It will be matter of consideration in a future Lecture how our knowledge of the Eternal Law of the holy, the just, the good, and the right, is thus purified in the individual and in the race. At present it will be enough to have indicated the general principle of what may be called the evolution of the knowledge of morals.
But I now go on from the Moral Law as a duty to the Moral Law as a faith. For the inner voice is not content with commanding a course of conduct and requiring obedience of that kind. This is its first utterance, and the man who hears and obeys unquestionably has within him the true seed of all religion. But though the first utterance it is not the last. For the same voice goes on to require us to believe that this Moral Law which claims obedience from us, equally claims obedience from all else that exists. It is absolutely supreme or it is nothing.
Its title to our obedience is its supremacy, and it has no other title. If it depended on promises of reward or threats of punishment addressed to us, it might be considered as a law for us, but could be no law for others. It would in that case, indeed, be a mere physical law. Things are so arranged for you, and as far as you know for you only, that terrible pain will come to you if you disobey, and wonderful pleasure if you obey. Such a law as that might proceed from a tyrant possessed of absolute power over us and the things that concern us, and might be either good or bad as should happen. But such a law would not be able to claim our reverence. Nay, rather, as is the case with all merely physical laws, it might be our duty to disobey it. In claiming our reverence as well as our obedience, in making its sanction consist in nothing but the fact of its own inherent majesty, the Moral Law calls on us to believe in its supremacy. It claims that it is the last and highest of all laws. The world before us is governed by uniformities as far as we can judge, but above and behind all these uniformities is the supreme uniformity, the eternal law of right and wrong, and all other laws, of whatever kind, must ultimately be harmonised by it alone. The Moral Law would be itself unjust if it bade us disregard all physical laws, and yet was itself subordinate to those physical laws. It has a right to require us to disregard everything but itself, if it be itself supreme; if not, its claim would be unjust. We see here in things around us no demonstrative proof that it is supreme, except what may be summed up in saying that there is a power that makes for righteousness. Enlightened by the Moral Law we can see strongly marked traces of its working in all things. The beauty, the order, the general tendency of all creation accords with the supremacy of the Moral Law over it all. But that is by no means all. We see, and we know that we see, but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. And the result of this partial vision is that, while there is much in things around us which asserts, there is also much which seems to deny altogether any supremacy whatever in the Moral Law. The universe, as we see it, is not holy, nor just, nor good, nor right. The music of creation is full of discords as yet altogether unresolved. And if we look to phenomena alone, there is no solution of the great riddle. But in spite of all imperfections and contradictions, the voice within, without vouchsafing to give us any solution of the perplexity, or any sanction but its own authoritative command, imperatively requires us to believe that holiness is supreme over unholiness, and justice over injustice, and goodness over evil, and righteousness over unrighteousness. To obey this command and to believe this truth is Faith.
This is the Faith which is perpetually presenting to the believer's mind the vision of a world in which all the inequalities of this present world shall be redressed, in which truth, justice, and love shall visibly reign, in which temptations shall cease and sin shall cease also; in which the upward strivings of noble souls shall find their end, and holiness shall supersede penitence, and hearts shall be pure of all defilement. This is the Faith which holds to the sure conviction that all things shall one day come to judgment; and whether by sudden catastrophe or by sure development, the physical system shall surrender to the moral. This is the Faith which supplies perpetual strength to the hope of immortality; for though it cannot be said that the immortality of the individual soul is of necessity involved in a belief in the supremacy of the Moral Law, yet there is a sense, never without witness in the soul, that all would not be according to justice if a being to whom the Moral Law has been revealed from within is nevertheless in no degree to share in the final revelation of the superiority of that Moral Law over what is without. We cannot say that it is a necessary part of the supremacy of the Moral Law that every one of those who know it should partake of its immortal nature. We cannot even say that it is a necessary part of the ultimate redressing of all injustice and resolution of all the discords of life that the hope of it should prove true in the individual as it will certainly prove true in the universe. For we are unable to weigh individual merit or demerit, and cannot assert for certain that the balance of justice is not maintained even in this present life. But nevertheless the hope that it must and will be so is inextinguishable, and Faith in an Eternal Law of Morals is inextricably bound up with hope of immortality for the being that is endowed with a moral and responsible nature.
