But the right to govern implies the correlative duty of obedience. If God has the right to govern us, then we are bound to obey him and do his bidding, whatever it may be. There is nothing arbitrary in this, it is founded in the relation of creator and creature, and God himself could not make it otherwise without annihilating all creatures and ceasing to be creator. God could not create existences without giving them a law, because their very relation to him as his creatures imposes on them an inflexible and invariable law, which, if created free agents, they may, indeed, refuse to obey, but not and live. Here is the whole philosophy of authority and obedience. We must not confound the symbols employed in Genesis with the meaning they symbolize. The command given to our first parents was simply the law under which they were placed by the fact that they were creatures, that God had made them, and they belonged to him, owed him obedience, and could not disobey him without violating the very law of their existence. They cannot but die, because they depart from the truth of things, deny their real relation to God, and go against the divine order, conformity to which is in the nature of the case their only condition of life. So Rome teaches in accordance with our highest and best reason. The world, listening to the flattering words of Satan and the allurements of the flesh, denies it, and says, "Ye shall not surely die;" you may sin and live, may become free and independent, be as gods yourselves, your own master, teacher, and guide. Hence the inevitable war between Rome and the world, she striving to secure the obedience of men and nations to the law of God, and it striving to maintain their independence of the law, and to make them believe that they can live a life of their own, which in the nature of the case is not life, but death.
Other considerations, no doubt enter into the worship of God beside the simple fact that he is our Creator, but that fact is the basis of our moral obligation to obey him. This obligation is obscured when we seek for it another basis, as in the intrinsic worth, goodness, or excellence of God. No doubt, God deserves to be adored for his own sake, to be loved and obeyed for what he is in and of himself, but it is not easy to prove to men of the world that they are morally bound to love and obey goodness. These higher views of God which convert obedience into love, and would enable us to love God even if he did not command it, and to desire him for his own sake without reference to what he is to us, may in some sense be attained to, and are so by the saints, but there are few of us perfect enough for that. The law certainly is an expression of the goodness and love of the Creator, as is creation itself, but this is not precisely the reason why it is obligatory. It is a good reason why we should love the law and delight in it, but not the reason why we are bound to obey it. We are bound to obey it because it is the law of our Creator, who has the sovereign right to command us, and hence religion cannot be severed from morality. No act of religion is of any real worth that is not an act of obedience, of submission of our will to the divine will, or which is not a frank acknowledgment of the divine sovereignty and the supremacy of the moral law. There must be in it an act of self-denial, of self-immolation, or it is not a true act of obedience, and obedience is better than any external offerings we can bring to the altar.
Here is where the world again errs. It is ready to offer sacrifices to God, to load his altars with its offerings of the firstlings of flocks and herds, and the fruits of the earth, but it revolts at any act of obedience, and will not remember that the sacrifices pleasing to God are an humble and contrite heart. It would serve God from love, not duty, forgetting that there is no love where there is no obedience. The obedience is the chief element of the love: "If ye love me, keep my commandments." We show our love to the Father by doing the will of the Father. There is no way of escaping the act of submission, and walking into heaven with our heads erect, in our own pride and strength, and claiming our beatitude as our right, without ever having humbled ourselves before God. We may show that the law is good, the source of light and life; we may show its reasonableness and justness, and that there is nothing degrading or humiliating in obeying it; but, whatever we do in this respect, nothing will avail if the act of obedience be withheld. Till the world does this, submits to the law, no matter what fine speeches it may make, what noble sentiments it may indulge, what just convictions it may entertain, or what rich offerings it may bring to the altar, it is at enmity with God, and peace between it and Rome is impossible.
God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but there can be no reconciliation without submission. God cannot change, and the world must. No humiliating conditions are imposed on it, but it must acknowledge that it has been wrong, and that the law it has resisted is just and right, and, above all, obligatory. This is the hardship the world complains of. But what reason has it to complain? What is demanded of it not for its good, or that is not demanded by the very law of life itself? The world demands liberty, but what avails a false and impracticable liberty? True liberty is founded in justice, is a right, and supported by law. We have shown, time and again, that the church suppresses no real liberty, and asserts and maintains for all men all the liberty that can fall to the lot of any created being. It demands the free exercise of human reason. In what respect does the church restrain freedom of thought? Can reason operate freely without principles, without data, without light, without any support, or anything on which to rest? What is the mind without truth, or intelligence in which nothing real is grasped? We know only so far as we know truth, and our opinions and convictions are worth nothing in so far as they are false, or not in accordance with the truth that we neither make nor can unmake, which is independent of us, independent of all men, and of all created intellects. What harm, then, does the church do us when she presents us infallibly that truth which the mind needs for its support? Society needs law, and how does the church harm it by teaching the law of God, without which it cannot subsist? Men need government. What harm does the church do in declaring the supreme law of God, from which all human laws derive their force as laws, and which defines and guarantees both authority and liberty, protects the prince from the turbulence of the mob, and the people from the tyranny of the prince?
