Common Sense Applied to Religion; Or, The Bible and the People

by Catharine Esther Beecher

As examples of moral habits may be mentioned those which are formed by the oft-repeated exercise of self-government, justice, veracity, obedience, and industry. The will, as has been shown, gains a facility in controlling specific volitions and in yielding obedience to the laws of right action by constant use, as much as all the other mental powers.

The happiness of man in the present state of existence depends not so much upon the circumstances in which he is placed, or the capacities with which he is endowed, as upon the formation of his habits. A man might have the organ of sight, and be surrounded with all the beauties of nature, and yet, if he did not form the habit of judging of the form, distance, and size of bodies, most of the pleasure and use from this sense would be wanting. The world and all its beauties would be a mere confused mass of colors.

If the habits of walking and of speech were not acquired, these faculties and the circumstances for employing them would not furnish the enjoyment they were designed to secure.

It is the formation of intellectual habits by mental discipline and study, also, which opens vast resources for enjoyment that otherwise would be forever closed. And it is by practicing obedience to parents that moral habits of subordination are formed, which are indispensable to our happiness as citizens, and as subjects of the divine government. There is no enjoyment which can be pointed out which is not, to a greater or less extent, dependent upon this principle.

The influence of habit in regard to the law of sacrifice is especially interesting. The experience of multitudes of our race shows that such tastes and habits may be formed in obeying this law, that what was once difficult and painful becomes easy and pleasant.

But this ability to secure enjoyment through habits of self-control and self-denial, induced by long practice, so far as experience shows, could never be secured by any other method.

That the highest kinds of happiness are to be purchased by more or less voluntary sacrifice and suffering to procure good for others seems to be a part of that nature of things which we at least may suppose has existed from eternity. We can conceive of the eternal First Cause only as we imagine a mind on the same pattern as our own in constitutional capacities, but indefinitely enlarged in extent and action. Knowledge, wisdom, power, justice, benevolence, and rectitude must be the same in the Creator as in ourselves, at least so far as we can conceive; and, as the practice of self-sacrifice and suffering for the good of others is our highest conception of virtue, it is impossible to regard the Eternal Mind as all-perfect without involving this idea.

The formation of the habits depends chiefly upon the leading desire or governing purpose, because whatever the mind desires the most it will act the most to secure, and thus by repeated acts will form its habits. The character of every individual, therefore, as before indicated, depends upon the mode of seeking happiness selected by the will. Thus the ambitious man has selected the attainment of power and admiration as his leading purpose, and whatever modes of enjoyment interfere with this are sacrificed. The sensual man seeks his happiness from the various gratifications of sense, and sacrifices other modes of enjoyment that interfere with this. The man devoted to intellectual pursuits, and to seeking reputation and influence through this medium, sacrifices other modes of enjoyment to secure this gratification. The man who has devoted his affections and the service of his life to God and the good of his fellow-men sacrifices all other enjoyments to secure that which results from the fulfillment of such obligations. Thus a person is an ambitious man, a sensual man, a man of literary ambition, or a man of piety and benevolence, according to the governing purpose or leading desire of the mind.

There is one fact in regard to the choice of the leading object of desire, or the governing purpose of life, which is very important. Certain modes of enjoyment, in consequence of repetition, increase the desire, but lessen the capacity of happiness from this source; while, in regard to others, gratification increases the desire, and at the same time increases the capacity for enjoyment.

The enjoyments through the senses are of the first kind. It will be found, as a matter of universal experience, that where this has been chosen as the main purpose of life, though the desire for such pleasures is continually increased, yet, owing to the physical effects of excessive indulgence, the capacity for enjoyment is decreased. Thus the man who so degrades his nature as to make the pleasures of eating and drinking the great pursuit of life, while his desires never abate, finds his zest for such enjoyments continually decreasing, and a perpetual need for new devices to stimulate appetite and awaken the dormant capacities. The pleasures of sense always pall from repetition—grow "stale, flat, and unprofitable," though the deluded being who has slavishly yielded to such appetites feels himself bound by chains of habit, which, even when enjoyment ceases, seldom are broken.