Faith in the absolute supremacy of the Moral Law is the first, but this again is not the last step upwards in Faith. We are called upon, and still by the same imperative voice within, to carry our Faith still further, and to believe something yet higher.
For the supremacy of the Moral Law must be a moral, not merely a physical supremacy. In claiming supremacy at all the Moral Law does not assert that somehow by a happy accident, as it were, all things turn out at last in accordance with what is in the highest sense moral. The supremacy of the moral over the physical involves in its very nature an intention to be supreme. It is not the supremacy of justice, if justice is done as the blind result of the working of machinery, even if that be the machinery of the universe. In our very conception of a moral supremacy is involved the conception of an intended supremacy. And the Moral Law in its government of the world reveals itself as possessing the distinctive mark of personality, that is, a purpose and a will. And thus, as we ponder it, this Eternal Law is shown to be the very Eternal Himself, the Almighty God. There is a sense in which we cannot ascribe personality to the Unknown Absolute Being; for our personality is of necessity compassed with limitations, and from these limitations we find it impossible to separate our conception of a person. And it will ever remain true that our highest conceptions of God must fall altogether short of His true nature. When we speak of Him as infinite, we are but denying that He is restrained by limits of time and space as we are. When we speak of Him as absolute, we are but denying that He is subject to conditions as we are. So when we speak of Him as a person, we cannot but acknowledge that His personality far transcends our conceptions. But it still remains the truth that these descriptions of Him are the nearest that we can get, and that for all the moral purposes of life we can argue from these as if they were the full truth. If to deny personality to Him is to assimilate Him to a blind and dead rule, we cannot but repudiate such denial altogether. If to deny personality to Him is to assert His incomprehensibility, we are ready at once to acknowledge our weakness and incapacity. But we dare not let go the truth that the holiness, the justice, the goodness, the righteousness, which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, are identical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the more we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearly do we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He does not make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law are different aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast to this is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itself rudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in Almighty God is the last and highest.
It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in this Lecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said long ago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the spiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the name of conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insist on the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within the soul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science by searching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of the universe to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done, tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritual things.
Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have invariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness, so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got out of phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating the fundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enabling us to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, or in shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlike every other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under the dominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more than one of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat the sentiment of reverence which it excites, the remorse which follows on disobedience to its commands, the sense of its supremacy, as delusions. It is always possible so to treat these things; but only at the cost of standing lower in the scale of being.
But we have one step further to take. For as the spiritual faculty is the recipient directly or indirectly of that original revelation which God has made of Himself to His rational creatures, so too this appears to be the only faculty which can take cognizance of any fresh revelation that it might please Him to make. If He commands still further duties than those commanded by the supreme Moral Law, if He bids us believe what our reason cannot deduce from the primal belief in that Law and in Himself, it is to that faculty that the command is issued. If over and above the original religion as we may call it there is a revealed religion, it is the spiritual faculty that can alone accept it. Such a revelation may be confirmed by signs or proofs in the world of phenomena. He who is absolute over all nature may compel nature to bear witness to His teaching. The spiritual may burst through the natural on occasion, and that supremacy, which underlies all nature and which is necessarily visible to intelligences that are capable of seeing things as they are in themselves, may force itself into the world of phenomena and show itself in that manner to us. But this always is and must be secondary. The spiritual faculty alone can receive and judge of spiritual truth, and if that faculty be not reached a truly religious belief is not yet attained.
External evidences of revealed religion must have a high place but cannot have the highest. A revealed religion must depend for its permanent hold on our obedience and our duty on its fastening upon our spiritual nature, and if it cannot do that no evidences can maintain it in its place.