This do, and thou shalt live.
But what if he has not done it, but the very contrary?
what if the Querist should be a staunch disciple of Dr. Paley: and hold himself "morally obliged" not to hate or injure his fellow-man, not because he is compelled by conscience to see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to abhor sin as sin, even as he eschews pain as pain,—no, not even because God has forbidden it;—but ultimately because the great Legislator is able and has threatened to put him to unspeakable torture if he disobeys, and to give him all kind of pleasure if he does not
? Why, verily, in this case, I do foresee that both the Tinker and the Divine would wax warm, and rebuke the said Querist for vile hypocrisy, and a most nefarious abuse of God's good gift, intelligible language. What! do you call this '
oving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind,—and your neighbour as yourself?
Whereas in truth you love nothing, not even your own soul; but only set a superlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish lust of enjoyment, and insure you from hell-fire at a thousand times the true value of the dirty property. If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance in which you use the word in this sense? If your son did not spit in your face, because he believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you—and with all his heart, and mind, and strength, and soul?—Shame! Shame!
Now the power of loving God, of willing good as good, (not of desiring the agreeable, and of preferring a larger though distant delight to an infinitely smaller immediate qualification, which is mere selfish prudence,) Bunyan considers supernatural, and seeks its source in the free grace of the Creator through Christ the Redeemer:—this the Kantean also avers to be supersensual indeed, but not supernatural, but in the original and essence of human nature, and forming its grand and awful characteristic. Hence he calls it
die Menschheit