As sure as that man is God's creature and bound to obey God, there is for him no good independent of obedience to the law of God; and equally sure is it that obedience to that law secures to him all the good compatible with his condition as a created existence. The mystery of the Incarnation, in which God assumes human nature to be his own nature, gives him the promise of even participating in the happiness of God himself. This happiness or beatitude with God in eternity is the end for which man was created, and is included in the creative act of which it is the completion or fulfilment. In estimating the good which is sure to us by conformity to the divine order and obedience to the divine law, we must take into the account our whole existence from its inception to its completion in Christ in glory, and include in that good not only the joys and consolations of this life, but that eternal beatitude which God through his superabundant goodness has provided for us, and remember that all this we forfeit by obeying the law of death rather than the law of life. We can fulfil our destiny, attain to the stature of full-grown men, or complete our existence only by conforming to the divine order, by adhering to the truth, and obeying the law of life. Instead, then, of regarding the church as our enemy, as opposed to our real good, we should regard her as our true friend, and see in her a most striking proof of the loving-kindness of our God. In her he gives us precisely what we need to teach us his will, to make known to us the truth as it is in him, and to declare to us in all the vicissitudes and complexities of life the requirements of the law, and to be the medium of the gracious assistance we need to fulfil them.
No good thing will God withhold from them that love him. And he gives us all good in giving us, as he does, himself. Nor does he give us only the goods of the soul. He that will lose his life in God shall find it. "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things"—the things which the Gentiles seek after—"shall be added to you." They who lay up the most abundant treasures in heaven have the most abundant treasures on earth. The true principle of political economy, which the old French Economists and Adam Smith never knew, is self-denial, is in living for God and not for the world, as a Louvain professor has amply proved with a depth of thought, a profound philosophy, and a knowledge of the laws of production, distribution, and consumption seldom equalled. "I have been young, and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread." No people are more industrious or more bent on accumulating wealth, than our own, but so little is their self-denial and so great is their extravagance that the mass of them are, notwithstanding appearances, really poor. The realized capital of the country is not sufficient to pay its debts. We have expended the surplus earnings of the country for half a century or more, and the wealth of the nation is rapidly passing into the hands of a few money-lenders and soulless mammoth corporations, already too strong to be controlled by the government, whether State or General. If it had not been for the vast quantities of cheap unoccupied lands easy of access, we should have seen a poverty and distress in this country to be found in no other. The mercantile and industrial system inaugurated by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and which is regarded as the crowning glory of the modern world, has added nothing to the real wealth of nations. But this is a theme foreign to our present purpose, and has already carried us too far. We will only add that the true Christian has the promise of this life and of that which is to come.
Now, no one can estimate the advantage to men and nations that must have been derived and continue to be derived from the church placed in the world to assert at every point the divine sovereignty, and to proclaim constantly in a clear and ringing voice that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and his law is the law of life, of progress, and of happiness both here and hereafter, the great truth which the world is ever prone to forget or to deny. We ought, therefore, to regard her existence with the most profound gratitude. She has done this work from the first, and continues to do it with unabated strength, in spite of so many sad defections and the opposition of kings and peoples. Never has she had more numerous, more violent, more subtle, or more powerful enemies than during the pontificate of our present Holy Father, Pius the Ninth. Never have her enemies seemed nearer obtaining a final triumph over her, and they have felt that at last she is prostrate, helpless, in her agony. Yet do they reckon without their host. The magnificent spectacle at Rome on the 29th of last June of more than five hundred bishops, and thousands of priests from all parts of the world, from every tongue and nation on the earth, gathered round their chief, and joining with him in celebrating the eighteen hundredth anniversary of the glorious martyrdom of Peter, the prince of the apostles, whose succession in the government of the church has never failed, proves that their exultation is premature, that her veins are still full of life, and that she is as fresh and vigorous as when she first went forth from Jerusalem on her divine mission to win the world to her Lord. The indication by the Holy Father of his resolve at a near day to convoke a universal council, a grand assembly of the princes of the church, proves also that she is still a fact, a living power on the earth, though not of it, with whom the princes of this world must count. Before her united voice, assisted by the Holy Ghost, her enemies will be struck dumb, and to it the nations must listen with awe and conviction, and most of the errors we have spoken of will shrink back from the face of day into darkness and silence. Faith will be reinvigorated, the hearts of the faithful made glad, and civilization resume its march, so long and so painfully interrupted by heresy, infidelity, and the almost constant revolutions of states and empires. We venture to predict for the church new and brilliant victories over the world.
