Responsibility guards itself by three sanctions:—
1st, The natural sanction; which is that of which I have just been speaking—the necessary suffering or recompense which certain acts and habits entail.
2d, The religious sanction; or the punishments and rewards of another life, which are annexed to acts and habits, according as they are vicious or virtuous.
3d, The legal sanction; or the punishments and rewards decreed beforehand by society.
Of these three sanctions, I confess that the one which appears to me fundamental is the first. In saying this I cannot fail to run counter to sentiments which I respect; but I must be permitted to declare my opinion.
Is an act vicious because a revelation from above has declared it to be so? Or has revelation declared it vicious because it produces consequences which are bad? These questions will probably always form a subject of controversy between the philosophical and the religious mind.
I believe that Christianity can range itself on the side of those who answer the last of these two questions in the affirmative. Christianity itself tells us that it has not come to oppose the natural law, but to confirm it.[112] We can scarcely admit that God, who is the supreme principle of order, should have made an arbitrary classification of human actions, that He should have denounced punishment on some, and promised reward to others, and this without any regard to the effects of these actions, that is to say, to their discordance, or concordance, in the universal harmony. [p479]
When He said, “Thou shalt not kill—thou shalt not steal,” no doubt He had in view to prohibit certain acts because they were hurtful to man and to society, which are His work.
Regard to consequences is so powerful a consideration with man that if he belonged to a religion that forbade acts which universal experience proved to be useful, or that sanctioned the observance of habits palpably hurtful, I believe that such a religion could not be maintained, but that it would at length give way before the progress of knowledge. Men could not long suppose that the deliberate design of God was to cause evil and to interdict good.
The question which I broach here has perhaps no very important bearing on Christianity, since it ordains only what is good in itself, and forbids only what is bad.