as the First Cause, the all-originating Will. We have seen also how
the order manifest in the universe leads up to Him as the Supreme
Intelligence. But there is more in the universe than force and order;
there is force which works for good, and a just and benevolent order;
there are moral laws and moral actions, moral perceptions and moral
feelings. Can anything be thence inferred as to whether God is, and
what He is? I think we shall find that they clearly testify both as to
His existence and character.
The moral law which reveals itself to conscience has seemed to certain
authors so decisive a witness for God, that all other witnesses may be
dispensed with. Kant, who exerted his great logical ability to prove
that the speculative reason in searching after God inevitably loses
itself in sophisms and self-contradictions, believed himself to have
found in the practical reason or moral faculty an assurance for the
Divine existence and government capable of defying the utmost efforts
of scepticism. Sir William Hamilton has also affirmed that "the only
valid arguments for the existence of God, and for the immortality
of the human soul, rest on the ground of man's moral nature." Dr
John Newman has insisted that conscience is the creative principle
of religion, and has endeavoured to show how the whole doctrine of
natural religion should be worked out from this central principle. A
well-known living theologian of Germany, Dr Schenkel, has attempted to
build up a complete theology on conscience as a basis, starting from
the position that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul"--the
faculty through which alone we have an immediate knowledge of God.
These thinkers may have erred in relying thus exclusively on the moral
argument--I believe that they have--but the error, if error there be,
shows only the more clearly how convincing that argument has seemed to
certain minds, and these assuredly not feeble minds.
There is, besides, valuable truth underlying any exaggerations into
which they may have fallen on the subject. There is probably no living
practical belief in God which does not begin with the conscience. It
is not reasoning on a first cause, nor even admiration of the wisdom
displayed in the universe, which makes the thought of God habitually
and efficaciously present to the mind. It is not any kind of thinking
nor any kind of feeling excited by the physical universe or by the
contemplation of society, which gives us an abiding and operative sense
of God's presence, and of His relationship to us. It is only in and
through an awakened and active conscience that we realise our nearness
to God--His interest in us, and our interest in Him. Without a moral
nature of our own, we could not recognise the moral character and moral
government manifested by Him. We might tremble before His power, or we
might admire His skill, but His righteousness would be hidden from us,
His moral laws would be meaningless to us, and their sanctions would
be merely a series of physical advantages or physical disasters. But a
God without righteousness is no true God, and the worship which has no
moral element in it is no true worship. As, then, it is only through
the glass of conscience that the righteousness of God can be discerned,
and as that attribute alone can call forth, in addition to the fear,
wonder, and admiration evoked by power and intelligence, the love,
the sense of spiritual weakness and want, and the adoring reverence,
which are indispensable in true worship--such worship as God ought
to receive and man ought to render--the significance of the moral
principle in the theistic argumentation is vast indeed.
It follows, however, from the entire course of the reasoning in which
we have been engaged, that the moral argument is not to be exclusively
relied on. It is but a part of a whole from which it ought not to be
severed. It cannot be stated in any valid form which does not imply
the legitimacy of the arguments from efficiency and order. If other
facts do not refer us back to a primary case, neither will moral
facts lead us to the primary moral agent. If order is no evidence of
intelligent purpose, moral order can be no evidence of moral purpose.
The moral argument proves more, but also less, than the arguments which
have been already expounded. It shows us that God is endowed with
the highest moral excellence, and is the source of moral law and of
moral government, but it does not prove Him to be the Creator of the
universe or the Author of all order in the universe. It contributes to
the idea of God an essential element, without which that idea would be
lamentably defective, but it supposes other elements also essential
to be given by other arguments. The office of bearing witness to
the existence and character of God can be safely devolved on no one
principle alone, even although that principle be conscience. It is
a work in which all the principles of human nature are privileged
to concur. Either all bear true testimony, or all have conspired to
deceive us. The self-manifestation of God is addressed to the entire
man, and can only be rightly apprehended by the concurrent action of
all the energies and capacities of the soul.[35]
[35] See Appendix XXV.
It is, perhaps, especially important in conducting the moral argument
to ask ourselves distinctly, Whence ought we to begin? Is there any
point, any fact or principle, which we are in reason bound to start
from? Inattention to this preliminary inquiry has caused many to try
to look at moral facts _en masse_, as it were, and to endeavour to
draw an inference from them in virtue of something common to them all.
