Moral Duties Divine Obligations.
(3) Christian teaching has elevated the ethical view in closely uniting all moral obligation with duty to God. Natural ethics, when its implications are rationally followed up, is, indeed, theistic, and finds the seat of moral law in God as the absolute ground of the whole moral constitution. But from this movement, rising from the law of right in the conscience and in the moral constitution of the world, such ethics has yet this limitation, that duty is thought of from the human side, and not from the standpoint of God, who in his personal nature and will is both the source and goal of moral law. In this mode of forming the theory God is apt to be left remote, virtue is abstractly conceived and remains a reality too much by itself and separated from any enforcing or helping authority. It becomes too abstract and simply humanistic. But our view of moral good must be lifted into closer and more living connection with God. And so, Christianity, to transfuse the ethical sense with religious light and motives, teaches us to look upon right and duty from the standpoint of God. This is in accordance with the very design of Christianity as a redemptive and saving religion, seeking to bring man into true and practical fellowship with God. The moral discernment is to be filled and animated by the religious spirit, so that the moral training may be carried on and completed together with the development and consummation of the Christian life. Thus the form of the appeal is: "Be ye holy, for I am holy." "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." In a high and peculiar emphasis all duty is required to be done as unto God. "Forasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done it unto me." "We should so fear and love God," as not to offend against any part of the law or fail in doing good. Through the Christian revelation alone the ethical conception and relation of God is truly attained, and with it a right conception of man and the highest spirit of duty.
In thus teaching that all duties should be fulfilled as something due to God, and under inspiration of love to Him, Christian ethics is not to be understood to mean that rational ethical theory is mistaken when it claims that men are to "do right because it is right." But it means to remind us where alone the absolute right is found—only in God. And it means that both the religious and the ethical life is to upraise and anchor us to Him, and to eternal righteousness as it is in Him. All duty is owed finally to God, because He is the one absolute righteous Being to whom the whole universe owes its very existence and all its blessings. Thus Christian ethics sets forth fully what rational thought has often caught a glimpse of and hinted at, but wanted vision to see clearly, viz.: that the goal of the ethical aim is to be "like God." Its aim, as is that of religion itself, is to bring our moral life into living fellowship with Him and His blessedness. This marked feature of Christian teaching presents the ethical view in its highest elevation, purification and power.
Moral Guilt.
(4) In harmony with this close connection of the moral with the religious life, a further special feature of Christian ethics is a peculiar emphasis upon the guilt of offence against the moral law. In pagan ethics, often with no clear perception of the existence of God, always without just conception of his character, though the moral distinction was recognized and wrong was regarded as condemnable, yet because the wrong was viewed as traversing only an abstract principle or an accredited usage or order of best happiness, it evoked no strong sense of guilt. Right was always little else than a conforming of one's self to "nature," or "reason," or "civil authority," or conditions of "well-being" or "enjoyment," or at best to an ideal conception of virtue. In the ethical view which materialistic philosophies present, though the phenomenon of conscience is acknowledged and obedience to its direction admitted to be necessary for proper right order, yet the condemnatory judgment on immorality is rather a judgment of it as unwise, imprudent, and injurious than as guilty and worthy of punishment. It is at most a non-conformity to an impersonal, mechanically determined, ongoing nature. The whole utilitarian conception of morality, which makes it consist essentially in following the teachings of experience as to what is most advantageous and useful, may hold disregard of it as a great "evil," economically viewed, but almost annuls, if it does not completely remove, the idea of guilt, by substituting that of loss. Even in simply rational theistic ethics, despite theistic pre-suppositions and conclusions, the view may still deal too much with abstractions and rest too much on abstract ideas or impersonal things. Right and wrong are, indeed, developed by natural relations, to which men are bound to conform, but only because these relations, by being divinely established, represent God, who in the perfections of his nature and will, is at once the free Creator and righteous personal Ruler of the universe. Moral law not only applies alone to free personality, but has its source and authority in the Absolute Personality whose holy and beneficent will has constituted the moral relations and requirements of life. Morality pertains, not to the relations of mere things to things, or of persons to simply impersonal nature, but of persons to persons. Inter-human relations create and exhibit obligations because God's plan and will speak in them, but the full solemnity of moral obligation appears only when all inter-human obligations are seen carried up and united in the supreme and all-embracing obligation to God, to whom all duty is due. When these inter-human duties are refused, they are refused to God who requires them and has expressed that requirement to reason through the relations themselves and through his word. Not only the religious duties, as faith and love and gratitude and prayer, but all human duties are owed to Him. Here all religious duties become moral obligations; and all moral obligations become religious duties. And the guilt of wrong-doing is heightened by the fact that it is a sin against the just, holy, supreme authority and will of God, the absolute personal ground of the right order and blessedness of the universe. In Him the moral authority is identified with the rights of the Creator to whom every good in the universe is owed. This emphasis upon the transcendent authority and sanctity of moral law and consequent guilt of its violation is a special feature in the Christian ethical view and necessary for the true force and efficiency of the moral sense.
