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Of 'Art, as anything whatever, but an instrumentality, thoroughly subdued, and subordinated to that end, of Art as anything in itself, with an independent tribunal, and law with an ethic and ritual of its own, this inventor of the one Art, that has for its end the relief of the human estate and the Creator's glory, knows nothing.
And thus it comes about that every philosophic theory serves to explain and justify an ethic, a doctrine of conduct, which has its real origin in the inward moral feeling of the author of the theory. But he who harbours this feeling may possibly himself have no clear consciousness of its true reason or cause.
It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation. It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death.
The failure of Christianity to avert bloodshed, and the horrors under which Christendom is now submerged, are naturally used as a proof that the ethic of Christianity is lamentably feeble. The difference between theoretical Christianity and the social practices which the Church condones is held to be damning evidence of hypocrisy and falsehood.
Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral import, is very mixed. There is much that is true and beautiful; much that is treacherous and savage. So that its moral and ethical effects have been very mixed too. But its style, a subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might find.
The whole point was quaintly expressed by Bishop John Gambold: The Doctrine of the Unitas By Providence was meant, In Christendom's degenerate days, That cold lump to ferment, From Scripture Pearls to wipe the dust, Give blood-bought grace its compass just, In praxis, truth from shew to part, God's Power from Ethic Art. But the last line must not be misunderstood.
Logic is not synonymous with our term Logic in the narrower sense of that word. Cleanthes, a Stoic, subdivided the three divisions, and made six, Dialectic and Rhetoric, comprised in Logic; Ethic and Politic; Physic and Theology. This division was merely for practical use, for all Philosophy is one.
And all this in order to arrive at the conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole Ethic, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The everlasting refrain!
To delineate the particular beauties of these gardens would, indeed, require as much pains, and as much paper too, as to rehearse all the good actions of their master, whose life proves the truth of an observation which I have read in some ethic writer, that a truly elegant taste is generally accompanied with an excellency of heart; or, in other words, that true virtue is, indeed, nothing else but true taste.
And here we may turn our attention to the poem itself, to see, if I do not misinterpret it, the evidences of that ethic creed, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the moral law, which we acknowledge as the only rightful basis of religious idealism. In the first place, it is only amid the silence of the soul, when the voice of the senses is still, that we "gain a sense of God" at all.
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