==Supported by Analogy.==

=4.= It is supported also by the analogy of organic and instinctive

action. In organic action, the physically right is adaptation to

environment, in which each part and movement fills its sphere

and accomplishes its functions in the given place and relations.

In instinctive action, the force is adjusted to the position and

connections in which the animal is placed. For example, that of the

bee is made to move correspondently to its relations to the individuals

of its own kind and to the end of supporting and preserving the

species. The instinct of the beaver adjusts its house to its peculiar

surroundings; that of birds constructs their nests in distinct

adaptation to the conditions that surround them. In animals that

harvest and store their food, it suits the action to the particular

environment and changing seasons. In every case instinct fits the

activity to the given place and relations of its subject. This method

by which organic and instinctive functions are set to secure right

action in their special spheres, is exceedingly significant of the

generic principle of all right action. In the light of the analogy, the

morally right is a continuation of the same principle of harmony with

constituted relations which is seen to be omnipresent in all the lower

domain of nature extending up to human personality, but becoming moral

at this point by being subject to free will and accomplished by it. It

is to be remembered that teleologic plan and adaptation run through the

entire cosmic order, from atoms to worlds and from minutest structures

of body to the loftiest endowments of intelligent beings akin to God.

Automatic action secures accordance in the inferior ranges. The grand

distinction of the moral realm appears when, as the crowning ascent

of life is reached, the principle of ethical harmony with divinely

constituted relations is to be accepted and accomplished by the

intelligence and freedom of man and is made the moral _ought_ under

personal responsibility.

==Assumed in Common Life.==

=5.= It adds confirmation to this explanation, that it is implicitly

assumed in all the conceptions and language of common life. Unbiassed

by speculative theories the every-day thinking and speech of mankind

connect duties with men's personal place and relations--duties

modified and fixed according to the form and specialty of individual

situations. The fact of duty itself is not more certain than this

fact of the way in which spontaneous and unperverted thought grounds

it. This fixing of the world's conceptions and speech in this form

cannot be fairly interpreted as a caprice or accident, but as the true

effect of the actual reality, which stands as its cause or warrant.

And it is significant that speculative theorists who have framed for

themselves some other account, whenever momentarily off their guard

or forgetting to act as watch-dog for their theory, have been wont to

turn unconsciously into forms of expression recognizing this relational

ground for human duties.

==The Ultimate Ground.==

II. In thus finding the right grounded directly on conformity to the

relations given men in the constituted order of life, we have not yet

reached the full solution of the great problem. For these relations are

only a part of the aggregate moral constitution, and are not the last

term of moral authority. They do not stand in their own independent

right. Though they do directly create and shape the immediate duties

for which they call, they are not the ultimate reality in which moral

law has its deep foundations. So we must go back to the source and

reason of these relations. The ultimate ground can be found, only in

God himself who, in his underived eternal nature, is the absolute

ground of the whole created universe, with all its interrelations which

develop the reality of moral law.

The true conception of the divine creative action is that in it the

thought and moral character of God become transitive and appear in the

relations established and the ethical requirements which the relations

impose. The constituted connections and order of life, which involve

an ideal standard of right conduct and duty, reveal the divine mind

or intention and in it the ultimate authority. The proximate basis,

already discovered, in ideal conformity to the moral relations in which

the moral agent is placed, therefore represents God, who, as the first

cause and eternal ground of the creation with all its adaptations and

laws, is the ultimate and unchangeable ground of right and of all moral

law.

This statement of the ultimate ground means more than a resting of

right simply on the will of God. A reference of it to his will has

often stood for a claim that the moral law stands merely in the option

of God or as only a product of his choice. Many have represented it as

only an effect whose cause is an act of his will--that will originating

or making "the right" rather than observing and declaring it, and the

moral law having no basis other than such enactment of will. But this

would imply that God himself is without moral character, acting from

no norm of essential right, but simply by mere will ordaining what

should pass as right among mankind. Our fundamental ethical conception

of him, however, is that of a moral being and moral ruler. And to be

moral means to love and choose the right as right. We must keep in

mind here the relation between moral law and will, or the choices of

the will. Moral authority does not exist as will, but as right. The

great conception of the right, as witnessed to in universal conscience,

is of something that appeals to will and requires the will to bow to

its claim. Right is superior and authoritative for will, and cannot,

therefore, be simply an effect of it. The right itself is basal for

right willing, even with God himself. He wills according to it. Hence

the moral law is not to be considered a product of his will, but an

expression of his nature. In perfect freedom he wills the good because

he is good, being in his eternal nature the absolute and infinite moral

Perfection. It is a deep conviction in the moral consciousness of

mankind, that God himself is in his very nature righteous and good, a

conviction which utters itself evermore in the spontaneous exclamation:

"Shall not the judge of all the earth do right!" Out of a non-moral

ground the moral could never arise, and only in the very nature of God

himself as perfect, infinite and unchangeable righteousness, do we

reach the ultimate ground both of the constituted relations of human

life and of the sublime and inextinguishable reality of moral law for

the ordering of these relations. The profound meaning of the poet's

couplet:

"For right is right since God is God,

And right the day must win,"

is to identify God and right as united in the eternal foundation of

the moral system. There is thus, for the universe, what has been often

designated "an eternal and immutable morality" whose authority and

standard rest in the very Ground of the universe itself.

The conclusion thus apparent is vindicated by the very conception

of the authority which binds men ethically. Mere "might cannot make

right" or be that which has the reverence of the moral nature. Moral

sovereignty does not attach to a simple absolutism of power. The

ethical will bows to the right only. It would be a great contradiction

to think of the power to which the moral submission of the soul is due

as itself anything other than an ethical power, the morally good power,

the morally good Being.

This ultimate ground of right, thus found, makes plain why ethics,

in its full meaning and issue, is so closely allied to religion.

Religion, in its spirit and aim, means fellowship with God, accordance

of desire, will, and life with him. And ethics, even in the view of

its early student Plato, looks to the same goal, "likeness to God."

The supreme aim of Christianity is ethical, the transformation and

exaltation of human conduct and character into the excellence and

happiness of righteousness. That the moral life of man may, out of his

broken, corrupt and disabled state of sin, thus become again harmonized

with God and the divine constitution of things, redemption comes

with its supernatural powers and help for human nature, enabling and

accomplishing a realization of the ethical law in human character.

CHAPTER X.

THE OBJECTS OF MORAL JUDGMENT.

A full view of the ethical reality and its meaning for us requires yet

an examination into the question: Of what may we justly affirm moral

quality? Where does the conscience apply the distinctions of right and

wrong? What are properly the objects, and the only objects, of moral

approval or condemnation? Or, to put it in a way possibly more easily

understood, to what human activities or features of life does moral

quality belong?

It has already been noted in general that only personal beings

can be moral agents or become, in what they are and do, objects

of moral judgment. Apart from personality, no place for virtue or

vice can be found. Of things, whether natural products or products

of human industry, as rock or star or stream, or ship or watch or

engine, we cannot predicate moral character. We may speak of them

as beautiful, useful, or perfect, or as ugly, useless, or faulty,

but all distinctly ethical terms are inapplicable to them. The moral

approbation or condemnation which we feel for the temper, words, and

actions of men is felt toward them as personal phenomena. Detached from

personality they would no more be subjects of praise or blame than

the temperature of the sea, the noise of the wind, or the down-pour

of rain Moral character belongs to them only as the characteristics

and manifestations of the self-conscious and self-directed life of a

moral agent. To the question what activities of a moral agent may have

ethical quality, it ought to be sufficient to say that it belongs to

all his conscious and self-directed conduct. Obligation claims sway

over the whole personality. But for clearness and definiteness, it is

necessary to specify.

==Personal Actions.==

=1.= The action itself, in its external form, may be right or wrong, as

in conformity to moral relations or incongruous with them. It may be

either the deed that is due to the relations and a fulfilment of the

duty they call for, or it may be one that clashes with their rational

and actual requirement. It may be in itself just the action in which

conduct is rightly adjusted to the actual relations--an act that ought

to appear in them. Or it may be in itself an action whose very form

contradicts the moral demand of the relations, and which ought not to

be done, no matter how good a motive may prompt the deed. For example,

the motive to use them in a worthy charity could never justify a theft

of goods or money, nor could filial care of a helpless parent be in

itself wrong, even should a bad motive inspire it. Moral law repudiates

the first deed; it condemns the wrong motive in the second, but

declares the material of the deed itself to be right and good.

We must here distinguish between the moral character of the doer and of

the deed. The quality of right and wrong belongs to the action; guilt

or innocence belongs to the person. This is the basis of the well

known fact that in some cases the doer of a wrong act may nevertheless

be held as innocent and even virtuous in it. He may have honestly

meant to do right, and acted from praiseworthy motives, but from not

understanding correctly or fully the situation, may have done what has

violated the moral call of the relations. The action may be condemned,

while he himself may be acquitted of guilt. The full ethical demand,

however, requires such a use of all our faculties of knowledge and

behavior, as not only to maintain a good intention, but to keep our

outward conduct in harmony with objective righteousness.

Many writers have shown a disposition to deny moral quality to the

external action. Locating it all in the inner sentiment or intention,

their analysis separates the visible part from its source, and

holds up to view the action, so separated, as mere physical motion,

characterizable as useful and expedient or the contrary, but neither

moral nor immoral. Independently of its motive it is resolved into mere

natural movement, as non-ethical as a muscular spasm, sleepwalking,

the dashing of a wave, or the biting of frost. But this is as

misleading as it is plausible. The error becomes clear by the following

considerations:

(1) The supposed separation of the deed from the inward intention

falsifies the actual facts in the case. The essential element in the

problem is that we are contemplating, not physical movement only,

like spasms or waves, but personal deeds, as acts of moral agents.

Of course, moral quality does not attach to the action of non-moral

beings, as the striking of clocks or the barking of dogs, but to deeds

of self-directing personality. Let it be freely admitted that the inner

sentiment does give quality to conduct. The obligation to the conduct

that shall fulfil duty attaches to the personal agent; the innocence

or guilt also belongs to him. But there is obligation upon him with

respect to conduct only because conduct, in its external forms as well

as inward springs, forms the total material of morality. There could be

no responsibility for conduct if no moral quality belonged to actions.

