"THOU X. THE SIXTH WORD. PART I. THE SACREDNESS OF LIFE. Thou shalt not kill.-Exod. xx. 13. HOU shalt do no murder "-our Prayer Book LECT. X. version-is the better rendering, because rendering. it expresses the moral aspect of the command- The better ment. All killing is not murder. Life may be taken accidentally, or in self-defence, or even in shocking carelessness, all which is homicide, but not murder. stitutes To constitute murder life must be taken evilly What conand wilfully. There must be present in the act murder. personal feeling, hate, or revenge, or covetousness. It is this personal feeling which makes murder awful, and which sends a thrill of horror through the land as the national conscience is confronted with the hideous sin. always That thrill of horror we are capable of feeling Life not to-day, because, thanks to our Christianity, we sacred. have been trained up in the belief of the sacredness of human life. But let us remember it was not always so. LECT, X. Proofs. Human sacrifices. Roman sports. It has taken long ages to reach our present estimate of life. In the East especially blood has always been as cheap as water. Until recently the Sultan of Turkey had a right to take a certain number of lives every day without rendering a reason. So in old days the lives of their subjects were in the power of kings and chiefs; and fathers could slay their children. The lives of the conquered were all forfeit ; it was only caprice or interest which spared them. As Canon Mozley shows in his book, already referred to, human sacrifices common amongst all the peoples round about Israel, the Moabites, Ammonites, and Sidonians, could never have been offered, if the depreciation of human life had not first existed as a national feeling. It was a system supported, or at least allowed, by common opinion. Plato would never have proposed in his 'Republic' to put away all weak and defective children if the proposition had been likely to shock the moral sense of his day. Judge also of the ordinary estimate of human life, when all the élite of Rome, from the Emperor and Empress downwards, would cram the vast Coliseum on gala-days to see Christians martyred, slaves fight with wild beasts, and armies of gladiators slay each other to the last man, all in the way of public sport. Fine ladies, the beauties LECT. X. of the court, would turn down their thumbs, the sign that no mercy must be shown to the vanquished, and that the bloody slaughter must go on. It was a common occurrence too for mis- The frequent tresses to order their slaves to be bound hand fate of and foot and thrown into the fishponds to feed slaves. the lampreys, because perhaps they had broken a vessel, or in some other way chanced to displease them. view of life. The law given to Moses established justice A new upon a new view of human life, and introduced a new order of ideas. It has long wrought slowly but surely upon human consciousness, and it is working still to maintain the rights in life of all classes of society, from the helpless babe to the helpless aged; working in the national laws to defend life against all enemies; working in the national charities through medical and other institutions to preserve life against disease and destitution. What is the view of human life upon which Its basis. Moses based his law? It is the inherent dignity of man. What it forbids. Voluntary death. LECT. X. own property; it cannot lie at the mercy of either his will or his passions. They are but parts of itself. Life is the property of the Creator, and stands above all mere human caprice or opinion. It is this view of God's property in man which forbids the proposition of John Stuart Mill, I think, that the law should allow hopeless cases of sickness to be put to painless death at the request of the sufferers. The appearance of mercy in the proposition is specious and delusive. To make life, or its duration, a question of expediency, to deliver it over to utilitarian reasoning, and thus withdraw it out of the circle of Divine sacredness, is to make it the subject of every possible depreciation. Neither life healthy nor life sick would be safe if thrown on the waves of capricious ideas. It is the ominous thing about Atheism that with it life itself is only a matter of expediency. Atheism is expediency. The suicide. It is this view which makes awful the action of the suicide. Amongst the ancients suicide was held in honour as the extremest act of courage, and as the supreme right of the heroical. In Christian ideas it is branded as the most fearful of all human deeds, and it is an open question whether it be brave or cowardly. We cannot any longer take the rational view of life, that it is a man's own; to us there is revealed light, life is of God; and for a man to kill himself is to cast impiously back at the feet of God His own image, a violated and rejected thing. LECT. X, It is this view which has put an end to duel- Duelling. ling. Notions of honour, which placed human life on a level with the changeful punctilios of fashion, or subjected it to the demands of fitful pride, came to be realized as treason against the Creator. It is true the bully and the coward may seem to be the gainers, but not so really. Christianity has put an end to duelling, not in the interests of cowardice, but because of the realization of an awful sanctity which protects all rights. The exchange which it insists on is moral truthfulness for a false code of honour. It still remains true, as Ruskin says, "that it is better to meet a man in fair fight than to cheat him.” to animals It is this view, lastly, which has begun to A blessing encircle all life, even brute life as well as human, with the majesty of God. It is becoming a wall of defence against the evil passions, or passionless cruelties of man. Therefore it is that we have now our noble" Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," and the kindred one, which abhors all that is unnecessary and cruel in vivisection; Vivisecwhich views with abhorrence what we read of Continental doings; which dreads the increase of tion. |