The irrational cannot morally bind the rational. All men are equal, and no man, no body of men has, or can have, a natural right to bind or govern another. Only the Creator obliges, as the owner of the creature; and if I owe myself, all I am and all I have, to God, I owe nothing to another in his own right, and only God has any right over me, or to me. Here is at once the basis of obligation and of liberty, and the condemnation of all tyranny and despotism. From this, it clearly follows that every system of morals that rests on nature, the state, or any thing created, as its foundation, is not and of itself cannot be obligatory upon any one, and that without God as our creator, and whose we are, there is and can be no moral obligation or duty whatever. Pantheism, which denies the creative act, and atheism, which denies God, both alike deny morals by denying its basis or foundation. Either is fatal to morals, for obligation is only the correlative of the right to command. Having found the ground of obligation, and shown why we are morally bound, the next thing to be considered is the rule by which is determined what we are bound to do, and what we are bound to avoid. Mr. Lecky makes this rule conscience, which, though he labors to prove that it is uniform and infallible in all ages and nations, and all men, he yet concedes varies in its determinations as to what is or is not duty according to the circumstances of the age or nation, the ideal or standard adopted, public opinion, etc. That is, conscience assures us that we ought always to do right, but leaves us to find out, the best way we can, what is or is not right. Conscience, then, cannot be itself the rule; it is a witness within us of our obligation to obey God, and the judgment which we pass on our acts, usually, in practice, on our acts after they are done, is at best only our judgment of what the rule or law is, not the rule or law itself. The rule or regula is not conscience, but the light of conscience, that by which it determines what is or is not duty; it is the law which, according to St. Thomas, is "quaedam est regula et mensura actuum, secundum quam inducitur ad agendum, vel ab agendo retrahitur;" [Footnote 156] or, in the sense we here use the term, the rule, or measure of duty prescribing what is to be done, and what avoided.
[Footnote 156: Summa primae secundae, quest. xc. art. I. incorp.]
It is, as St. Thomas also says, an ordinatio rationis, and as an ordination of reason, it can be only the rule or measure of what is obligatory to be done or to be avoided. It defines and declares what is or is not duty, it does not and cannot make the duty, or create the obligation. The author and his school overlook the fact that reason is perceptive, not legislative. They confound the obligation with the rule that measures and determines it, and assume that it is the reason that creates the duty. They are psychologists, not philosophers, and see nothing behind or above human reason, man's highest and distinguishing faculty. Certainly without reason man could not either perform, or be bound to perform, a single moral act; and yet it is not the reason that binds him; and if he is bound to follow reason, as he undoubtedly is, it is only because reason tells him what is obligatory, and enables him to do it.
Since only God can bind morally, only God can impose the law which measures, defines, or discloses what independent of the law is obligatory. The rule of duty, of right and wrong, is therefore the law of God. The law of God is promulgated in part through natural reason, and in part through supernatural revelation. The former is called the natural law, lex naturalis; the latter, the revealed law, or the supernatural law. But both are integral parts of one and the same law, and each has its reason in one and the same order of things, emanates from one and the same authority, for one and the same ultimate end. There are, no doubt, in the supernatural law, positive injunctions, and prohibitions, which are not contained in the natural law, though not repugnant thereto; but these have their reason and motive in the end, which in all cases determines the law. All human laws, ecclesiastical or civil, derive all their vigor as laws from the law of God, and all the positive injunctions and prohibitions of either are, in their nature, disciplinary, or means to the end, in which is the reason or motive of the law. Hence there is, and can be, nothing arbitrary in duty. Nothing is or can be imposed, under either the natural law or the supernatural law, in either church or state, in religion or morals, that does not immediately or mediately grow out of our relation to God as our creator, and as our last end or final cause. As a Christian I am bound to obey the supreme Pastor of the church, not as a man commanding in his own name, or by his own authority, but as the vicar of Christ, who has commissioned him to teach, discipline, and govern me. As a citizen I am bound to obey all the laws of my country not repugnant to the law or the rights of God, but only because the state has, in secular matters, authority from God to govern. In either case the obedience is due only to God, and he only is obeyed. It is his authority and his alone that binds me, and neither church nor state can bind me beyond or except by reason of its authority derived from him.
