As regards the man who acts, Responsibility is the natural link which exists between the act and its consequences. It is a complete system of inevitable Rewards and Punishments which no man has invented, which acts with all the regularity of the great natural laws, and which may, consequently, be regarded as of Divine institution. The evident object of Responsibility is to restrain the number of hurtful actions, and increase the number of such as are useful.
This mechanism, which is at once corrective and progressive, remunerative and retributive, is so simple, so near us, so identified with our whole being, so perpetually in action, that not only can we not ignore it, but we see that, like Evil, it is one of those phenomena without which our whole life would be to us unintelligible.
The book of Genesis tells us that, the first man having been driven from the terrestrial paradise, because he had learned to distinguish between good and evil, sciens bonum et malum, God pronounced this sentence on him: In laboribus comedes ex terrâ cunctis diebus vitæ tuæ. Spinas et tribulos germinabit tibi. In sudore vultûs tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de quâ sumptus es: quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.[110]
Here, then, we have good and evil—or human nature. Here we have acts and habits producing good or bad consequences—or human nature. Here we have labour, sweat, thorns, tribulation, and death—or human nature.
Human nature, I say; for to choose, to be mistaken, to suffer, to rectify our errors—in a word, all the elements which make up the idea of Responsibility—are so inherent in our sensitive, rational, and free nature, they are so much of the essence of that nature [p475] itself, that I defy the most fertile imagination to conceive for man another mode of existence.
That man might have lived in an Eden, in paradiso voluptatis, ignorant of good and evil, we can indeed believe, but we cannot comprehend it, so profoundly has our nature been transformed.
We find it impossible to separate the idea of life from that of sensibility; that of sensibility from that of pleasure and pain; that of pleasure and pain from that of reward and punishment; that of intelligence from that of liberty and choice, and all these ideas from the idea of Responsibility; for it is the aggregate of all these ideas which gives us the idea of Being or Existence, so that when we think upon God, our reason, which tells us that He is incapable of suffering, remains confounded—so inseparable are our notions of sensibility and existence.
It is this undoubtedly which renders Faith the necessary complement of our destinies. It is the only bond which is possible between the creature and the Creator, seeing that God is, and always will be, to our reason, incomprehensible, Deus absconditus.
In order to be convinced how hard Responsibility presses us, and shuts us in on every side, we have only to attend to the most simple facts.
Fire burns us; the collision of bodies bruises us. If we were not indued with sensibility, or if our sensibility were not painfully affected by the approach of fire, and by rude contact with other bodies, we should be exposed to death every moment.