Lay Morals | Page 8

double accounts?
do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process,
gain more from those who deal with you than it you were bargaining
and dealing face to face in front of God?--What are you but a thief?
Lastly, if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart
of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still
draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this office, or
still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with these
injurious goods?--though you were old, and bald, and the first at church,
and a baronet, what are you but a thief? These may seem hard words
and mere curiosities of the intellect, in an age when the spirit of
honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all business is conducted upon
lies and so-called customs of the trade, that not a man bestows two
thoughts on the utility or honourableness of his pursuit. I would say
less if I thought less. But looking to my own reason and the right of
things, I can only avow that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately
suspect my neighbours of the same guilt.
Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in

your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like a
blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what
you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience. Even before the lowest of
all tribunals,--before a court of law, whose business it is, not to keep
men right, or within a thousand miles of right, but to withhold them
from going so tragically wrong that they will pull down the whole
jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds--even before a court of law,
as we begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following at each
other's tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and
punished, and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling;
and simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet conscience
may learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom of the
trade may be a custom of the devil. You thought it was easy to be
honest. Did you think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful? Did
you think the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe?
and you could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no
more concern than it takes to go to church or to address a circular? And
yet all this time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it
richer, you would not have broken it for the world!
The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use in
private judgment. If compression is what you want, you have their
whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed
with more significance, since the law is there spiritually and not
materially stated. And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from
the sixth to the ninth, are rather legal than ethical. The police-court is
their proper home. A magistrate cannot tell whether you love your
neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you have
murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand and
testified to that which was not; and these things, for rough practical
tests, are as good as can be found. And perhaps, therefore, the best
condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,
'neminem laedere' and 'suum cuique tribuere.' But all this granted, it
becomes only the more plain that they are inadequate in the sphere of
personal morality; that while they tell the magistrate roughly when to
punish, they can never direct an anxious sinner what to do.
Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct

proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces. We
grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something
above and beyond that we desire. Christ was in general a great enemy
to such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any of
these plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers
from the letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal affair; in the war
of righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred
precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my