To separate--after the manner referred to--the action from the personal

moral agent and think of it as physical motion only, makes it no longer

the action about whose character we are inquiring.

(2) We must bear in mind several just distinctions in the application

of the term right. Along with duty, obligation, merit, innocence,

or guilt, it may be affirmed of the moral agent. We may say, "he is

right," in doing so or so. We may speak of the inner sentiment as

right or wrong. So we may of the external action. For the true and

full extent of moral quality, we must make it cover the agent himself,

and both the inner and outer sides of his personal conduct. Conduct

has an internal and an external part. The motive is only one part. An

action is relatively right, with respect to the agent, when he has the

right will in right motive; it is absolutely right only when it is

also shaped into accordance with the relations so as to realize the

moral demand upon the person. The distinction, often made, between

formal right and material right, throws the point into clear light. It

is well stated by Prof. Bowne: "The former depends upon the attitude

of the agent's will toward his ideal of right, the latter depends on

the harmony of the act with the laws of reality and its resulting

tendency to produce and promote well-being. Conduct which is formally

right may be materially wrong; and conduct which is materially right

may be formally wrong; but no conduct can be even formally right when

the agent does not aim to be materially right. The ideal of conduct

demands both formal and material rightness, and as long as either is

lacking the outcome is imperfect.... If one does 'the best he knows,'

it is often said nothing more can be demanded of him. And yet it is

plain that this formal righteousness is altogether insufficient for

the person's well-being. The reason is that the law of well-being

is independent of our will. If we misconceive that law and act

accordingly, we may be formally right, but because of the misconception

we should be materially wrong. It is, then, by no means sufficient

that one be formally right, that is, true to his convictions of duty;

he must also be materially right, that is, in harmony with reality

and its laws. Formal rightness, of course, is ethically the more

important, as it involves the good will; but material rightness is only

less important, as without it our action is out of harmony with the

universe."[62]

(3) The moral consciousness, when unperverted by speculative theory,

does in fact judge the actions of men. It steadily holds them as

essentially right or wrong, over and above all question as to the

motives for them. It is found perpetually condemning even well-meant

deeds as traversing duty and righteousness, hardly able to excuse the

blundering ignorance to which they are due. This feeling of reprobation

is genuine, normal, and wholesome. On the other hand the overthrow of

this feeling and the adoption of the claim of a non-ethical character

for actions, tends directly and strongly to consequences which witness

against the validity of the claim. The demoralizing effect has often

been illustrated. The resolving of duty into a mere matter of good

intentions has led off into ways and forms of behavior shocking to

enlightened consciences. It has made quite plausible the illusion

that "the end sanctifies the means," and in the name of religion has

stretched men on the rack and lighted the faggots at the stake. Under a

fancy that purity is simply a thing of the heart, men have been known

to excuse not a little sensualism of life. While ethics must lay stress

on the inner good-will, it must also look after the harmony of the

outward acts with the law of right relations. No amount of good motive

can make blasphemy or murder right or virtuous.

==The Feelings, Passions and Desires.==

=2.= The various feelings, passions, and desires are not only springs

of action that may issue in conduct, but are in themselves either right

or wrong, according as they are exercised in harmony with moral law or

in conflict with it.

(1) Though our feelings spring spontaneously and immediately out of

our knowledge and fundamental psychical character, they are subject to

training and regulation by the will, and their states and movements

are part of our moral life. And though by natural unperverted

constitution all these primary feelings and affections have right

and good functions, their activities, under noxious stimulation, may

run into forms and in directions thoroughly immoral. Love, which,

in its holiest direction, toward God, and in its purest forms of

benevolence, toward men, is the highest virtue, may take forbidden

directions and corrupt and disorder life. Hate, the reverse of love,

instead of being directed against evil which ought to be hated, often

emits its venom against that which ought to be loved for its goodness.

Self-esteem, as a proper respect for what has been put into a person's

being to be cared for and enjoyed, frequently runs into condemnable

selfishness. Many of the "desires" are apt to be in offense because of

over-development, clashing in anarchic insubordination in the soul, or

rushing toward unlawful objects. Desire for possessions tends to grow

into covetousness, desire for honor into unscrupulous ambition, desire

for pleasure into a ruling passion. Such feelings as malice and envy,

mongrel products of selfishness and ill-will, are at once adjudged to

be sinful.

(2) Were further proof needed that morality attaches to the affections

and desires, it is found in their relations as motives to conduct.

We have not traced actions completely to their moral source when we

have ascertained the volition from which they proceed. We must go a

step further back and mark the impulses that either rightly or wrongly

influenced the will. We must do as do courts of justice in seeking the

character of an act, and ascertain not only that the act was done in

free-will, but also what feelings influenced the free-will in doing

it. An act of volition may have very different motives behind it. The

immoral character of the volition is not only from the immorally-acting

will itself, but also from the wrong feelings or desires acting on

the will. Indeed, the very will is betrayed into wrong-doing by their

perverting persuasions. It becomes clear, therefore, that if it be at

all true that "actions take moral character from their motives," this

character must be predicable of these motive sensibilities.

(3) A special question has place here--whether moral quality belongs

even to the personal dispositions, propensities and inclinations

that lie back of the _exercise_ of the feelings, as attitudes or

habitudes of the soul with respect to good and evil? The facts of life

unquestionably show the existence of such propensities or tendencies

derived through heredity and descending from generation to generation.

The scientific theory of evolution recognizes them and draws many of

its conclusions, both psychological and moral, from them. They express

rather a state of the personal constitution than any exercise of its

faculties. They denote so basally the psychical life-condition, that

they characterize rather what the person is than what he does morally.

Since they, as states of the personal agent, constitute his attitude,

among other things, toward good and evil, an attitude either right or

wrong, this question manifestly requires an affirmative answer.

==Aims and Intentions.==

=3.= Intentions. In judging conduct we inquire especially into the aim,

purpose, intention, which directed it. We look at the end sought. And

in a peculiar degree conduct is pronounced right or wrong according to

this. For the intention is pre-eminently the very heart and informing

principle of the moral act. Besides largely shaping the material action

in agreement or conflict with objective duty it is the inner soul of

the total deed.

It may make an act that in its external form is morally indifferent

thoroughly virtuous or deeply criminal--such as that of handing a sum

of money to another, in one case to relieve suffering, in another to

secure murder. The intention to do what is known to be wrong, even

when the overt deed is prevented, stamps upon the person its own moral

character.

In intentions we find the teleology of the ethical conduct--the chosen

ends at which men are aiming in their constant endeavor--and they have

a place of importance corresponding to this directive relation. Life

moves as these turn, and the great body of human activity, in its

mighty sweep of purposive conduct, whether rising into its loftiest and

purest virtues or descending to its lowest and most horrid crimes, is

their result. In this teleological position they differ as "motives"

from the motives found in the simple feelings, affections and passions

which act non-voluntarily and unconscious of ends, but are springs of

impulse and incentives from the subjective psychical organization.

Intentions are deliberate voluntary purposes aiming at chosen objects

and adjusting means to ends. For this class of motives, therefore, we

are peculiarly and pre-eminently responsible.

==Activities of the Intellect.==

=4.= The activities and uses of the intellect. Often theorists have

denied any moral element in these, mainly because of a certain

"necessity" in intellect under psychical law, and because its function

is simply "to know." It does nothing, either good or bad; "it only

knows." Its sphere is the sphere of knowledge, not of conduct. But

this is a very inadequate view of its total activity, and of its place

in the moral agent's life. As to the question of "necessity," the

activities of the intellect are as much under the command of the moral

agent as are his sensibilities, his affections, desires, and passions.

It would be difficult to see why he should be amenable for the

direction and regulation of these desires and passions, and not also

for the direction and character of his intellectual work and the use

he makes of these high endowments. As to the question of the non-moral

character of cognitive or thought activities, they are correctly

conceded to be, in very large measure, without any ethical quality. But

it is also true, that there may be activities, as for example, in the

imagination, and in purposive scheming, which are impure and grossly

violative of justice and right. Because the intellect in itself, as

contradistinguished from the will, does not choose and has no choice,

we may not, indeed, say of its activity: "It is guilty," "it is under

obligation," since obligation and guilt pertain not to the act but

to the moral person; but yet we may speak of intellectual activity

or work as morally "right" or "wrong," according as it is in harmony

or in conflict with the true ends for which the intellectual powers

have been framed and the well-being they are designed to serve. It

would be difficult to see why the intellectual activity which plans

out the details of a theft or a murder is not as really immoral,

_i. e._ something morally condemnable, as is the desire or wish to

commit it, or why the person is less blameworthy for the one than the

other. In both cases it is part of his personal activity. And if he is

"blameworthy," it is only because the activity is in itself "wrong." Is

he any less guilty for allowing his intellect to think out the wrong

than his feelings to desire it? The moral sense must condemn this

intellectual work as inconsistent with the relations of the intellect

to human well-being and righteousness. In these days of worship of

intellectual brilliancy, and the large prostitution of the imagination

to activities which flood literature with thoughts that defile and

suggestions that carry moral blight and desolation, producing every

form of vice and crime, it is of prime importance to recognize that

this intellectualism does not stand altogether apart from moral

quality, and that men are under the completest obligation to keep it

all in harmony with righteousness and the ethical ends of life.

==Acts of the Will.==

=5.= Our view of intentions has touched on part of the functions of

the _will_ with respect to moral quality, but its acts in the stricter

sense and more specific forms require further statement. "Intentions"

are, indeed, under the command of the will, yet they are there as

motives, whose force and quality stand specially in the objects desired

and aimed at. They draw their quality rather from the ends sought than

from the working of the will which consents to the ends. We must see

yet whether the conscience judges also the proper and specific acts of

the will.

