406 Human Physiology. 



Every command in the Decalogue is so utterly reasonable, and 

 appeals so entirely to our own sense of right, that argument 

 seems impertinent. Negatively, we must do no wrong, no 

 injury to ourselves or others; positively, we are bound, by our 

 relationship to our fellow-creatures, to love them as ourselves, 

 as a part of our own being and life, and do them all possible 

 good we being so constituted, that the highest happiness of 

 which we can conceive comes from our unselfish efforts to make 

 others happy. Here is the true basis of human society : abso- 

 lute justice unswerving equity, which cannot wrong a fellow- 

 creature, nor see him wronged without pain and protest eager 

 and heroic benevolence, striving for the good of all. 



And it must be seen that there is no reality in the social 

 theory that the rights and happiness of individuals must be 

 sacrificed for the general welfare. The Almighty has made no- 

 such blunder. In a true social state, what is for the highest 

 good of each one is for the good of all ; what benefits society 

 benefits every individual of which it is composed. There is no- 

 such inequity as that thousands must be poor that one may be 

 rich; that thousands must be killed with toil, and the hard 

 conditions of the labouring poor, that a few may spend their 

 lives in idleness and luxury. There is no equity, no justice,. 

 no right, no benefit in any such social condition. It is na 

 more defensible than any other exercise of what has been 

 called the right of the strongest taking plunder and captives 

 in war, or negro slavery, or the seizure of land by brigand 

 chiefs, or the rack-rents of Irish landlords, or the robbery of 

 caravans by Arab marauders, or any other act of savage or 

 barbarian violence, or of civilised fraud and crime. 



A true morality, which is essentially a true religion, will give 

 us a true society. The whole spirit of the Bible, so seldom- 

 preached, so seldom written upon, so seldom enforced any- 

 where, is at war with all the injustice, the crimes, the cruelties, 

 the false theories and inhuman practices of our actual civilisa- 