This can only lead to confusion and error. Moral facts are of two
radically distinct classes, and cannot be comprehended under any higher
generalisation, which can be taken as the foundation of a theistic
inference. The facts need to be distributed and interpreted--to have
their characters discriminated; and we must begin with the principle
by which this is done--that is, with conscience itself. We need no
more attempt to judge of moral qualities without reference to our
moral perceptions and feelings--to the information given us through
conscience--than to pass a judgment on colours before seeing them, or
irrespective of how they appeared to us when we saw them. If we look
at the moral facts of the universe from any outside point of view--not
from that of conscience--how can we escape ascribing the evil as well
as the good to God, and trying His character either from both or from
the preponderance of the one over the other? But if we do so,--if we
seek to rise to God through an induction from all moral facts--we
shall form a miserable notion of God, and we shall, besides, ride
rough-shod, as it were, over conscience. For what is it that conscience
declares most clearly about moral good and evil, right and wrong?
Is it not that they are radically antagonistic--irreconcilable and
contradictory,--that they cannot have the same ultimate author--that
if the one be the expression of God's will, the other must be the
expression of His aversion? If conscience have any testimony to give
about God at all, it is that, as the author of good, He must be the
enemy of evil. The contemplation of the moral world may perplex us, but
conscience is an assurance that evil, however perplexing, is not to be
referred to the same source as good.
The testimony of conscience on behalf of God has been presented
in various ways, and it need not surprise us to find some of them
unsatisfactory. I regard as unwarranted the view that conscience is
"the religious organ of the soul," the sole faculty through which the
human mind is in contact and communion with God. There is no one
specific power or organ of the mind in virtue of which exclusively man
is a religious being. It is by the whole make and constitution of his
nature, not by a particular faculty, that he is framed for religion.
I more than question if we have a right even to ascribe to conscience
an immediate intuition of God. It brings us, some have affirmed, in a
strict and positive sense into the real presence of God, with nothing
intervening between us and Him--He as the absolute personality standing
sharply and distinctly over against our personality. This doctrine has,
however, one obvious and serious difficulty before it. Conscience--that
is a word which has got in ordinary use a very clear and definite
meaning. We all know what conscience is as well as we know what the eye
or the ear is, and we all know what an act of conscience is as well as
we know what seeing or hearing is. It is not more certain that by the
eye we see colours, and that by the ear we hear sounds, than that by
conscience we discern good and evil. When, therefore, any man comes and
assures us that through conscience we have an immediate apprehension
of God, it is natural that we should answer at once, You may as well
assure us that through sight we immediately hear sounds or smell
odours. What we immediately apprehend through conscience is the right
or wrong in actions, and therefore not God. Morality is the direct
object of conscience; God can therefore only be the presupposition or
postulate of conscience,--can only be given in conscience as implied in
morality. This, I say, is an obvious objection to the assertion that
God is immediately known in conscience. It is an objection which has
not been got over, and which, I believe, cannot be got over.[36]
[36] See Appendix XXVI.
The argument from conscience, like all the other theistic arguments,
is extremely simple. It is the obvious inference from the most
obvious facts of our moral consciousness. It demands of us no subtle
analysis of conscience. It is not dependent on the truth of some
one particular theory as to the origin of conscience. It is based
directly on what cannot be denied or disputed,--the existence of
conscience, the existence of certain moral judgments and feelings
common to the experience of all men. Conscience exists. It exists as
a consciousness of moral law; as an assertion of a rule of duty; as a
sense of responsibility. When it pronounces an action right, it does
so because it recognises it to be conformed to law; when it pronounces
an action wrong, it does so because it recognises it to fall short of
or to transgress law. It acts as the judge of all that we do, and as
such it accuses or excuses, condemns or approves, punishes or rewards
us, with a voice of authority, which we may so far disregard, but the
legitimacy of which we cannot dispute. It claims to rule over body and
soul, heart and mind, all our appetites, affections, and faculties;
and the claim is implicitly admitted even by those who have most
interest in denying it. But it does not rule, nor pretend to rule,
as an autocratic authority; it does not give us, nor pretend to give
us, a law of its own: on the contrary, it claims to rule in us only
in virtue of recognising a law which is over us; its authority is
derived wholly from a law which it interprets and applies, but does not
create. It thus speaks not of itself but as the deputy of another. It
unequivocally declares itself a delegated authority. Some may say that
the law of conscience is set by man's own will, and that the will is a