Of course that which we name "the will" is simply the soul's power of

choosing, or rather, it is the personal self as causal for choices

and executive action. Its acts are "volitions." Does moral quality

attach to these? There can be no doubt of it. Upon these volitions,

preferential and executive choices, electing between duty and its

opposite, between conduct in harmony or in conflict with moral

requirement, between indulgence of good or wicked feelings, between

virtuous and evil intentions, between higher and lower motives, between

actions materially right or wrong, making the decision for or against

righteousness and goodness and purity, in all the questions of daily

behavior in which life rises into ethical excellence and blessedness

or descends into wrong, vice, crime, and consequent wretchedness,

the moral sense of mankind pours its most unequivocal approvals or

reprobations. It not only judges them as right or wrong in themselves,

but as, among all human activities, most creative or most destructive

of moral character. It is a fundamental postulate in ethical thinking

that moral law binds the will.[63]

In the action of the will the moral judgment finds its object of

highest approval and of most thorough condemnation. It is to the will,

_i. e._ the personal self, that moral law presents its claims. It is

the point in which personality is summed up in free and responsible

selfhood, and where the great reality of responsibility is pivoted. The

will, as another name for the soul's power of choosing, sustains the

decisive relation between all the motives that precede and the actions

which follow the volitions. The action contemplated may be right or

wrong, the motive may be good or bad, but when the question is brought

by the conscience into the presence of the will, the place of supreme

and final responsibility for virtue or sin is reached.

This justifies the conclusion that moral character belongs to the

exercise of the will as it does not to any other activity of our

moral nature. For it is the point, and the only point, of freedom

in our whole constitution. Necessity marks the action of each and

every part from the lowest functions up to the will; and beyond this

there stretches on another realm of necessity in the consequences

of volition. For example, necessity rules in the physical nature.

The processes go on under fixed uniform laws, with no freedom or

choice. So in the intellect and the sensibility. We begin to think in

non-optional spontaneity, or we would not think at all. In perception,

representation, in the discursive and intuitive powers, and in the

emotions, affections and desires that arise from the activity of the

intellect, the movement is bound up under laws of cause and effect.

Whatever power of regulation, change or control we possess over these

functions does not belong to the powers themselves, but to the will or

the personal capacity of free choice and self-regulation. It is only

through our will-power that we can handle and direct our thinking or

control the direction and force of our feelings. So, too, the ideas of

right and wrong, the perceptions of duty and the sense of obligation

come into the presence of the will of necessity. All before the will

is of necessity. Thus men see the right and perceive obligation. At

this point all the responsibility of character is thrown upon the will.

If contemplated action appear right or wrong, as action that ought or

ought not to be done, the will must decide whether it shall be done. If

good or bad motives plead for rulership, the will must say which shall

prevail. If feelings are out of harmony with duty and right in the

relations of life, with respect to God or man, it is to be remembered

that the feelings cannot choose, and the will alone can guide them in

virtuous action. To it, therefore, virtue or guilt belongs as nowhere

else. For it not only accepts and makes its own all the right or wrong

that appears elsewhere, but it also remains true or becomes false to

its own supreme duty and obligation to moral law, when, under the

behests of conscience, it directs life and character either up the

heights of moral excellence and happiness, or into the wrong and guilt

and miseries of immorality. Where the will is moral the man is moral;

for the will is the zenith of personality. Where it is immoral the man

is immoral.

CHAPTER XI.

THE ETHICAL VIEW UNDER CHRISTIAN TEACHING.

These conclusions with respect to the nature and office of conscience,

the ethical distinction, its theistic implications, its transcendental

character and objective validity, its relation to personality and

freedom, the proximate and ultimate ground of right, and the different

parts of human activity to which moral quality belongs, are conclusions

reached by the scientific method and stand on the warrant of reason.

They arise from phenomena of history and life, and form, in their

essential statements, a body of scientific and philosophical knowledge

of equal certainty and authority with the most assured results of

other branches of rational investigation. Ethics, therefore, finds its

fundamental truths in the natural constitution of the world, and is

able to build these truths into a science possessed of all the rights

and force of systematized and established knowledge.

==Christianity Recognizes Ethics.==

=1.= Christianity fully recognizes these truths and all the essential

principles which ethical science formulates and certifies. It does

more. It magnifies their importance by building upon them its own

divine view of moral requirement and the way of its realization. All

that ethical science shows to be true in the moral constitution of man,

in the reality of moral law for the free regulation of his conduct,

and in respect to the source and immutable authority of that law,

abides as fundamental presuppositions in the divine superstructure

of religion and duty presented by Christianity. Redemption starts

and works upon the basal facts of human nature and man's condition,

relations, duties, responsibilities and needs. If Christianity assumes

the existence and rulership of God, a moral constitution of human life,

and the existence of conscience with its perceptions of duty and sense

of obligation; if it assumes man to be a free agent and yet bound in

the exercise of his autonomy by laws of obligation and responsibility;

if it assumes the law of right to be essentially unalterable and

irrepealable, a reality to which God himself conforms, all these are

great truths fully certified in the rational conclusions of ethical

science.

==Contributions to Ethical View.==

=2.= But Christianity contributes immensely to the ethical view. It is,

indeed, a great misconception to think that supernatural revelation

has been given simply to teach morality, or to look on Christianity

as merely a code of ethics. But though its first great object is

redemption, presenting God to our view in redeeming love and activity,

and offering deliverance from the guilt and life of sin, it necessarily

also aims to recover men to personal righteousness. Indeed, both

forgiveness and renewal look to this as the goal to which redemption is

to bring its subjects. While primarily Christianity is a religion and

redemptory, its ultimate aim is the establishment of men in obedience

to God, righteousness, and excellence. The very summit of its purpose,

the Alp that rises above every other Alp, is character and right life.

So the very law of its movement is supremely ethical. Forgiveness of

sin, justification by faith, stands as only the first step in the

application of redemption, and beyond this Christianity pre-eminently

means a life, the increasing recovery and perfection of human nature in

its ethical character and action, enthroning the principles of duty,

love, and righteousness in the conscience and the heart, and bringing

personal conduct into rhythmic harmony with eternal righteousness and

goodness.

And the science of ethics has not properly completed its view until

it has fully included the distinctive teaching of Christianity. For

beyond all question the data of this teaching have produced the purest

and loftiest moral life that the world has seen, the best product of

the moral history of mankind. Its ideal is confessedly the highest and

the best sustained. Even apart from the question of the well-proved

supernatural claims of Christianity, its ethical work lifts its moral

teachings to the most authoritative place, the supreme court, for the

decisions and formulations of the complete scientific view.

The total contribution of Christianity to morality comes along two

lines of help: 1. In the way of fuller disclosure of moral principles

and of essential duties; and 2. In the way of furnishing an efficient

dynamic for their fulfilment. The first of these two topics claims

attention in this chapter; the second must be left for the next.

The need of larger knowledge, than that furnished by simply

naturalistic ethics, for the perfection of moral life, has everywhere

been evident. The debasement of moral thought and the worse debasement

of moral life frequently found among peoples outside of the atmosphere

illuminated by Christian truth, is sad proof how crying this need

of right knowledge may become. The strife of conflicting opinions

as to the root and validity of moral principles, even among many

in Christendom who look at the subject with faces averted from

Christianity, is perpetual remembrancer of the room for more and better

information. And the perplexing phenomenon of wide diversity of moral

judgments in daily life, to which we have had occasion several times

already to refer, resulting from the different degrees of correctness

with which the relations of life are understood and interpreted,

enforces the same truth. The moral power is educable. It sees its

objects in the light, not in darkness, nor fully in dawn. It acts

best when flooded with the fullest knowledge. Men can discern duty

accurately and fully only when they comprehend all their relations to

God above them, their fellow-men around them, their destiny before

them, and the significance and moral demand of these relations. From

the high origin of their nature, "in the image of God," they may

carry some impress of the moral law from God in their hearts, in the

inner order of insight and spiritual vision, and in measure "read

God's thoughts after Him" about love and justice and truth and other

essential virtues. But this rational reading of duty from the law

of right within them and from the moral constitution about them,

is grandly helped when revelation throws its illumination on the

nature and relations of men, the meaning of life and the reach of its

responsibilities. Whatever has been the short-coming of Christianity's

professors in exemplifying its moral teaching, the history of its

work is full proof of its containing the best ethical direction and

power the earth has yet seen. In individuals and communities in which

its teachings have been worthily turned into character and life, it

presents an inspiring suggestion of what it is capable of doing for

human exaltation when its instruction is truly followed. It is the

completing factor for moral guidance, and the scientific view is false

to itself when it fails to include the teachings and the phenomena

of the Christian consciousness and life. Since Christianity has come

and given the world its highest civilizations and elevations, its

grandest progress in philosophy, science, art, literature, invention,

enterprise and prosperity, all the purest and most beautiful amenities

of life, and is still leading the best nations onward and upward, it

is surely worse than idle to think of forcing ethical science back

to a pagan or merely naturalistic standpoint. This would ignore the

greatest moral phenomenon of history and the most impressive facts in

the present condition of the world. "Christian ethics is ethics in the

highest--ethics raised to the highest power--the last and fullest moral

interpretation of the world and its history."[64]

=3.= The Christian ethical view has its special moral conceptions from

two sources. The one is primary and principal; the other secondary and

auxiliary.

==Sources of Christian View.==

(1) The principal source is the Sacred Scriptures of the Old and New

Testaments. Along with their distinctively religious purpose and

teaching, these pages of God's supernatural revelation, from first

to last, look to ethical ends, and are replete with principles,

laws, and precepts for duty and righteousness. As for a knowledge of

Christianity as a religion we must come to these writings as its own

accredited records, presenting its truths and requirements, so also for

a knowledge of its moral teachings. Whatever help may be obtainable

from other sources, say from study of the Christian consciousness or of

the effects of Christianity on personal and social life, the chief and

highest source is these Sacred Scriptures. For the best Christian life

falls short of the ideal standard of conduct there presented. It would

be unfair to study it or judge it only in the partial, fragmentary,

one-sided, imperfect illustrations of it. Every ideal thus gained must

be corrected and greatly up-raised before it can stand for the complete

divine ideal that shines out from the teachings of the Scriptures and

the life of the Christ therein revealed. The perfect image of Christian

ethics has never been fully reflected by either the inward or outward

life of the believer. The Sacred Scriptures, therefore, are the only

infallible normative authority for Christian ethics, as they are for

Christian theology.

