1. Obedience to God, manifested by obedience to moral law. I can obey the moral law in two ways: on the one hand, because it is a duty, whatever besides may be the reason of this duty, and next because this duty is in unison with universal order, which is the work of divine wisdom. To fulfill one’s duty is, then, to co-operate in some respect with God in the achievement of this order. It is thus that in ancient religions, agriculture was regarded a religious act, because man took therein the part of the creator.
2. Resignation to the will of Providence.—Patience is unquestionably a duty in itself. There is a lack of dignity in rebelling against evils which cannot be prevented; but this is as yet a wholly negative virtue. It becomes a religious virtue if we regard the ills of life in the light of trials, and as the condition of a higher good, and expect to voluntarily submit to them as being in the plan of Providence. It is thus the Pythagoreans forbade suicide, saying that it was leaving the post in which God had placed us.
It would, moreover, be interpreting this duty of resignation very falsely to think that it commands us to bear trouble and make no effort to escape it. This were confounding Providence with fatalism. On the contrary, God, having given us free will, not only permits us thereby, but even positively enjoins upon us, to use it in bettering our condition.
3. Love of God conjoined with the love of man.—There is no real love of God without love of neighbor; it is a false piety which thinks itself obliged to sacrifice the love of men to the love of God: thence come fanaticism, intolerance, persecution. To believe these to be religious virtues is impious. We cannot please God by acts of hatred and cruelty. Thus is the love of God nothing without the love of men.
But it can also be said that the love of men is incomplete if it does not get its sustenance from a higher source, which is the love of God. We can, in fact, love men in two ways: first, because they are men, because they are like us, because there is between them and us a natural bond of sympathy. But we can also love them because they are, like ourselves, members of the universe of which God is the sovereign ruler, members of a family of which God is the father, because, like ourselves, they reflect some of the attributes of supreme perfection, because they ought, like us, to strive after all perfection. We can then love men religiously, love them in God in some respect. Thus conversely to love men will be loving God.
170. The idea of God in morals.—We have, in a former course of lectures, seen how the moral law is related to God: this law is certainly not dependent on his will alone, but on his holiness and supreme perfection; and it is still further related to him as to a supreme sanction. We have to consider here only the practical efficacy of the idea of God—that is to say, the additional strength moral belief receives by a belief in absolute justice and holiness. It is on this condition and from this standpoint that Kant has called the existence of God the postulate[143] of the moral law. The moral law, in fact, supposes the world able to conform to this law; but how are we to believe in such a possibility if this world were the effect of a blind and indifferent necessity? “Since it is our duty,” says Kant, “to work toward the realization of the supreme good, it is not only a right, but a necessity flowing from this duty, to suppose the possibility of this supreme good, which good is only possible on the condition of God’s existence”[144]....—“Suppose, for example,” he says elsewhere, “an honest man like Spinoza, firmly convinced that there is no God and no future life. He will, without doubt, fulfill disinterestedly the duty that holy law imposes on his activity; but his efforts will be limited. If here and there he finds in nature accidental co-operation, he can never expect of this co-operation to be in perfect and constant accordance with the end he feels himself obliged to pursue. Though honest, peaceful, benevolent himself, he will always be surrounded by fraud, violence, envy; in vain do the good people he meets deserve to be happy; nature has no regard for their goodness, and exposes them, like all the rest of earth’s animals, to disease and misery, to a premature death, until one vast tomb—the gulf of blind matter from which they issued—swallows them all up again. Thus would this righteous man be obliged to give up as absolutely impossible the end which the law imposed on him; or, if he wished to remain true to the inner voice of his moral destiny, he will, from a practical point of view, be obliged to recognize the existence of a moral cause in the world, namely, God.” Thus, according to Kant, is religion, namely, the belief in the existence of God, required, not as a theoretical basis for morality, but as a practical basis. “The righteous man can say: I will that there be a God.”[145]
It may be objected that moral law can dispense with outward success; that it does not appear to be essential to the idea of that law; that the wise, as far as their own happiness is concerned, need not consider it, can ignore it. But what they are obliged to consider, and are not allowed to ignore, is the happiness of others, and what is generally understood by progress—the possible improvement of the race. If, as some pessimistic and misanthropic philosophers seem to think, men will never be anything more than monkeys or tigers given to the lowest and most ferocious instincts, do you believe that any man, be he ever so well endowed morally, ever so deeply convinced of the obligation of the law of duty, could, if he believed such a thing, be able to continue doing his duty, a duty followed by no appreciable or perceptible results? The first condition for becoming or remaining virtuous, is to believe in virtue. But to believe in virtue means to believe that virtue is a fact, that it exists in the world, that it can do it good; in other words, it is to believe that the human race was created for good; that nature is capable of being transformed according to the law of good; it is, in short, to believe that the universe obeys a principle of good, and not a principle of evil—an Oromazes, not an Ahrimanes. As to believing in an indifferent being, one that were neither good nor evil, we should not be any better off; it would leave us just as uncertain in regard to the possible success of our efforts, and just as doubtful about the worth of our moral beliefs.