Heresy has well-nigh run its course. It is inherently sophistical, and is too much for infidelity and too little for religion. In no country has it ever been able to stand alone, and it acquires no strength by age. The thinking men of all civilized nations have come, or are rapidly coining, to the conclusion that the alternative is either Rome or no religion, or, as they express it, "Rome or Reason," which we showed last month is by no means the true formula. The real formula of the age is, Rome or no religion, God or Satan. The attempt to support anything worthy of the name of religion on human authority, whether of the individual or of the state, of private judgment or of the Scriptures interpreted by the private judgment of the learned, has notoriously, we might say confessedly, failed. Old-established heresies will no doubt linger yet longer, and offer their opposition to Rome; but their days are numbered, and, save as they may be placed in the forefront of the battle with the church, the active non-Catholic thought of the age makes no account of them, and respects them far less than it does Rome herself. They live only a galvanic life. We are far from regarding the battle that must be fought with the scientific no-religion or dry and cold unbelief of the age as a light affair. In many respects the world is a more formidable enemy than heresy, and the Gentilism of the nineteenth century is less manageable than that of the first, for it retains fewer elements of truth, and far less respect for authority and law. It has carried the spirit of revolt further, and holds nothing as sacred and inviolable. But it is always some gain when the issue is fairly presented, and the real question is fairly and distinctly stated in its appropriate terms; when there is no longer any disguise or subterfuge possible; and when the respective forces are fairly arrayed against each other, each under its own flag, and shouting its own war-cry. The battle will be long and arduous, for every article in the creed, from "Patrem omnipotentem" to "vitam aeternam," has been successively denied; but we cannot doubt to which side victory will finally incline.
Tertullian say, "the human heart is naturally Christian," and men can not be contented to remain long in mere vegetable existence without some sort of religion. They will, when they have nothing else to worship, evoke the spirits of the dead, and institute an illusory demon-worship, as we see in modern spiritism. The Christian religion as presented by Rome, though it flatters not human pride, and is offensive to depraved appetite or passion, is yet adapted to the needs of human nature, and satisfies the purer and noble aspirations of the soul. There is, as we have more than once shown, a natural want in man which it only can meet, and, we may almost say, a natural aptitude to receive it. Hence, we conclude that, when men see before them no alternative but Rome or no religion, downright naturalism able to satisfy nobody, they will, after some hesitation, submit to Rome and rejoice in Catholicity. Nature is very well; we have not a word to say against it when normally developed; but this world is too bleak and wintry for men to walk about in the nakedness of nature; they must have clothing of some sort, and, when they are fully convinced that they can find proper garments only in the wardrobe of the church, they cannot, it seems to us, long hold out against Rome or refuse submission to the law of life.
We here close our very inadequate discussion of the great subject we have opened. Our remarks are only supplementary to the article on Rome or Reason in THE CATHOLIC WORLD for September last, and are intended to guard against any false inferences that some might be disposed to draw from the doctrine we there set forth. We hold, as a Catholic, the dogma of original sin, and that our nature has been disordered by the fall and averted from God. We have not wished this fact to be overlooked, or ourselves to be understood as if we recognized no antagonism between this fallen or averted nature and Rome. Our nature is not totally depraved. Understanding and will, if the former has been darkened and the latter attenuated by the fall, yet remain, and retain their essential character; but disorder has been introduced into our nature, and the flesh inclines to sin; its face is turned away from God, and it stands in need of being converted or turned to him. The church brings to this disordered and averted nature whatever is needed to convert it, heal its wounds, and elevate it to the plane of its destiny. But after conversion, after regeneration, the flesh, "the carnal mind," remains, as the Council of Trent teaches, and, as long as it remains, there must be a combat, a warfare. This combat, or warfare, is not, indeed, between reason and faith, revelation and science, nor between nature and grace, but between the law of God accepted and served by the judgment and will, by the inner man, and the law of sin in our members, the struggle between holiness and sin, an internal struggle, of which every one is conscious who attempts to lead a holy life. We have not only wished to recognize the fact of this struggle as an interior struggle in the individual, but also as passing from the individual to society, and manifesting itself in the perpetual struggle between Rome and the world, which ceases, and can cease, only in proportion as men and society become converted to God, and voluntarily submissive to his law.