This then is the distinction of Moral Philosophy—not that I begin with one or more assumptions: for this is common to all science; but—that I assume a something, the proof of which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any man assert, that he can not find it, I am bound to disbelieve him. I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the very foundations of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an essential of the Humanity common to him and me: or I have not found it at all, except as an hypochondriast finds glass legs. If, on the other hand, he will not find it, he excommunicates himself. He forfeits his personal rights, and becomes a Thing: that is, one who may rightfully be employed, or used as[66] means to an end, against his will, and without regard to his interest.
All the significant objections of the Materialist and Necessitarian are contained in the term, Morality, all the objections of the infidel in the term, Religion. The very terms, I say, imply a something granted, which the Objection supposes not granted. The term presumes what the objection denies, and in denying presumes the contrary. For it is most important to observe, that the reasoners on both sides commence by taking something for granted, our assent to which they ask or demand: that is, both set off with an Assumption in the form of a Postulate. But the Epicurean assumes what according to himself he neither is nor can be under any obligation to assume, and demands what he can have no right to demand: for he denies the reality of all moral Obligation, the existence of any Right. If he use the words, Right and Obligation, he does it deceptively, and means only Power and Compulsion. To overthrow the Faith in aught higher or other than Nature and physical Necessity, is the very purpose of his argument. He desires you only to take for granted, that all reality is included in Nature, and he may then safely defy you to ward off his conclusion—that nothing is excluded!
But as he cannot morally demand, neither can he rationally expect, your assent to this premiss: for he cannot be ignorant, that the best and greatest of men have devoted their lives to the enforcement of the contrary, that the vast majority of the human race in all ages and in all nations have believed in the contrary; and there is not a language on earth, in which he could argue, for ten minutes, in support of his scheme, without sliding into words and phrases, that imply the contrary. It has been said, that the Arabic has a thousand names for a lion; but this would be a trifle compared with the number of superfluous words and useless synonyms that would be found in an Index Expurgatorius of any European dictionary constructed on the principles of a consistent and strictly consequential Materialism.
The Christian likewise grounds his philosophy on assertions; but with the best of all reasons for making them—namely, that he ought so to do. He asserts what he can neither prove, nor account for, nor himself comprehend; but with the strongest inducements, that of understanding thereby whatever else it most concerns him to understand aright. And yet his assertions have nothing in them of theory or hypothesis; but are in immediate reference to three ultimate facts; namely, the Reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will, as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of Evil—of Evil essentially such, not by accident of outward circumstances, not derived from its physical consequences, nor from any cause, out of itself. The first is a Fact of Consciousness; the second a Fact of Reason necessarily concluded from the first; and the third a Fact of History interpreted by both.
Omnia exeunt in mysterium, says a schoolman; that is, There is nothing, the absolute ground of which is not a Mystery. The contrary were indeed a contradiction in terms: for how can that, which is to explain all things, be susceptible of an explanation? It would be to suppose the same thing first and second at the same time.
If I rested here, I should merely have placed my Creed in direct opposition to that of the Necessitarians, who assume (for observe both Parties begin in an Assumption, and cannot do otherwise) that motives act on the Will, as bodies act on bodies; and that whether mind and matter are essentially the same, or essentially different, they are both alike under one and the same law of compulsory Causation. But this is far from exhausting my intention. I mean at the same time to oppose the disciples of Shaftesbury and those who, substituting one Faith for another, have been well called the pious Deists of the last century, in order to distinguish them from the Infidels of the present age, who persuade themselves, (for the thing itself is not possible) that they reject all Faith. I declare my dissent from these too, because they imposed upon themselves an idea for a fact: a most sublime idea indeed, and so necessary to human nature, that without it no virtue is conceivable: but still an idea. In contradiction to their splendid but delusory tenets, I profess a deep conviction that man was and is a fallen creature, not by accidents of bodily constitution, or any other cause, which human wisdom in a course of ages might be supposed capable of removing; but as diseased in his Will, in that Will which is the true and only strict synonime of the word, I, or the intelligent Self. Thus at each of these two opposite roads (the philosophy of Hobbes and that of Shaftesbury), I have placed a directing post, informing my fellow-travellers, that on neither of these roads can they see the Truths to which I would direct their attention.