law unto itself; but this assertion cannot bear examination. The will
apart from reason and conscience is a mere force, not a true will. It
has a rational law only through its connection with reason, a moral law
only through its connection with conscience. Whoever affirms that the
will is its own law must grossly abuse language, and signify by the
term will what others mean by reason and will, conscience and will. He
must do worse than this, bad as it is. He must contradict the plain
dictates of his own consciousness. The will and its law are distinctly
felt to be not one but two. The will is clearly realised in our moral
experience as not legislative, as not giving itself a law but as
being under a law, the law which conscience apprehends. To identify
the will and its law is to confound entirely distinct things. For the
will to rule the will, it would need at once to command and to obey,
to be bond and free, dependent and independent. To be its own rule
were for it to be without rule. Conscience claims to rule my will in
virtue of a law which cannot be the expression of my will, and which
cannot be anything else than the expression of another will; one often
in antagonism to mine--one always better than mine--one which demands
from me an unvarying and complete obedience. It comes to me and speaks
to me in defiance of my will; when my will is set against hearing it,
and still more against obeying it; when my will is bent on stifling
and drowning its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes
me, against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate or
deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an absolute right
to rule over me, to control and sway all my faculties; which searches
me and knows me; which besets me behind and before. Whose is this
perfect, authoritative, supreme will, to which all consciences, even
the most erring, point back? Whose, if not God's? Those who object that
this argument is a mere verbal inference, or that it rests on a double
meaning of the word law, do not understand it, simple as it is. They
may be honest enough disputants, but their objection is strangely
superficial. In the utterly irrelevant criticism of a word they
lose sight of a great fact, and so necessarily fail to perceive its
momentous significance. From no mere word, whether law or any other,
but from that consciousness of moral dependence which no moral creature
can shake off, which conscience implies in every exercise, which
reveals itself in a thousand ways in the hearts and lives of men, do
we conclude that there is One on whom we morally depend, that we have
a holy Creator and Judge to deal with. Reason takes no mere name, but
it takes the fact that man feels himself under a law of duty, that he
is conscious of obligation and responsibility, that he has a conscience
which does not counsel but which commands him to do what is right and
to resist what is wrong; and it finds this fact inexplicable, this
consciousness a delusion, this conscience a false witness--unless there
be a holy God, a Moral Governor.
Conscience reveals a purpose as well as declares a law. Its very
existence is a proof of purpose. The eye is not more certainly given
us in order that we may see, than conscience is given us in order that
we may use all our powers in a righteous and beneficent manner. Is it
conceivable that any other than a righteous God would have bestowed on
us such a gift, such a faculty? Would an intelligent but unrighteous
God have made us to hate and despise what is characteristic of his own
nature? Would he have made us better than himself? The purpose which
conscience reveals is certainly not our own purpose, just as the law
which it declares is not the law of our own will. The purpose which
finds its expression in conscience, and our own purpose, are often
felt by us to be in direct antagonism. Our souls may be tortured by
the conflict between them. But in all phases of the conflict we are
sensible that it is our purpose which ought to be abandoned; that the
purpose which we dislike is that which we are bound to accept and to
obey. In this way, also, conscience speaks to us of a righteous God
by speaking in His name. If the inference from effect to cause, from
manifestation of purpose to intelligence, is good anywhere, it is good
here; and it warrants us to believe that the First Cause of conscience
is a righteous Being.[37]
[37] See Appendix XXVII.
All the feelings, emotions, and affections which gather around the
apprehension of right and wrong, which accompany the sense of duty
or conviction of obligation, point to the same conclusion. The
consciousness of good or ill desert, remorse and self-approval, moral
hopes and fears, concur in referring to a holy God. They imply that
man is a person related not merely to things and laws, but to another
person who is his rightful and righteous Judge. The atheist himself,
when he grieves even for secret and private sins, or enjoys the inner
peace which only his own heart knoweth, mourns and rejoices as if
in the presence of a higher personal Being--the God whom he denies.
Neither his sorrow nor his satisfaction is fully intelligible if his
soul have before it only an impersonal law or the abstract nature of
things; both presuppose that he has some kind of consciousness of being
under the cognisance of a Person possessed of moral attributes. If
men felt that they were responsible for their evil thoughts and words
and deeds to no one higher than themselves or their fellows, is it
conceivable that the consciousness of guilt and the fear of retribution
would have been what experience and history testify them to have been?