This use of the Scriptures as the determinative authority, however,

must take account of the fact that they present an historical

and progressive revelation. As God's redemptive action advanced

historically, unfolding religious truth and grace gradually and

educationally, so the moral ideal, which Christianity in its fulness

of provision and power should exhibit, is found more and more clearly

revealed till the view is completed. This accounts for the higher

ethical view reached in the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is the record of the earlier stages of the

Christian revelation, distinctly preparatory and prophetic, forms a

continual instruction in duty and righteousness. It grounds the moral

life essentially in the religious, but religion must walk in holiness.

Fundamental in it stands the decalogue, a summary of moral law, of

most profound and comprehensive sweep, which is still the great code

of duty for the guidance of human conduct, and so clearly beyond the

mere thinking of Moses or the people he led, as to prove its divine

origin. All the types and symbols of the Old Testament, its sacrifices

of cleansing and expiation, are impressive condemnations of sin and

calls to repentance. The ever-ringing voices of prophecy are thrilling

rebukes to wrong-doing and clarion appeals for righteousness. Its

psalms and music are but echoing praise for the divine grace that

renews the heart and restores the life to the blessedness of obedience

to the moral laws of God. The lofty ethical demands of the Hebrew

Scriptures, along with their revelation of grace, form a unique and

distinguishing feature among ancient literatures. Their ceaseless

voice is: "Keep judgment and do righteousness"; "Cease to do evil and

learn to do well"; "Offer to God the sacrifices of righteousness."

Nowhere else at that day was the moral ideal lifted so high, or with

such imperative authority. The Old Testament ethics was a fit prophecy

and preparation for the full Christian teaching. "If the ethics of the

old dispensation had not passed into the fulfilment of the new, the

Hebrew prophets and poets would still be the world's most inspiring

teachers of high ethical hopes and ideals, and the moral code of Israel

would be the school of righteousness, reverence, and law, to which the

generations should go for the loftiest instruction."[65]

The New Testament, which completes the authoritative records of

Christianity, completes also Christianity's normative statement of the

truths and principles of duty. These appear in the threefold form of

(1) Christ's recorded teaching, (2) His personal example, and (3) the

inspired interpretations of Christian duty in the apostolic writings.

The teaching of Jesus, all through the gospels, while primarily

religious and religiously spiritual, deals with the great realities of

character and conduct, and, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount,

ascends to the very heights and penetrates to the very depths of the

laws of duty. It carries those laws into a spirituality, solemnity, and

glory before unknown, and forms a representation which stands before

the moral sense of the race as the unsurpassed and the unequalled

ethical ideal. The view is carried up to the goal: "Be ye perfect, even

as your Father in heaven is perfect." This divine teaching is at the

same time reflected from the personal life of Christ. It is presented

in living form. The example is part of the teaching--an example which

is never lowered below the exalted range of the given precepts, and

which has been instructing and inspiring all the centuries since.

In the apostolic writings, under the guiding Spirit of truth, the

teaching and pattern of Christ, together with his redemptive gospel,

are applied to wide and varied ranges of practical life, the apostles

themselves being filled with an ever-increasing appreciation of their

divine import and transcendence. These inspired Scriptures, because of

their unique and supreme authority for Christianity itself, are the

fundamental and decisive standard of Christian ethics.

(2) But there is a secondary and auxiliary source for formulation

of Christian ethics--in the Christian moral consciousness. In this,

Christianity exhibits its moral principles and meaning as they enter

into the inner experience of men, where they may be studied and

estimated. Christianity is a "life," a "new life," in whose moral

consciousness its principles and forces are acting formatively for

character. Not only of "the life" that in Christ was "the light of

men,"[66] but of all the pure life that is from him, is it true: "the

life is the light of men." The ethicised Christian consciousness

reveals the principles and laws that have come into it. It is a maxim

in theology that only the regenerated and sanctified mind has a clear

interpretative insight into spiritual truth, and can form the true

theologian. The maxim holds, just as truly, with respect to moral

truth. The spiritual and moral are inseparably united, and no man

can judge with unhindered and reliable discrimination in matters

of Christian ethics whose heart is unsympathetic or averse to the

duties of the Christian life. The light shines in the darkness, but

the darkness comprehends it not. Christian ethics, therefore, in

formulating its ideas and completing its theoretical view rightly,

draws upon the Christian consciousness, as that consciousness is

scripturally determined, and interprets, not the Scriptures alone, but

also, in auxiliary relation, the ethicised life of Christian humanity.

While, therefore, it is the science of Biblical morality, it is also

of the whole moral development of Christianized life, both in personal

consciousness and in the observed historical fruitage of Scripture

doctrine.

=4.= It is necessary to look at some of the particular elements or

features of the clearer and fuller ethical view which comes from these

sources.

==Duties made More Definite.==

(1) Most of the duties naturally discerned by the conscience from the

known relations of life are brought into more distinct and definite

view by Christian revelation and experience. The natural discernment is

often unclear, uncertain, partial, and faulty. The blindness, mistakes

and misgivings of the moral sense form a large and perplexing chapter

in the story of non-Christian morality. It has often led to doubt

whether there is such a thing as a fixed, sure, immutable morality. A

remedy for this has been needed. By its immense number of specific

_precepts_ for particular relations and circumstances, revelation gives

correctness, minuteness, and fulness of application to the general

principles of duty asserted by the moral sense. In manifold cases

the conscience would be in the dark, or have only obscure or partial

view, without the instruction and guidance thus supplied. Scarcely

a situation or emergency in life can be named for which precept and

counsel have not been given. When the sun rises the eye sees not

only farther, but more minutely and with more certainty. Myriads of

objects and relations before unseen flash into view. So by the light

of the Scriptures, more of duty is known and better known. By common

consent, even among skeptics as to the Christian religion, the ethical

precepts of Christianity, in their purity and elevation, in their

quickening directness and radical thoroughness, in their explicitness

and universality, form an aggregate moral directory unapproached by the

best codes of pagan sages or human philosophies, and add a grand aid to

the moral judgments.

==Human Relations.==

(2) The human _relations_, on which duty rests, have been brought

into broader and fuller view by Christian teaching. Much of the

disability, under which morality has suffered, has always come from a

faulty understanding, if not total ignorance, of the varied relations

which are to be filled out with their exact and full measure of duty.

The idea of God and man's relation to him has often been falsely or

misleadingly conceived. The history of thought as to inter-human

relations, from the closest to the most extended, presents a sad story

of misapprehension, error, ignorance and consequent wrong. When these

great vital relations are themselves misconceived, looked at from a

false or obscuring view-point, one of the prime conditions for correct

moral judgments is absent. Positive misdirection is in play. When our

knowledge has not yet shown us clearly man's place in God's plan of the

world, or the adaptations and purposes in human nature itself; when

neither the great fact of personality nor that of human solidarity is

correctly understood, as for example, when the individual is reduced,

as has often been the case, to mere material for the state or for

possible enslavement by captors, or he is, on the other hand, looked

upon as an isolated and unrelated unit; or when the reality and meaning

of the universal brotherhood of man, under the universal fatherhood of

God, is not seen, the duties and obligations of life must necessarily

be much obscured and unperceived.

But here the Christian revelation comes in with one of its great

forms of help--a divine disclosure of our moral relations. It reveals

some otherwise undiscoverable relations, opening to view additional

obligations and responsibilities. It sets before us our solemn

relations to God, to his renewing and saving grace, as well as to

his creating and preserving love, to offered blessings, gracious

rewards, and eternal destinies. The whole horizon of life is lifted

and broadened, and the sphere of the moral activity and consequences

extends into a future life. Man becomes a child of immortality and his

home is eternity. The world and human life have a grandly changed

meaning under the gospel. Man's place in the system of things, as to

the past, present, and future is revealed in a light increased and

broadened like that on the landscape when morning rises upon night;

and in this light he sees a thousand new responsibilities on which he

is touching every moment, and which stretch out and on in illimitable

ranges. Conscience is enabled to act in view of all these new relations

as well as the irradiated old ones, and taught to hold the heart

and life, the will and activities to the moral requirements of this

enlarged and illuminated ethical domain.

==Moral Duties Divine Obligations.==

(3) Christian teaching has elevated the ethical view in closely

uniting all moral obligation with duty to God. Natural ethics, when

its implications are rationally followed up, is, indeed, theistic,

and finds the seat of moral law in God as the absolute ground of the

whole moral constitution. But from this movement, rising from the

law of right in the conscience and in the moral constitution of the

world, such ethics has yet this limitation, that duty is thought of

from the human side, and not from the standpoint of God, who in his

personal nature and will is both the source and goal of moral law. In

this mode of forming the theory God is apt to be left remote, virtue

is abstractly conceived and remains a reality too much by itself

and separated from any enforcing or helping authority. It becomes

too abstract and simply humanistic. But our view of moral good must

be lifted into closer and more living connection with God. And so,

Christianity, to transfuse the ethical sense with religious light and

motives, teaches us to look upon right and duty from the standpoint

of God. This is in accordance with the very design of Christianity as

a redemptive and saving religion, seeking to bring man into true and

practical fellowship with God. The moral discernment is to be filled

and animated by the religious spirit, so that the moral training may be

carried on and completed together with the development and consummation

of the Christian life. Thus the form of the appeal is: "Be ye holy, for

I am holy." "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."

In a high and peculiar emphasis all duty is required to be done as unto

God. "Forasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done

it unto me." "We should so fear and love God," as not to offend against

any part of the law or fail in doing good. Through the Christian

revelation alone the ethical conception and relation of God is truly

attained, and with it a right conception of man and the highest spirit

of duty.

In thus teaching that all duties should be fulfilled as something due

to God, and under inspiration of love to Him, Christian ethics is not

to be understood to mean that rational ethical theory is mistaken when

it claims that men are to "do right because it is right." But it means

to remind us where alone the absolute right is found--only in God. And

it means that both the religious and the ethical life is to upraise and

anchor us to Him, and to eternal righteousness as it is in Him. All

duty is owed finally to God, because He is the one absolute righteous

Being to whom the whole universe owes its very existence and all its

blessings. Thus Christian ethics sets forth fully what rational thought

has often caught a glimpse of and hinted at, but wanted vision to see

clearly, viz.: that the goal of the ethical aim is to be "like God."

Its aim, as is that of religion itself, is to bring our moral life into

living fellowship with Him and His blessedness. This marked feature of

Christian teaching presents the ethical view in its highest elevation,

purification and power.