But the place of starting was at the meeting of four roads, and one only was the right road. I proceed, therefore, to preclude the opinion of those likewise, who indeed agree with me as to the moral Responsibility of man in opposition to Hobbes and the Anti-Moralists, and that he is a fallen creature, essentially diseased, in opposition to Shaftesbury and the misinterpreters of Plato; but who differ from me in exaggerating the diseased weakness of the Will into an absolute privation of all Freedom, thereby making moral responsibility, not a mystery above comprehension, but a direct contradiction, of which we do distinctly comprehend the absurdity. Among the consequences of this doctrine, is that direful one of swallowing up all the attributes of the Supreme Being in the one Attribute of infinite Power, and thence deducing that things are good and wise because they were created, and not created through Wisdom and Goodness. Thence too the awful Attribute of Justice is explained away into a mere right of absolute Property; the sacred distinction between things and persons is erased; and the selection of persons for virtue and vice in this life, and for eternal happiness or misery in the next, is represented as the result of a mere Will, acting in the blindness and solitude of its own Infinity. The title of a work written by the great and pious Boyle is "Of the Awe, which the human Mind owes to the Supreme Reason." This, in the language of these gloomy doctors, must be translated into—"The horror, which a Being capable of eternal Pleasure or Pain is compelled to feel at the idea of an Infinite Power, about to inflict the latter on an immense majority of human Souls, without any power on their part either to prevent it or the actions which are (not indeed its causes but) its assigned signals, and preceding links of the same iron chain!"
Against these tenets I maintain, that a Will conceived separately from Intelligence is a Non-entity and a mere phantasm of abstraction; and that a Will, the state of which does in no sense originate in its own act, is an absolute contradiction. It might be an Instinct, an Impulse, a plastic Power, and, if accompanied with consciousness, a Desire; but a Will it could not be. And this every human being knows with equal clearness, though different minds may reflect on it with different degrees of distinctness; for who would not smile at the notion of a rose willing to put forth its buds and expand them into flowers? That such a phrase would be deemed a poetic licence proves the difference in the things: for all metaphors are grounded on an apparent likeness of things essentially different. I utterly disclaim the notion, that any human Intelligence, with whatever power it might manifest itself, is alone adequate to the office of restoring health to the Will: but at the same time I deem it impious and absurd to hold, that the Creator would have given us the faculty of Reason, or that the Redeemer would in so many varied forms of argument and persuasion have appealed to it, if it had been either totally useless or wholly impotent. Lastly, I find all these several Truths reconciled and united in the belief, that the imperfect human understanding can be effectually exerted only in subordination to, and in a dependent alliance with, the means and aidances supplied by the All-perfect and Supreme Reason; but that under these conditions it is not only an admissible, but a necessary, instrument of bettering both ourselves and others.
We may now proceed to our reflections on the Spirit of Religion. The first three or four Aphorisms I have selected from the Theological Works of Dr. Henry More, a contemporary of Archbishop Leighton, and like him, holden in suspicion by the Calvinists of that time as a Latitudinarian and Platonizing Divine, and who probably, like him, would have been arraigned as a Calvinist by the Latitudinarians (I cannot say, Platonists) of this day, had the suspicion been equally groundless. One or two I have ventured to add from my own Reflections. The purpose, however, is the same in all—that of declaring, in the first place, what Spiritual Religion is not, what is not a Religious Spirit, and what are not to be deemed influences of the Spirit. If after these declaimers I shall without proof be charged by any with renewing or favouring the errors of the Familists, Vanists, Seekers, Behmenists, or by whatever other names Church History records the poor bewildered Enthusiasts, who in the swarming time of our Republic turned the facts of the Gospel into allegories, and superseded the written ordinances of Christ by a pretended Teaching and sensible Presence of the Spirit, I appeal against them to their own consciences, as wilful slanderers. But if with proof, I have in these Aphorisms signed and sealed my own condemnation.