In one word, and to conclude, if God were an illusion, why could not virtue be an illusion also? In order that I may believe in the dignity and excellence of my soul and that of other men, I must believe in a supreme principle of dignity and excellence. Nothing comes from nothing. If there is no being to love me and my fellow-men, why should I be held to love them? If the world is not good, if it was not created for good, if good is not its origin and end, what have I to do here in this world, and what care I for that swarm of ants of which I am a part? Let them get along as well as they can! Why should I take so much trouble to so little purpose? Take any intelligent man, a friend of civil and political liberty, and ready to suffer anything to procure these to his country, as long as he believes the thing possible, both wisdom and virtue will command him to devote himself wholly to it. But let experience prove to him that it is a chimera, that his fellow-citizens are either too great cowards or too vicious to be worthy and capable of the good he wishes to secure to them; suppose he sees all around him nothing but cupidity, servility, unbridled and abominable passions; suppose, finally, that he becomes convinced that liberty among men, or at least among the people he lives with, is an illusion, do you think he could, do you even think he should, continue wasting his faculties in an impossible enterprise? Once more, I can forget myself, and I ought; and I should leave to internal justice or divine goodness the care to watch over my destinies; but that which I cannot forget, that which cannot leave me indifferent, is the reign of justice on earth. I must be able to say: Let Thy kingdom come! How can I co-operate with the Divine Idea if there is no God, who, in creating us for the furthering of his kingdom, made it, at the same time, possible for us? And how any I to believe that out of that great void whereto atheism reduces us, there can come a reign of wills holy and just, bound to each other by the laws of respect and love? Kant, the great stoic, without borrowing from theology, has more strongly than any other, described the necessity of this reign of law; but he fully understood that this abstract and ideal order of things would remain but a pure conception, if there were not conjoined with it what he justly calls “the practical, the moral faith” in the existence of God.
171. Religious rights.—Religious duties imply religious rights: for if it is a duty to honor the Creator, it is also a right. Even those who do not admit obligations toward God, ought to respect in those who do admit them, their liberty to do so. The right of having a religion, and practicing it, is what is called liberty of conscience.
“The first right I claim,” says an eloquent writer, “is the right of adopting a free belief touching the nature of God, my duties, my future; it is a wholly interior right, which governs the relations of my will or conscience alone. It is the liberty of conscience in its essence, its first act, its indispensable basis. It is the liberty to believe, or faith. Free in the innermost of my thought, shall I be confined to a silent worship? Shall I not be allowed to express what I think? Faith is communicative, and will make itself felt by others. I cannot control its expressing itself without doing it violence, without offending God, without rendering myself guilty of ingratitude. I cannot, moreover, worship a God that is not my God. The freedom of belief, without the freedom of prayer—that is to say, without free worship—is only a delusion.