Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human nature—that is, the distinction between moral good and moral evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and demerit,—are necessarily and intimately connected with the truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its authority.
Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable from Religion.
What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to each other in the unity of the human being?
The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the moral law, the moral judgment comes. "In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice, sometimes manifests itself there with éclat, and sometimes remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre mysteries. Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task; in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in that of the individual man.
In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to events of the most contradictory character: everything in the world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering. Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more than feeble convictions—dim hopes? On the other side, in the midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt; intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate, natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the moral being.