The law is the rule, and is prescribed by the end, in which is the reason or motive of duty. The law is not the reason or motive of duty, nor is it the ground of the obligation. It is simply the rule, and tells us what God commands, not whence his right to command, nor wherefore he commands. His right to command rests on the fact that he is the Creator. But why does he command such and such things, or prescribe such and such duties? We do not answer, because such is his will; though that would be true as we understand it. For such answer would be understood by this untheological age, which forgets that the divine will is the will of infinite reason, to imply that duties are arbitrary, rest on mere will, and that there is no reason why God should prescribe one thing as duty rather than another. What the law of God declares to be duty is duty because it is necessary to accomplish the purpose of our existence, or the end for which we are created. Everything that even God can enjoin as duty has its reason or motive in that purpose or end. The end, then, prescribes, or is the reason of, the law.
The end for which God creates us is himself, who is our final cause no less than our first cause. God acts always as infinite reason, and cannot therefore create without creating for some end; and as he is self-sufficing and the adequate object of his own activity, there is and can be no end but himself. All things are not only created by him but for him. This is equally a truth of philosophy and of revelation, and even those theologians who talk of natural beatitude, are obliged to make it consist in the possession of God, at least, as the author of nature. Hence, St. Paul, the greatest philosopher that ever wrote, as well as an inspired apostle, says, Rom. xi. 36, "Of him, and by him, and in him are all things;" or, "in him and for him they subsist," as Archbishop Kenrick explains in a note to the passage. The motive or reason of the law is in the end, or in God as final cause. The motive or reason for keeping or fulfilling the law is, then, that we may gain the end for which we are made, or, union with God as our final cause. This is all clear, plain, and undeniable, and hence we conclude that morals, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be asserted unless we assert God as our creator and as our last end.
Mr. Lecky and his school do not, then, attain to the true philosophy of morals, for they recognize no final cause, either of man or his act; and yet there is no moral act that is not done freely propter finem, for the sake of the end. We do not say that all acts not so done are vicious or sinful, nor do we pretend that no acts are moral that are not done with a distinct and deliberate reference to God as our last end. The man who relieves suffering because he cannot endure the pain of seeing it, performs a good deed, though an act of very imperfect virtue. We act also from habit, and when the habit has been formed by acts done for the sake of the end, or by infused grace, the acts done from the habit of the soul without an explicit reference to the end are moral, virtuous, in the true sense of either term; nor do we exclude those Gentiles who, not having the law, do the things of the law, of whom St. Paul speaks, Rom. ii. 14-16.
Mr. Lecky overlooks the end, and presents no reason or motive for performing our duty, distinguishable from the duty itself. He adopts the philosophy of the Porch, except that he thinks it did not make enough of the emotional side of our nature, that is, was not sufficiently sentimental. The Stoics held that we must do right for the sake of right alone, or because it is right. They rejected all consideration of personal advantage, of general utility, the honor of the gods, future life, heaven or hell, or the happiness of mankind. They admitted the obligation to serve the commonwealth and to do good to all men, but because it was right. The good of the state or of the race was duty, but not the reason or motive of the duty. The professedly disinterested morality on which our author, after them, so earnestly insists, closely analyzed, will be found to be as selfish as that of the Garden, or that of Paley and Bentham. The Epicurean makes pleasure, that is, the gratification of the senses, the motive of virtue; the Stoic makes the motive the gratification of his intellectual nature, or rather his pride, which is as much a man's self as what the apostle calls concupiscence, or the flesh. Intellectual selfishness, in which the Stoics abounded, is even more repugnant to the virtue of the actor than the sensual selfishness of the votary of pleasure. We care not what fine words the Stoic had on his lips, no system of pagan morals was further removed from real disinterested virtue than that of the Porch.
Mr. Lecky denounces the morality of the church as selfish, and says the selfish system triumphed with Bossuet over Fénélon; but happily for us he is not competent to speak of the morals enjoined by the church. He does not understand the question which was at issue, and entirely misapprehends the matter for which Fénélon was censured by the Holy See. The doctrine of Fénélon, as he himself explained and defended it, was never condemned, nor was that of Bossuet, which, on several points, was very unsound, ever approved. Several passages of Fénélon's Maxims of the Saints were censured as favoring quietism, already condemned in the condemnation of Molinos and his adherents—a doctrine which Fénélon never held, and which he sought in his Maxims to avoid without running into the contrary extreme, but, the Holy See judged, unsuccessfully. His thought was orthodox, but the language he used could be understood in a quietistic sense; and it was his language, not his doctrine, that was condemned.