==Moral Guilt.==

(4) In harmony with this close connection of the moral with the

religious life, a further special feature of Christian ethics is a

peculiar emphasis upon the guilt of offence against the moral law.

In pagan ethics, often with no clear perception of the existence of

God, always without just conception of his character, though the moral

distinction was recognized and wrong was regarded as condemnable, yet

because the wrong was viewed as traversing only an abstract principle

or an accredited usage or order of best happiness, it evoked no strong

sense of guilt. Right was always little else than a conforming of one's

self to "nature," or "reason," or "civil authority," or conditions

of "well-being" or "enjoyment," or at best to an ideal conception of

virtue. In the ethical view which materialistic philosophies present,

though the phenomenon of conscience is acknowledged and obedience

to its direction admitted to be necessary for proper right order,

yet the condemnatory judgment on immorality is rather a judgment

of it as unwise, imprudent, and injurious than as guilty and worthy

of punishment. It is at most a non-conformity to an impersonal,

mechanically determined, ongoing nature. The whole utilitarian

conception of morality, which makes it consist essentially in following

the teachings of experience as to what is most advantageous and useful,

may hold disregard of it as a great "evil," economically viewed, but

almost annuls, if it does not completely remove, the idea of guilt, by

substituting that of loss. Even in simply rational _theistic_ ethics,

despite theistic pre-suppositions and conclusions, the view may still

deal too much with abstractions and rest too much on abstract ideas or

impersonal things. Right and wrong are, indeed, developed by natural

relations, to which men are bound to conform, but only because these

relations, by being divinely established, represent God, who in the

perfections of his nature and will, is at once the free Creator and

righteous personal Ruler of the universe. Moral law not only applies

alone to free personality, but has its source and authority in the

Absolute Personality whose holy and beneficent will has constituted the

moral relations and requirements of life. Morality pertains, not to the

relations of mere things to things, or of persons to simply impersonal

nature, but of persons to persons. Inter-human relations create and

exhibit obligations because God's plan and will speak in them, but the

full solemnity of moral obligation appears only when all inter-human

obligations are seen carried up and united in the supreme and

all-embracing obligation to God, to whom all duty is due. When these

inter-human duties are refused, they are refused to God who requires

them and has expressed that requirement to reason through the relations

themselves and through his word. Not only the religious duties, as

faith and love and gratitude and prayer, but all human duties are owed

to Him. Here all religious duties become moral obligations; and all

moral obligations become religious duties. And the guilt of wrong-doing

is heightened by the fact that it is a sin against the just, holy,

supreme authority and will of God, the absolute personal ground of the

right order and blessedness of the universe. In Him the moral authority

is identified with the rights of the Creator to whom every good in

the universe is owed. This emphasis upon the transcendent authority

and sanctity of moral law and consequent guilt of its violation is a

special feature in the Christian ethical view and necessary for the

true force and efficiency of the moral sense.

Any separation of morality from the position of something due to God

personally, obscures and weakens the ethical view. This has been

the bane not only of pagan, materialistic, atheistic, or grossly

utilitarian theories, but also of many other forms of representation.

Whenever the sense of duty is resolved into an instinct, or blind

feeling, or sympathy, or a product of custom, its true authority is

kept out of sight. The guilt of neglect of it disappears. Though

fervently regarded by many great thinkers as a sublime statement

of the moral principle, even the Kantian "categorical imperative,"

an immediate behest of the reason, saying: "Do this, or do that,"

giving no account of itself or ground for its authority, but speaking

autocratically in its own right, and as sufficient and final in its

own imperative, under the abstract rule: "Act as if the maxims of thy

action were to become by thy will the law of the universe," holds the

whole moral authority too abstractly and remote from God for complete

theory or effective power. He is not brought clearly into view or made

livingly near, but left in the background--a Being whose existence,

along with freedom and immortality, is only inferred and to be believed

because this ideal "law" requires Him for its maintenance. Sublime as

the "categorical imperative" may often have seemed, this shaping of

the theory of obligation is not suited to fill and vivify the moral

consciousness of men as does a sense of the sublimer reality of the

holy will and supreme authority of God, as present in and speaking

through that moral consciousness. But the Christian view brings us

face to face with this righteous will and authority in every moral

obligation, and teaches us to see in all the established personal

relations of life a divine call to right and duty.

==Moral Law Universal.==

(5) The Christian view makes uniquely clear the universalism of

the moral law. In natural theories the reach and identity of the

law has failed rightly to appear. The theory has formed only an

ethics for a race, a nation, a condition or caste. It has been

particularistic, limited by race lines, tribal or national boundaries,

class distinctions, or ancestral traditions. Codes of duty have

been shaped to local and exclusive conditions. So we have a national

ethics created by civil law, or a class ethics, as of free citizens

contra-distinguished from slaves, or of Brahmans as different from

low caste people. Or we have an ethics of individuals, in which the

code of duty of each is determined by his own personal "instincts,"

"feelings," swing of "sympathy," preference in "pleasure," development

of "reason," calculations of "utility," ancestral "inheritance," or a

mysterious "categorical imperative." Moral codes have been immensely

and confusingly diversified. A self-identical and common standard

does not appear, nor the clear, sure foundation of any. The moral law

is not exhibited in its universality and permanence. Its grandeur is

unseen by reason of the kaleidoscopic variations presented by the

moving fragmentary theories. Its authority is brought into doubt. The

great want has been a view of morality for man as man, authoritative

everywhere and always, co-extensive with humanity.

The defect of the theories has been twofold. 1. They have not brought

the whole race of man together in the essential sameness of a universal

humanity, each individual being endowed with the high attributes of a

personality, made in the image of God, and all bound together in one

all-inclusive brotherhood. 2. They have failed clearly to unite this

total humanity, in all its personalities, with God, whose nature and

will is the only and absolute source of the moral law which sweeps

round and through all the world. The Christian Scriptures and the

Christian consciousness supply the needed completion of view by

throwing both these truths into clear light. Christianity invests

human personality with a worth, sacredness, and responsibility never

elsewhere recognized. It is at the point of personality that each

individual is to be united in fellowship with the personal God, who,

as righteousness and love, sits upon the throne. Christianity seeks

to make so real and living the brotherhood of man, that the throb

of love and sympathy may be felt across all national lines and race

distinctions around the earth. And while it thus strengthens the

vitality and sacred force of the relations that thus bind men together,

it teaches that the moral duties to men which these relations require,

are to be done as unto God. Monotheism brings _mono-nomism_. The moral

law, which is absolute, self-identical, eternal and immutable in the

holy nature and will of God, becomes universal and irrepealable not

only for the earth but for all the moral universe.

==Condition of Fulfillment.==

(6) A special extension in the Christian ethical view is the truth that

the moral law can be truly fulfilled only in and through a spiritual

regeneration and renovation of the personal life. This is a truth

which simply rational theories fail to formulate, though they are not

without materials to justify the formulation of it. Few facts of life

and history are more conspicuous than the impotence of the ethical

perceptions and motives to get and maintain rightful rulership. Some

hindering and disabling depravity in the human condition prevents

attainment of the moral ideal. Apart from the dreadful sway of vice

and crime and cruel wrong, even with the well-disposed, full duty to

neither God nor man is completely realized. The words put by Ovid in

the mouth of Medea: "_Video meliora, proboque, detereora sequor_"

(I see and approve the better, I follow the worse), voice the moral

weakness felt even in pagan consciousness. This incompetency of the

ethical behests to accomplish the true and required life, Christianity

confirms and emphasizes; and upon its basis unfolds the necessity of a

deep, radical renewal of personal character.

In Christianity, let it be remembered, the moral law is a diviner and

deeper reality than natural notions of men make it. It looks, with

its divine eye, down into the very depths of the heart, and demands

loyal and full duty through the whole range of personal relations with

respect to both God and man. It spreads the force of moral obligation

over religious duties, joining them in indissoluble union. "The law

of the Lord is perfect," and requires this wholeness of duty and

righteousness. Hence Christianity holds a merely natural morality

always to be faulty, leaving men under the law's condemnation. Without

a divine quickening and spiritual enabling, men can never be brought to

true and full obedience and transformed into moral harmony and likeness

with God. And the proclamation, looking to this part of the redemptive

process, is: "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of

God." Thus it becomes a unique distinction of the Christian ethical

view, that it proposes to bring men to spiritual and moral endeavor

and victory from the starting-point of a conviction and recognition

of their own thorough incompetence for the moral task. It furnishes

a true and adequate ability where it has broken up dependence on an

insufficient one.

But this brings to us the moral task, which belongs to the next

chapter.

CHAPTER XII.

THE ETHICAL TASK UNDER CHRISTIANITY.

The ethical task is to fulfil the moral law, to actualize the ethical

ideal in conduct and character. It is to turn obligations into life.

It is not enough to know duty, even in completest theory. It must be

realized. In its most important and final view, ethics is a question of

moral power.

The impotence of the conscience before the moral task has always been

an impressive fact. The perception of duty has lacked efficiency for

the enforcement of duty. Vision of the right largely fails to secure

conformity to it. Even the clearest intellectual discriminations and

illuminations of the moral law have often been only as the play of

cold light, almost like the aurora of the north quickening nothing

into life or fruitage. Here is found the chief point of failure in

natural ethics. It has power to dictate, but not to move. It wants an

efficient dynamic for overcoming the moral evil that has established

itself in human nature and life--evil so positive and dominant as to

justify an apostle in representing the better ethical will as disabled:

"Ye cannot do the things that ye would." Prof. Flint says: "The wisdom

of the heathen world, at its very best, was utterly inadequate to

the accomplishment of such a task as creating a due abhorrence of

sin, controlling the passions, purifying the heart, and ennobling the

conduct."[67]

The aim of Christianity is supremely practical. It seeks to save

from sin and bring to righteousness. It wastes no effort for simply

speculative results. It comes "not in word only, but in power." Besides

its service to morals in confirming and extending our needed knowledge

of duty, its greatest ethical service is in supplying the needed

dynamic or efficacious force for the realization of the holy life. How

does it enable the moral task?

