244. In this love of good in general, these free acts are moral, when their will wills the order which God has willed, without mingling with this order foreign or contrary combinations.
245. In order that an act may be moral, it is not necessary that the one who performs it should think explicitly of God, nor that his will should love him explicitly.
246. The act is more moral, in proportion as it is accompanied with greater reflection on its morality and its conformity to the will of God.
247. Moral sentiment was given us in order that we might perceive the beauty of the order willed by God; it is, so to speak, an instinct of love of God.
248. As this sentiment is innate, indelible, and independent of reflection, even atheists experience it.
249. The idea of moral obligation or duty results from two ideas: the order willed by God, and the physical freedom to depart from this order. God granting us life, wills us to try to preserve it; but man is free, and sometimes kills himself. He that preserves his life fulfils a duty; he that destroys himself, infringes it. Thus the idea of duty contains the idea of physical freedom, which cannot be exercised, in a certain sense, without departing from the order which God has established.
250. Punishment is a sanction of the moral order; it serves to supply the necessity which is impossible in free beings. Creatures that act without knowledge, fulfil their destiny by an absolute necessity; free beings do not fulfil their destiny by an absolute necessity, but by that kind of necessity produced by the sight of a painful result.
251. Here may be seen the difference between physical evil and moral evil even in the same free being; physical evil is pain; moral evil is the departure from the order willed by God.
252. Unlawful is what is contrary to a duty.
253. Lawful is what is not opposed to any duty.