 for dream-land, we should therefore become as- 

 cetics or mystics, and abandon as insoluble and 

 unimportant the problems which are most urgent- 

 ly pressing upon mankind. The saintly ideal may 

 doubtless be beautiful, but there is an ineradi- 

 cable taint of the morbid and sickly in its very 

 beauty. It has the same relation to actual life 

 as the wizards and knights of chivalrous romance 

 to real soldiers or philosophers. To present a 

 lofty ideal for our imitation is among the most 

 important functions of all great religious or po- 

 etical teaching. But the imagination which soars 

 too far above the earth, into the regions of the 

 purely arbitrary, ends by creating the grotesque 

 and unreal. We want to know what a man 

 should be under the actual conditions of hunger- 

 ing, thirsting social beings, and we are presented 

 with an emaciated invalid with a pair of impos- 

 sible wings tacked mechanically to his shoulders. 

 Such religion orders men not to reform the world, 

 but to retire from it in despair, and to aim at an 



ideal which is radically unattainable. So, again, 

 we may trace the opposite development in which 

 we separate the worlds of dreaming and reality 

 effectually enough. We are sensual or cruel or 

 avaricious in this life, and reconcile ourselves to 

 evil by dreaming in the most edifying fashion. 

 We are niggardly tradesmen on week-days, and 

 plunged in saintly devotion on sabbaths, or in- 

 dulge in every luxurious enjoyment, secure of an 

 absolution by proper compliance with the cere- 

 monies that satisfy our imagination. 



Such evils are common enough in all ages, 

 and will probably be common in one form or an- 

 other in all time to come. They are stimulated 

 and nourished by any form of belief which helps 

 us to regard morality as ultimately dependent 

 upon anything but a compliance with the actual 

 conditions of the real, tangible, and visible world 

 in which we live. The more extreme aberrations 

 of asceticism and antinomianism, of excessive 

 faith in priestly magic and in supernatural con- 

 versions, are, of course, rare in a civilized so- 

 ciety which knows pretty well that its dreams 

 are woven of unsubstantial materials. The hell 

 of the present day is objectionable for a rather 

 different reason. It can hardly be said, I think, 

 with fairness, that it is ever a product of com- 

 monplace selfishness. The selfish man is too com- 

 fortable to want a hell. So long as we do not 

 look beyond that part of the universe which is but- 

 toned within our own waistcoats, we can gener- 

 ally make ourselves tolerably happy. The other 

 world is generally created by a deep sense of 

 evils so inextricably intertwined with our present 

 state, that we frame an imaginary world where 

 all great problems are solved, and dwell upon it 

 till we half believe in its reality. It is not that 

 which makes " life worth living," for it is the 

 embodiment of a profound discontent with the 

 world as it is ; but it is that which might make 

 life better worth living if its force were expended, 

 not upon dreams, but realities. 



Amiable and philosophical minds cling to this 

 belief, because they believe in all sincerity that 

 to abandon it«is to abandon the world to sensual- 

 ity, materialism, and anarchy. To these we can 

 only say that it is surely undesirable to associate 

 the features of morality and our highest social 

 interests with a belief which daily proves more 

 shadowy in outline, more palpably demoralizing 

 as it is more distinctly realized, and more obvi- 

 ously divorced from any reasonable speculation, 

 until even its advocates can say little more than 

 that they wish it were true. If the association 

 be really enforced by logic, there is no more to be 



