Moralism and Christianity.
Inscribed To Elizabeth Peabody
With Her Four Page Manuscript Essay
[Peabody, Elizabeth]. James, Henry. Moralism and Christianity; or Man’s Experience and Destiny. In Three Lectures. New-York: J.S. Redfield, 1850.
8vo.; brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; extremities worn, some loss. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition. Includes “A Scientific Statement of the Christian Doctrine of the Lord, or Divine Man”; “Socialism and Civilization in Relation to the Dvelopment of the Individual Life”; and “Morality and the Perfect Life.” A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Miss E. Peabody / from H. James. Beneath this inscription Peabody penned a 425-word essay about this book spanning the first four pages. Though later, around the time she met James, she would write to Caroline Dall of his “Substance and Shadows” (1863) that it was “the highest word yet spoken of the philosophy of Christianity” (unpublished letter, August 17, 1863), she has less enthusiasm for the present work. Her prescient piece touching on God, Man, the tyranny of Catholicism and the inadequacy of Protestantism remains, to our knowledge, unpublished.
This book contains some splendid passages; -- and there is a half-truth running through it – But “half-truths are whole falsehoods.” In his zeal to set forth the Absolute Gift of God in Christianity, the author defames this gift in creation which made man social in a finite sphere. The best answer to its errors is in a subsequent work of the same author entitled “Substance & Shadow” whose doctrine is also found in Matthew Arnolds poem of “Morality.”
Morality (it must be observed if we would understand the author) includes all conscious evil as well as good actions – all that man does as a moral agent whether it be good or evil. In this sense only the beasts that perish are immoral. The word as applied to man is a denial of moral agency. The difficulty of understanding Mr. James and his difficulty of representing his ideas arises from the popular association of ideas with the word morality as synonymous with virtue. In this book Mr. James makes God synonymous with power – and the righteousness of God in man identifies man with power.
In the “Substance & Shadow” on the other hand he makes God identical with Love which is better and enables him to state his views in a more acceptable manner. For Love is a more universal Idea than Power. Every man is certainly more imaginable as an embryo love than an embryo power. But man is not described adequately by either word. The unity of Man like the unity of God requires that he should know as well as love and act. He is embryo wisdom as well as embryo Love and Power, and wisdom is the mediator between Love and Power. Any proposition which tends to paralyze man’s love on the one hand or on the other to paralyze his activities is unwise
and makes him fail in the image of God. The Catholic Church limits man’s power because it is Incarnate Despotism. The Protestant Church if it undertakes to be arbitrary (which is absurd) limits man’s Sympathy. But these are the only conceivable visible churches – the one which theoretically assumes all the power over the individual, the other which theoretically gives all the power to the individual. True – and so neither is the Church of Christ. That is not an Ecclesiasticism – as Mr James has shown in the only work that he has written that is really a work of art – and intelligible to the mass of mankind, or in other words – to Common Sense.
Peabody and James met in the early 1860s. They struck up a warm friendship – which chilled over time. Henry James, Jr. “caricatured her mercilessly” in the character of Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians (1886). (See also: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer On Her Own Terms, by Bruce A. Ronda, 1999, pp. 287-288; 336-337).
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