Any separation of morality from the position of something due to God personally, obscures and weakens the ethical view. This has been the bane not only of pagan, materialistic, atheistic, or grossly utilitarian theories, but also of many other forms of representation. Whenever the sense of duty is resolved into an instinct, or blind feeling, or sympathy, or a product of custom, its true authority is kept out of sight. The guilt of neglect of it disappears. Though fervently regarded by many great thinkers as a sublime statement of the moral principle, even the Kantian "categorical imperative," an immediate behest of the reason, saying: "Do this, or do that," giving no account of itself or ground for its authority, but speaking autocratically in its own right, and as sufficient and final in its own imperative, under the abstract rule: "Act as if the maxims of thy action were to become by thy will the law of the universe," holds the whole moral authority too abstractly and remote from God for complete theory or effective power. He is not brought clearly into view or made livingly near, but left in the background—a Being whose existence, along with freedom and immortality, is only inferred and to be believed because this ideal "law" requires Him for its maintenance. Sublime as the "categorical imperative" may often have seemed, this shaping of the theory of obligation is not suited to fill and vivify the moral consciousness of men as does a sense of the sublimer reality of the holy will and supreme authority of God, as present in and speaking through that moral consciousness. But the Christian view brings us face to face with this righteous will and authority in every moral obligation, and teaches us to see in all the established personal relations of life a divine call to right and duty.
Moral Law Universal.
(5) The Christian view makes uniquely clear the universalism of the moral law. In natural theories the reach and identity of the law has failed rightly to appear. The theory has formed only an ethics for a race, a nation, a condition or caste. It has been particularistic, limited by race lines, tribal or national boundaries, class distinctions, or ancestral traditions. Codes of duty have been shaped to local and exclusive conditions. So we have a national ethics created by civil law, or a class ethics, as of free citizens contra-distinguished from slaves, or of Brahmans as different from low caste people. Or we have an ethics of individuals, in which the code of duty of each is determined by his own personal "instincts," "feelings," swing of "sympathy," preference in "pleasure," development of "reason," calculations of "utility," ancestral "inheritance," or a mysterious "categorical imperative." Moral codes have been immensely and confusingly diversified. A self-identical and common standard does not appear, nor the clear, sure foundation of any. The moral law is not exhibited in its universality and permanence. Its grandeur is unseen by reason of the kaleidoscopic variations presented by the moving fragmentary theories. Its authority is brought into doubt. The great want has been a view of morality for man as man, authoritative everywhere and always, co-extensive with humanity.
The defect of the theories has been twofold. 1. They have not brought the whole race of man together in the essential sameness of a universal humanity, each individual being endowed with the high attributes of a personality, made in the image of God, and all bound together in one all-inclusive brotherhood. 2. They have failed clearly to unite this total humanity, in all its personalities, with God, whose nature and will is the only and absolute source of the moral law which sweeps round and through all the world. The Christian Scriptures and the Christian consciousness supply the needed completion of view by throwing both these truths into clear light. Christianity invests human personality with a worth, sacredness, and responsibility never elsewhere recognized. It is at the point of personality that each individual is to be united in fellowship with the personal God, who, as righteousness and love, sits upon the throne. Christianity seeks to make so real and living the brotherhood of man, that the throb of love and sympathy may be felt across all national lines and race distinctions around the earth. And while it thus strengthens the vitality and sacred force of the relations that thus bind men together, it teaches that the moral duties to men which these relations require, are to be done as unto God. Monotheism brings mono-nomism. The moral law, which is absolute, self-identical, eternal and immutable in the holy nature and will of God, becomes universal and irrepealable not only for the earth but for all the moral universe.
Condition of Fulfillment.