Would prayers and penances and sacrifices have prevailed so widely,
if the law of right and wrong when broken had been merely felt to be
broken--if there were no underlying sense of the existence of One
behind the law whose righteousness must be satisfied, and whose wrath
must be turned away by the breaker of the law? Would there have been in
that case any moral conflicts in the human heart akin to those which
a Sophocles or a Shakespeare has delineated? Were there no God, there
ought to be no fear of God awakened even by crime; but atheism itself
cannot protect a criminal when alive to his guilt from being haunted
and appalled by fears of a judgment and a justice more terrible than
those of man. When we are perfectly willing to bear any pain which the
mere laws of nature attach to our sins, and when our reason assures us
that we have nothing to fear on account of them from the law or even
the opinion of society, why, if our moral natures are not seared and
deadened, do we yet fear, and fear most when most alone? "Inanimate
things," says Dr Newman, "cannot stir our affections; these are
correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility,
are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience,
this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom
we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong,
we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us
on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same seeming
serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows
on one receiving praise from a father,--we certainly have within us
the image of some person to whom our love and veneration look, in
whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we
direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away.
These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an
intelligent being; we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we
feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction
in breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these
painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and, on
the other hand, it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a
resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object
to elicit. 'The wicked flees, when no one pursueth;' then why does
he flee? Whence his terror? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in
darkness, in the hidden chambers of his heart? If the cause of these
emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his
perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the
phenomena of conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination
with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful,
all-seeing, retributive."[38]
[38] Grammar of Assent, pp. 106, 107.
It will, I need scarcely say, be objected to the arguments which have
now been presented, that conscience is a product of association or a
consequence of evolution; that it has been developed either in the
experience of individuals or in the course of ages, out of sensations
of pleasure and pain, out of benefits and injuries; and that the
convictions and feelings implicated in it are due to the circumstances
under which it has grown up and the causes which have combined to
generate it. But to this it may be answered either that conscience
has not been shown to have grown up by association and development out
of sensuous experiences, or that even if this were proved the argument
would continue good; in other words, either the truth or the relevancy
of the objection may be denied. All associationist and evolutionist
theories of conscience seem to many of the most competent psychologists
to have failed as regards their main object, although they may admit
them to contain important elements of truth. This view I share. It
does not seem to me that even Mr J. S. Mill, Prof. Bain, Mr Spencer,
and Mr Darwin, have been able to show that conscience contains in it
nothing original. But, of course, I am aware that the vindication of
my dissent would require an adequate examination of associationism
and evolutionism as explanations of the origin of conscience. No such
examination is here possible. Nor is it required; on the contrary, a
discussion of the kind ought, I believe, to be avoided in an inquiry
like the present. No psychological investigation of a difficult and
delicate nature is, so far as I can judge, essentially involved in the
theistic argumentation at any stage. It is certainly unnecessary in
conducting the moral argument to engage in any scientific disquisition
as to the origin of conscience.[39] For our second or alternative
answer will suffice. It does not matter, so far as our present purpose
is concerned, whether conscience be primary or derivative. It exists;
it bears a certain testimony; it gives rise necessarily to the thoughts
and feelings which I have mentioned. Are these thoughts and feelings
true? If not, conscience is a delusion; it utters lies; the completest
moral scepticism is justified. If they are, the argument stands. The
mode in which they have been acquired is in this reference a matter of
indifference.
[39] See Appendix XXVIII.
The argument from conscience, I may add, rests on the general and
distinctive characteristics of our moral nature; not on the truth
of particular moral judgments or the purity of particular moral
affections. It cannot, therefore, be affected by the fact that moral
perceptions and emotions admit of variation and development, and are
sometimes false and depraved. However important in other respects may
be the circumstance that men's thoughts and sentiments as to right
and wrong are not always identical or even accordant, it is plainly
irrelevant as an objection to any of the forms in which the argument
for the Divine existence from the constitution of our moral nature
has just been stated. It cannot be necessary to do more than merely
indicate this, although some who maintain the wholly derivative nature
of conscience appear to believe that the moral differences to be traced
among men disprove all inferences from the moral faculty which they
feel disinclined to accept.
II.