II.
The time was when men accepted the existence of a moral order with the same implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all men to-day accept the existence of a natural order. In Homer’s Themistes we have an illustration of this confidence. The very word by which the decision of a judge is described attributes it to Themis, the invisible embodiment of justice. Thus the judge is but the channel through which the decision passes from the unseen moral order into the Greek court of justice. The judge is not respected because he has authority to make the decision, but because his vocation makes him the vehicle through which the decision of a higher power is rendered. Moses said to the people of Israel, “Thou shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but these were not his words simply, but the words through which a moral order was interpreted. The solemn and awful import given to these commands did not arise from the vehicle through which they passed into the Hebrew social order, but from the fact that they inhered in the very constitution of man as a social being, and when they were uttered, they were felt to come from the God who fashioned man’s life and set him in communities and states. They had the same sort of authority in the moral realm that the declarations of Newton, concerning the power of gravity, had in the natural. Newton did not conceive in his own brain the laws of gravity, he saw them and formulated them. Nor did Moses create the Ten Commandments, he saw them and interpreted them. The laws of gravity were transcripts from the will of God concerning matter, the Ten Commandments were transcripts from the will of God concerning men. When natural bodies come together, it would be found that they always attracted each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. When men come together, it would always be found, that if they were to live together in harmony and health; if they were to advance and get above the planes of the brutes and the savages; they must abstain from lying, and stealing, and adultery, and thus be truthful, and honest, and virtuous.
The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and contact with one another. Thus living, they were lower than the beasts that perish. They could not live together without rules of some sort to regulate their lives. And laws which looked to the preservation of truthfulness, honesty, and virtue, were thought better than laws which looked to the production of lying, dishonesty, and adultery.
Because of the impetus given to the studies of material science within recent years, by the discoveries of scholars, the attention of men has been directed to the objects of the natural world and the laws which regulate them. Discoveries into the nature of heat, light, etc., has had the same effect upon the human mind that the discoveries of the gold fields in the West had upon the people of America in the early days. People abandoned fields and shops and stores and went in search for gold. The attention of the civilized world has in this generation been directed to the consideration of outward facts. There has been promise here of earthly fortune. Conviction as to the existence of a moral order with its rewards and penalties is not so deep and abiding as it once was among English speaking people. But it is well to remember that the moral laws of the universe have not in the meantime been suspended, because men have not seen proper to consider them and to act with reference to them. They are just as real and as unfailing as ever. When accepted and followed, their presence is seen in health, in political stability, in intellectual progress. When ignored and forgotten, their presence is seen in disease, in political corruption, in mental stupidity, in sham and emptiness. In one way or another they always manage to get in their work. They never sleep, they never tire, they are eternally present to bless or to curse, to lift up or to cast down. They get round to every man’s home, and sooner or later to every man’s life, bearing honor or dishonor, legitimate reward or righteous infamy. They are not to be bribed, whitewashed, or bulldozed; they come clean, unvarnished, and unveneered to posit their labels on every man’s character; and whatever is read on the label, absolutely defines the content. Irrespective of money, titles, place, or rank, they come. The president in his seat, the judge on his bench, the preacher in his pulpit, cannot escape. If the president gets labeled pigmy, pigmy he is. If the judge gets classified fraud, fraud he is. If the preacher gets down as trimmer and sham, trimmer and sham he is.