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One of our ethicists, who genially informs us that "theology is discredited . . . and the world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says," writes as follows: "The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity."
The symptoms are accessible to the observation of all. Neither priestly intolerance nor rationalistic prejudice can suppress them. In The Bankruptcy of Religion, Mr. Joseph McCabe develops the case against religion with the skill of a trained controversialist. Like the converted sinner in the ranks of the Salvation Army, Mr. McCabe carries special weight to the lines of rationalists and ethicists.
We'd have gone gladly in a week's time, of course, but there was a great to-do all over the country about Ellador's leaving them. She had interviews with some of the leading ethicists wise women with still eyes, and with the best of the teachers. There was a stir, a thrill, a deep excitement everywhere.
In this connexion it is interesting to add a few words about Dutch Free Masonry. The Dutch Free Masons of the present day are not so much moralists as ethicists. The well-being of the commonwealth based upon the well-being of every member spiritually, intellectually, and materially is their threefold aim.
The ethicists those who maintain that ethics is a science, those whom the reading of these divagations will provoke to exclaim, "Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric!" would appear to think that virtue is the fruit of knowledge, of rational study, and that even mathematics help us to be better men.
And since ethicists have nothing better to propose in the domain of conduct than what we find in the Gospel since the "higher law," as formulated by Mr. Salter, reduces itself to altruism versus living for self there is nothing harsh in saying that the ethical movement proposes merely to take over Christian morality minus its Christian setting.
The less practical, perhaps; the girls who were artists of some sort, ethicists, teachers that kind. Terry was reduced to a rather combative group: keen, logical, inquiring minds, not overly sensitive, the very kind he liked least; while, as for me I became quite cocky over my general popularity. Terry was furious about it. We could hardly blame him.
Even the idealist Berkeley owed much of his theory to his iridescent tar-water; while surely the greater ethicists are those who have not only been dialecticians, but moral forces in the world of men. In such ways, then, I would justify the thesis that civics is no abstract study, but fundamentally a matter of concrete and descriptive sociology perhaps the greatest field of this.
Our agnostic ethicists, being themselves the products of a Christian civilisation, may commend, approve and practise they may wear the Christian virtues; that those virtues will bear transplanting into an agnostic soil and flourish in an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say that available experience seems to be against it.
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