==Completion of the Ethical View.==

=1.= In some degree by the completion of the ethical view itself. The

clearer light is forceful and efficacious for a better realization of

the moral task. "Knowledge is power," especially knowledge which throws

into view the most impressive realities and relations, and appeals

with the most cogent motives. By the strong illumination shed upon the

general principles of right and virtue, by the definiteness and detail

of the instruction and precepts for all situations in life, by the

elevation of view in which the moral horizon is widened and extended,

so as to show a living brotherhood of every man with every other

round the world and a range of moral interests and responsibilities

interminable as eternity, by the emphasis with which men are made

amenable to God for all moral duties, even those to men, thus vivifying

the whole moral consciousness with a sense of a close, unescapable

accountability to God the conscience is better enlightened and

quickened for its task, strengthened by the fullest certainty and under

the vigor of a new inspiration. It has more light for direction; it

bears grander motive forces before the will.

==Assurance of Success.==

=2.= By giving assurance of success. In the face of the greatest

hindrances and natural incompetence, it certifies an inspiring goal of

the moral endeavor. Pointing to redemptive grace, it makes manifest

that the administration of this world is not on the side of moral

evil, or indifferent to its wrong and blight, but is working for its

overthrow, the deliverance of its subjects, and their triumph over

it. It proclaims an established and ever-advancing "kingdom," whose

consummation will bring all those who, as its subjects, "hunger and

thirst after righteousness," triumphantly through and beyond the

present militant stage of the moral life into final victory over evil,

"a new earth and a new heaven wherein dwelleth righteousness." In this

divine assurance that the domination of moral evil, with its anarchy

and misery in the soul, is no necessity, that its overthrow is provided

for, and that God's government is so in the interest of righteousness

and love as to guarantee victory to even the feeblest that in faith

appropriate his grace and help, there comes the full inspiration, not

only of hope, but of sure success in the moral endeavor. Moral effort

is not compelled to be

"Like ships that sailed for sunny isles,

But never came to shore."

It has the certainty that

"To him who sides with God

No chance is lost."

The moral help thus supplied by Christianity is well illustrated by

the contrast which it presents to some other teaching, say as seen in

Buddhism, extolled in poetry as "The Light of Asia." This is known as

one of "the great religions." It is, rather, a philosophy of life, a

directory for conduct. It is an atheistic, or at best a pantheistic

philosophy, recognizing no personal God and emptying the idea of Deity

of practical validity. It had its origin in a deep and oppressive sense

of the evil and misery of life, and aimed at their solution and the

way of deliverance. On the basis of the oriental "metempsychosis,"

with its supposed perpetual re-births, on account of earlier sins,

into successive distressful lives, it elaborated, for deliverance, a

code of duty pervaded by the ascetic spirit and demanding the severest

self-discipline. In many of its separate precepts it rises, indeed,

here and there to elevations and beauties of moral idea that seem

almost akin to the finest and purest of New Testament inculcations.

But whether viewed as a philosophy or a religion Buddhism has no

personal God, who loves and values men as his own children made in

his own image, and ready to come to their help. It has heard, and in

its atheistic cosmos, can hear, no voice of redemption, knows of no

manifestation of a loving God for deliverance of his sinful children

from their sins and their exaltation to the dignity and happiness

of fellowship with Himself. In this despair of help from God, in

this dolefully pessimistic view of the world and life, and driven

to depend only on self-help, is it any wonder that the moral task

is directed, not to the development, elevation and joy of personal

life, but to its repression, subjugation, and reduction, so as to

bring it, at its earthly close, to Nirvana, extinction of conscious

individual existence, as the greatest good! By as much as this theory

of despair is suited to atrophy all nerve for the ethical task, and

sink personality from its true intended elevation of divine fellowship

and excellence into the inanity of unconscious being, by so much does

the Christian truth of the assured success and victory of right and

goodness in the advancing kingdom of God's grace and eternal love,

exalting the worth and force of personality to the highest, inspire and

sustain the moral endeavor. "Forasmuch as ye know that your labor is

not in vain in the Lord."

Much has been written in late years about "the evolution of the moral

life," by writers who seek to account for it through the action of

merely naturalistic forces in the human constitution and in its

physical environment. The above contrast is suggestive of factors in

the problem which many of these writers overlook.

==Religious Interest.==

=3.= By uniting the moral side of life with the religious, and so

bringing all the powers of the religious interest in vital help for

the moral task. The common false diremption between morality and

religion, classifying duties to God as religious, and only duties to

fellow-men or self as moral, each standing in isolation, and largely of

separate accomplishment, allowing men to be "moral" while repudiating

all their duties to God, or "religious" while without a conscience

enforcing duty to men, leaves flabby nerve for moral endeavor. All the

mighty motives from the Godward side are lost. No quickening force for

inter-human duties comes from a consciousness of God and his authority,

or the future life. Any view that severs morality from God and is

bounded by this world and temporal good, must fail to realize the

moral life of man. But the Christian view allows no such separation.

It unites the two as two sides of the same life of duty, out of one

conscience, with vision of both God and men, and one heart true to

the indivisible spirit of right. As religious duties are all moral,

as obligations to God, and all moral duties are religious, as due to

Him, the Christian consciousness of God must re-inforce and vivify with

new efficiency the whole twofold moral endeavor. All the distinctly

religious interests and forces, reverence of Deity, repentance before

God, gratitude, faith, love, hope, spiritual joy, aspiration, desire

of immortality and endless blessedness, thus brought into concurrent

action with the Christianly enlightened natural conscience, bring an

immensely advantageous condition for the actualization of the ethical

life. "To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over

the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and

eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to

the imperishable theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very

substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of

the conscience; they deepen every guilty shame; they guarantee every

righteous hope; and they help the will with a Divine casting-vote in

every balance of temptation."[68]

==Power of Holy Spirit.==

=4.= By the enlightening and obligating force of the Holy Spirit.

This reality is assured both in the teaching of the Scriptures and

the testimony of the Christian consciousness. We must distinguish

between the simply natural action of conscience and the quickening

and helping by the divine Spirit. Revelation fully recognizes the

natural conscience and its obligating energy, Rom. 2:15; 1:20. It

designates it by the term συνείδησις [Greek: syneidêsis] from σύνοιδα

[Greek: synoida], _conscius sum_--a knowing with, _i. e._ a conjoined

consciousness of self and of right, or a knowing with God, whose law

it discerns. Its natural functions of discernment and imperative are

not set aside by the Spirit, but enlightened and re-inforced. His part

must not be counted zero. "When the Spirit is come, He will convince

the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment," John 16:8. He

works through the truth, in and through men's natural faculties. While

the Christian's own conscience is acting in its natural functions, it

is not acting alone. It is not alone; for the Holy Spirit is there as

a quickening and helping power. In this is fulfilled the experience

expressed by St. Paul: "My conscience also bearing me witness in the

Holy Ghost," Rom. 9:1. This is a Christian conscience, one acting not

alone and unaided, but embraced within and filled by the influence of

the Holy Spirit. This influence has been well expressed as "like the

energy of the sunshine in the fruit."

==Spiritual Regeneration.==

=5.= Through spiritual regeneration and renovation. It is through this

profound reality that Christianity accomplishes its great ethical

result. It places the principle of holiness, of duty to God and men, in

the very heart of human nature and life. It writes the law in the love

of the soul.

The divine wisdom of Christianity is marked by the stress which it

places upon a purification of the inner life, "the heart," the very

fountain of thought, purpose, and conduct. It points to the immoral

source of the immoralities of conduct: "Out of the heart proceed

murders, adulteries," etc. The remedy must purify the fountain. When

this is secured and the law of holiness is established there, the

ethical life, in its manifoldness and many-sidedness, comes into

realization.

It is thus that the conscience gains control. Its failures result

from the strength of opposing passions, desires, and perverted

inclination, excited often by temptations without. The affections do

not find their centre and rest in God and righteousness. They are

irregular, often sordid and misleading. The appetites and passions

obscure the moral discernments and resist the moral judgments. There

is a law of "sin in the members." The will, which should bow to the

direction of the conscience, is swayed by wrong motives. The scepter

of the moral faculty is broken by the rebellion of desires at war

with right and duty. The faintest whisper of conscience ought to be

decisive, but against the imperious ascendency of wrong affections

its loudest imperatives prove impotent. But in this moral renovation,

giving its "new heart and right spirit," the affections come into

harmony with God and all that is good. It is the "writing of the law

again in the heart," in the understanding and love. To this new life

in the affections, duty becomes a pleasure. The conscience, no longer

perplexed and overborne by evil desires, becomes able to assert its

rightful authority. The will attains its rightful freedom and power to

control efficiently in the domain of righteousness, and to hold the

life in the harmonies of right and duty.

Put these different elements of the Christian ethical dynamic together.

They aggregate the final moral power. Christianity completes the

ethical view, flooding all the principles of right and duty with

impressive light. It throws broad and strong illumination over all

the moral relations of men, extending the view into the future life,

and giving certifying precepts for guidance and support. It gives

the inspiring assurance of the triumph of righteousness in the

kingdom which God's love is establishing for it. It unites all moral

duties under the sanctions and solemnities of obligation to God, and

re-inforces them by all the motives and appeals which the religious

sentiments and interests address to men. It supplies an exhaustless

wealth of truths which give nerve to moral endeavor and are directly

convertible into character. And, as expressing the line along which

these elements all pass into full effect, by its regenerative action it

secures for the innermost sources of conduct a transforming influence

which does for the life what making the tree good does for its fruit.

Love of right turns convictions of right into character. The efficiency

of the conscience no longer stands only in the intellectual judgments,

but also in affection for the morally good. With love toward what

is good a feebler conscience could sway the life aright. But under

this deep inward change, we have clearer moral vision and stronger

imperative, together with a transformation of the whole nature into

predominant love of righteousness. As the Christian life advances,

the principles of duty are more and more established in the heart and

conduct as life-forces, and the conscience becomes more and more _de

facto_, as it is _de jure_, sovereign for moral obedience. And thus

Christianity supplies the divine and sufficient dynamic for the full

realization of the ethical life.

INDEX.

Absolutism, Divine, 149-151.

Actions, objects of moral judgment, 183-187.

Affections, benevolent, not supreme, 90-92.

Agnostic tendencies, 81-83, 120-124.

Aim, ethical, in Christianity, 197-198.

Altruism, 154, 161.

Analogy, supports relational theory, 176-177.

Anthropological testimony, 34.

Applicatory moral judgments, 51-52, 67-68, 92-97, 128.

Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 25.

Aristotle, 16, 18, 33, 152.

Assyria, 43.

Assurance of success, quickening to moral endeavor, 220-222.

Aurelius, Marcus, 33.

Authority, moral, belongs not to utility or pleasure, 158-160;

nor to "the beautiful," 144;

but to "the right," supremely, 79-80, 87-88, 126-136, 158-159,

178-191;

to conscience, as discerning the right, 57-58, 86-99, 104.

Bain, Alexander, 121, 154.

Benevolent affections, not supreme, 90-92.

Bentham, Jeremy, 154.

Book of the Dead, 33.

Bowne, Prof. Borden P., 29, 36, 62, 153, 170, 186.

Brahmanism, 32, 142.

Buckle, 43.

Buddhism, 32, 126, 142, 221-222.

Butler, Bishop, 110-111, 154.

Calderwood, 167.

Cato, 33.

Christ, personal embodiment of his own teaching, 203-204.

Christian ethics, completes the ethical view, 198-200;

sources of, 200-205;

special features of, 205-217.

Christianity, relation of, to rational ethics, 26-27, 196-198;

its distinctive teachings, 205-217;

affords power for the moral task, 218-227.

Cicero, 16, 33.

Clarke, Samuel, 166.

Cocker, B. D., quoted, 173.

Coleridge, 167.

Confucianism, 32.

Confucius, 141.

Conscience, simple or complex, 37-39; its existence proved, 39-55;

its psychological place, 59-62;

its nature determined, 62-83;

theistic, 79-80, 86-88;

supremacy of, 83-92;

acts of necessity, 78-80;

educable, 104, 199-200;

conceivably formed through theistic evolution, 83-85;

enlightened by Christian teaching, 198-217;

becomes efficient through Christian forces, 218-227.

Consciousness, testimony as to freedom, 108-110;

Christian, source for formulation of ethics, 204-205.

Cudworth, 167.

Demerit, import and measure of, 70-72.

Deontology, 16 (note).

Des Cartes, René, 150.

Dividing line between true and false ethical theories, 130-132.

Diversity of moral judgments, 48, 173.

Dorner, Dr., quoted, 150.

Druidism, 32.

Duty defined, 65.

Dynamic, moral, 198, 218-227.

Education of conscience, 74, 104.

Egypt, 43, 126.

Epictetus, 148.

Ethics, defined, 15-17;

historically sketched, 17-20;

how divided, 21-23;

relation to psychology, 23;

to natural theology, 24;

to Christian theology, 25;

partly psychological, 21-22, 59;

partly metaphysical, 21-22, 119-120;

relation of evolution to, 54-55, 83-85, 132-137;

illuminated by Christianity, 196-217;

task of, under Christianity, 218-227.

Eudæmonism, 144-153.

Evolution, in relation to conscience, 54-55, 83-85, 132;

to objective moral law, 132-137, 154-155.

Fact, the primary ethical, 28-36.

Faculty, as applied to the conscience, 37-38;

psychologically described, 62-80.

Failure of utilitarianism, 155-160.

Fallibility of conscience, 52, 92-94, 103-105.

Fatalism, in Stoic virtue, 147.

Feelings, moral, a part of conscience, 72-77;

feelings, objects of moral judgment, 187-189.

Flint, Prof., quoted, 218.

Freedom, personal, abridged in ancient nations, 17-18.

Free-will, necessary to moral agency, 66, 105-106;

alternative choice, 106-107, 159;

proof of, 107-112;

excluded by materialism, 112-113.

God, existence of required by moral law, 79-80, 87-88, 135;

relation to moral law, 126, 135-136, 149-151, 158, 169, 172,

178-181, 208-215;

moral duties due to Him, 169-170, 222-223.

Good, the chief, 143, 145, 146, 148.

Greece, 17, 43, 143-148.

Gregory, Dr. D. S., 166.

Grote, 123.

Grotius, Hugo, 149-150.

Ground of right, the point defined, 139;

sometimes confounded with ground of obligation, 138-139;

various theories, 140-167;

Egyptian, 140;

Chinese, 141;

Indian, 142;

Zoroastrian, 142-143;

Greek, 143-148;

Roman, 148;

Divine absolutism, 149-150;

of Hobbes, 151;

sympathetic, 152;

utilitarian, 152-165;

of relations, 165;

spiritual excellence, 166;

direct intuition, 167;

as subjective or objective, 139-140, 168;

proximate ground, 168-178;

ultimate, 178-181;

not in mere "will" of God, 179-180.

Guilt of wrong-doing, 210-212.

Hamilton, Sir William, 121, 122.

Happiness, an end, but not supreme, 161-163;

idea of, not identical with that of right, 156;

without the moral imperative, 158-160.

Hedonism, 146.

Herbert Spencer, on moralizing effects of intellectualism, 43;

on relativity of knowledge, 122;

explanation of the moral sentiments, 35, 155.

Heredity and conscience, 83-84.

Hickock, Dr. Laurens P., 166.

Historical witness to the ethical distinctions, 29-31.

History of ethics, glance at, 17-20.

Hobbes, 151.

Horace, 33.

Hume, 152, 154.

Hutcheson, 154.

Imperative, the moral, 65-66, 99, 158, 212-213.

Instinct, not conscience, 57-58.

Intentions, have moral quality, 190;

teleological motives, 190.

Intuitional, the conscience perceptions, 60-63, 76, 78-79.

Jouffroy, Theo. Simon, 166.

Judgments, moral, universal, 29;

conflict of, 47;

agreement, 48-51;

primary, 62-67;

secondary, 51, 128;

not infallible, 52.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 81;

phenomenalism, 121-122;

on the ground of right, 167;

"categorical imperative," 212-213.

Knowledge, relation of, to moral judgments, 51-52, 59-62, 67-68,

92-93, 95-96, 102-105, 172-175, 205-209.

Lecky, quoted, 157 (note).

Literature, its testimony to the moral sense, 33.

Mansel, Dean, 121.

Marcus Aurelius, 148.

Martineau, James, 88, 174, 223-224.

Merit and demerit, import of, 68-70;

measure of, 71.

Metaphysics of ethics, 21, 119-195.

Mill, James, 154.

Mill, J. Stuart, 82, 121-122, 154.

Mohammedanism, 32.

Monism, material, 133-137, 155.

Moral agency, 100-118, 172, 182.

Moral distinctions, fact of, 28-36;

faculty of, 37-85;

objectively real, 125-126;

not made by mental organization, 127;

intuitions, 63;

immutable and eternal, 127-128.

Moral emotions, 44-47.

Moral Law, perceived obligation, 64-66;

theistic, 79-80, 87-88, 135;

only for free agents, 136;

grandeur of, 129-130;

universal, 213-215.

Morality, relation of Christianity to, 197-198.

Moral motives, 73, 75-76.

Moral qualities, predicable of personal beings, 182;

external acts, 183-187;

feelings, desires, etc., 187-189;

hereditary propensities, 189;

intellectual activities, 191;

intentions, 190;

will, 193-195.

Necessitarianism, 112-115.

Necessity, in the action of conscience, 78;

in intellect and sensibility, 174-175.

Nemesis, in history, 31.

Newman, Francis, 80.

Nirvana, 142, 222.

Obligation, perceived, 64;

felt, 64-65;

belongs to moral agent, 65;

central in conscience, 65;

implies objective moral law, 125-137.

Old Testament ethics, 202-203.

Paley, William, 153.

Pascal, 47.

Peculiarity of the moral perceptions, 40.

Persistence of the moral sense, 48, 64.

Phenicia, 43.

Phenomenalism, 81, 121-125.

Philosophical part of ethics, 21.

Plato, 18, 33, 144, 148, 152.

Plausibility of utilitarianism, 161-165.

Positive Philosophy, 82.

Principles, higher and lower, Dr. Martineau's rules, 174-175.

Presuppositions to responsibility, 102-103, 105-108, 172.

Psychology, relation to ethics, 23;

in study of conscience, 59;

shows the place of conscience, 59-62.

Quatrefages, 32.

Regeneration, to realize the ethical life, 215-217, 225-226.

Relativity of knowledge, 81, 120-125.

Religion, witness to the ethical distinctions, 31-33;

becomes moral obligation, 169-170, 222-223.

Right, rated in value, 160.

Robinson Crusoe, 170.

Roman teaching, 148.

Rome, 43.

Seneca, 33, 148.

Sensibility, the, as related to the conscience, 72-76;

to moral agency, 115.

Shaftesbury, 154.

Shintoism, 32.

Skepticism, intellectual, 123.

Smith, Adam, 151.

Smyth, Dr. Newman, quoted, 200, 203.

Society, ethical constituted, 29, 116.

Socrates, 17, 143, 144, 153.

Solidarity of humanity, 164.

Sophocles, 33.

Spencer, Herbert, 35, 43, 122, 157.

Spinozism, 112.

Stoic ethics, 146-148.

Supremacy of conscience, 86-99.

Sympathetic Theory, 151.

Tâoism, 32.

Theology, relation to ethics, 24, 25.

Theoretical and practical ethics distinguished, 21-23.

Universalism of moral law, 127-130, 213-215.

Utilitarianism, 35, 152-164;

error of, 155-160;

measure of truth involved in, 161-165;

evolutionist, 155-156, 159;

Lecky on, 157 (note).

Value of the morally good, 160.

Volitions, objects of moral judgment, 193-196.

Wayland, Dr. Francis, 166.

Whewell, 95.

Will, free, 106-112;

point of personal responsibility, 194-195.

Will of God, not itself the absolute ground of right, 179-181.

Wollaston, 166.

Wolseley, Lord, 43.

Zoroastrianism, 32, 142.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chap. I.

[2] The term Deontology, from τὸ δέον [Greek: to deon], what is due

or binding, and λόγος [Greek: logos], discourse, has been used by

some modern writers as a fit designation of moral science. Though it

has never come into general use, it is etymologically well adapted to

express the element of obligation involved in the moral sense. See

Krauth-Flemming Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences, p. 132.

[3] De Fato, Cap. I, 1.

[4] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics, Vol. I, pp. 69-122.

[5] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, p. 95. Int. to Aristotle's Ethics, p.

vi (Bohn's Ed.).

[6] Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, Chap. I.

[7] Philosophy of Theism, Harper & Brothers, N. Y., p. 220.

[8] See The Oldest Book in the World, Bibliotheca Sacra, October, 1882

(Vol. XLV). Also C. Loring Brace's The Unknown God (A. C. Armstrong &

Son, New York, 1890), pp. 1-40.

[9] Prof. Borden P. Bowne. Philosophy of Theism, p. 216.

[10] History of Civilization, p. 125 (D. Appleton & Co., N. Y.).

[11] Study of Sociology, p. 363.

[12] Fortnightly Review, December, 1888.

[13] See, for instance, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Chap. V.

[14] See Chap. IV, p. 83.

[15] So Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Brown.

[16] Jeremy Bentham, Jas. Mill, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer.

[17] Borden P. Bowne, Int. to Psychological Theory (Harper &

Brothers, N. Y., 1887), p. 206. Prof. Bowne thinks, indeed, that this

distinction, traced to its roots, depends on "a feeling of approval or

disapproval in connection with the aims and principles of conduct,"

and that the ideal of life and the law of conduct spring out of "this

basal feeling." He asserts that "we can only represent the motives and

actions to ourselves, and wait for the immediate feeling of approval or

disapproval to manifest itself." He maintains that nothing is gained

by regarding the distinction as an intuition of the reason instead of

a feeling, because, he says, "its universality depends on its content,

and not upon its psychological classification." But we may well ask

if it really does make no difference whether this distinction, the

"ethical ideal," comes as a perception of reality, the action of a

knowing power, or as a "feeling" which perceives nothing and to account

for which there is no perceived ethical reality, no discernment of the

elemental ideas of right and wrong, upon which approval or disapproval

can arise and rest. We are entitled to ask: How can there be a feeling

of ethical approval when there is no insight of the distinction between

moral good and evil? The "feeling" that arises from no perception of

anything to approve, or that approves without any perceived principle

or law of approval, is blind. It has no standard or reason for an

ethical approval. Moreover, Prof. Bowne admits: "As long as they [the

aims and principles of conduct] are unrecognized there is no moral

life. As long as they are unclearly perceived, there are only the germs

of a moral life. When they are brought out into clear recognition, the

self-conscious moral life begins."

[18] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics (Nelson & Phillips, N. Y.), Vol. II,

pp. 139, 140.

[19] Borden P. Bowne's Int. to Psychological Theory (Harper & Bros.,

N.Y., 1887), p. 184.

[20] Theism, p. 13. Quoted from William Knight's Essays in Philosophy

(Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1890), p. 276.

[21] J. Stuart Mill.

[22] "The Crisis in Morals," by Jas. Thomas Bixby, Ph. D. (Boston,

Roberts Brothers, 1891).

[23] Prof. Huxley, in one of his latest utterances, puts this point

strongly: "The practice of what is ethically best--what we call

goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all

respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic

struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion, it demands

self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all

competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect,

but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to

the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible

to survive." Lecture at Oxford on "Ethics and Evolution."

[24] See Dr. Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, II, pp. 5, 99-110.

[25] W. Whewell, Elements of Morality, Sect. 275.

[26] The Doctrine of Morality, by Dr. R. B. Fairbairn (Whitaker, N. Y.,

1887), pp. 109-113.

[27] This feature is recognized in what is usually termed "formal

freedom," _i. e._ that psychical capacity of rational choice which

is essentially formative of "personality." To lose this would be the

loss of personality. Whether the power of free choice between good

and evil is impaired in man's corrupt state, being put in bondage or

subserviency to a depraved love of sin, is quite a different question.

[28] "Liberum arbitrium habetur, quando positis ad agendum requisitis,

potest quis agere vel non agere." Quoted from W. S. Lilly's Right and

Wrong, p. 104, 2d Ed., London, Chapman and Hall.

[29] Part I, Chap. VI.

[30] Materialistic evolution, which holds matter as being the energy

and cause of all things, leaves no place for free-will, because in

truth it leaves no place for mind. For "mind" or "soul" as a real

entity or being which thinks, feels and wills, it substitutes mere

"mentality" as an effect of atomic or molecular changes in the brain.

"Mind," as a self-conscious spirit that itself self-knowingly acts,

is repudiated. Nothing is left but a series of sensations, thoughts

and wishes that are as truly physically-produced effects as are the

varied perfumes of flowers, the fall of rain or the waves of the sea.

No selfhood remains in man but the physical organism which, in material

causation, gives out the various forms of products or manifestations

denominated "mental." But this materialistic theory is not science. It

not only stands contradicted by the common judgment of mankind in all

ages, but breaks down utterly in the presence of scientific psychology.

For this finds among its unquestionable and irreducible facts a

real self-conscious subject or self back of the series of thoughts,

emotions and volitions, holding all these psychical experiences in its

unitary consciousness, and, with its memories of the past, carrying

its personal identity through present activity on into the future.

The series of mental experiences, in the theory, are independent of

each other and dependent only on the brain changes which directly

produce them, and thus, by necessity, ignorant of each other. Personal

identity, therefore, is full disproof of the theory. For personal

identity rests in a single abiding consciousness, in which all separate

mental acts are known as its own acts, the materials for memory and

comparison. The truth is, that all moral distinctions arise out of the

conviction that each individual, in the center of his personality, is a

soul, itself determining its rational choices and responsible for the

conduct of life.

[31] The contradiction thus involved is well put by Prof. E. D. Roe,

of Oberlin, O., in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1894: "This law (autonomy)

pre-supposes the freedom of the will, for without freedom 'oughtness,'

'responsibility' and 'repentance' would possess no significance. Every

one, as the necessarians admit, acts under the idea of freedom. Their

hypothesis to explain this is, that the subject acts under illusion

(necessary illusion, of course). But here an hypothesis is necessary to

explain the hypothesis. Why, if necessity is the truth, is the subject

necessitated to believe falsity? A very strange truth it is which

necessitates itself to be disbelieved." Pp. 656, 657.

[32] See Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, by J. H. W.

Stuckenberg, D. D. (Armstrong & Sons, New York, 1888), pp. 321, 322.

[33] Metaphysics, Lect. VIII.

[34] See Dr. McCosh's Defense of Fundamental Truth, Chap. X, 3.

[35] First Principles, Chap. IV, § 22.

[36] Quoted from Dr. McCosh. Fundamental Truths, Chap. X, 3.

[37] This is the old apothem: The _ratio cognoscendi_ is grounded in

the _ratio essendi_.

[38] See A. Alexander's Moral Science, Chap. VII.

[39] Brace's The Unknown God (A. C. Armstrong & Son, N. Y.), pp. 1-40;

The Oldest Book in the World, in Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1888.

[40] Quoted by Prof. Jas. Legge, in The Religions of China, from

Confucius's Doctrine of the Mean (Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York), p.

139.

[41] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, pp. 47-52.

[42] Wuttke's Christian Ethics, I, p. 59; Brace's Unknown God, pp.

182-197; S. D. F. Salmond's The Christian Doctrine of Immortality (F. &

T. Clark, 1895), Chap. VI.

[43] εὐδαιμονία [Greek: eudaimonia].

[44] Republic X, 613a; Theaet., 176.

[45] See Wuttke's Christian Ethics, Vol. I, Sec. 14, and Martineau's

Types of Ethical Theory, Book I, Branch I.

[46] See Luthardt's Christian Ethics (T. & T. Clark), Vol. I, p. 9.

[47] ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν [Greek: homologoumenôs tê physei zên],

Diogenes, L. VII, 87.

[48] The quotation, Acts 17:28, is probably from the Phænomena of the

Stoic poet Aratus.

[49] See Dr. Dorner's System of Christian Doc., II, p. 14.

[50] See Horace, Book III, Ode III. Sophocles' Œdipus Tyrannus, lines

863-871. Peter Bayne's Testimony of Christ to Christianity, p. 44.

[51] Prof. Borden P. Bowne designates this teaching as "the goods

ethics." Principles of Ethics (Harper & Bros.), Ch. I.

[52] Moral and Political Philosophy, Chap. VI.

[53] See pp. 133-137.

[54] Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, § 45.

[55] What is Reality? by Francis Howe Johnson (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,

Boston), pp. 475-498.

[56] Lecky, in History of European Morals, says: "In all nations and

in all ages, the ideas of interest and utility on the one hand and of

virtue on the other, have been regarded by the multitude as perfectly

distinct, and all languages recognize the distinction. The terms

honor, justice, rectitude, or virtue, and their equivalents in every

language, present to the mind ideas essentially and broadly differing

from the terms prudence, sagacity, or interest. The two lines of

conduct may coincide, but they are never confused, and we have not the

slightest difficulty in imagining them antagonistic. When we say a

man is governed by a high sense of honor, or by strong moral feeling,

we do not mean that he is prudently pursuing either his own interests

or the interests of society." ... "There is no fact more conspicuous

in human nature than the broad distinction, both in kind and degree,

drawn between the moral and the other parts of our nature. But this on

utilitarian principles is altogether unaccountable. If the excellence

of virtue consists solely in its utility or tendency to promote the

happiness of men, we should be compelled to canonize a crowd of acts

which are utterly remote from all ordinary motives of morality." Vol.

I, Chap. I.

[57] Moral Science (Boston, 1867), pp. 39-44.

[58] Christian Ethics, p. 104.

[59] Borden P. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, p. 113.

[60] B. F. Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, p. 377.

[61] Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, § 15.

[62] Principles of Ethics, pp. 39-40. For a clear exposition of this

distinction, see Dr. D. S. Gregory's Christian Ethics, Pt. I, Divis.

III, sec. 1.

[63] Martensen's Christian Ethics (General), § 7.

[64] Newman Smyth's Christian Ethics (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892),

p. 3.

[65] Newman Smyth's Christian Ethics, p. 60.

[66] John 1:4; 8: 12; 9: 5.

[67] "Theism," p. 305.

[68] James Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, Vol. I, quoted by Prof.

Drummond in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World" (J. Pott & Co., New

York), p. 168.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant

preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced

quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 9: "62-76" was misprinted as "62-80"; corrected here.

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