The error favored by Fénélon's language, though against his intention, was that it is possible in this life to rise and remain habitually in such a state of charity, or pure love of God for his own sake, of such perfect union with him, that in it the soul no longer hopes or fears, ceases to make acts of virtue, and becomes indifferent to its own salvation or damnation, whether it gains heaven or loses it. The church did not condemn the love of God for his own sake, nor acts of perfect charity, for so much is possible and required of all Christians. The church requires us to make acts of love, as well as of faith and hope, and the act of love is: "O my God! I love thee above all things, with my whole heart and soul, because thou art infinitely amiable and deserving of all love; I love also my neighbor as myself for the love of thee; I forgive all who have injured me, and ask pardon of all whom I have injured." Here is no taint of selfishness, but an act of pure love. Yet though we can and ought to make distinct acts of perfect charity, it is a grave error to suppose that the soul can in this life sustain herself, habitually, in a state of pure love, that she ever attains to a state on earth in which acts of virtue cease to be necessary, in which she ceases from pure love to be actively virtuous, and becomes indifferent to her own fate, to her own salvation or damnation, to heaven or hell—an error akin to that of the Hopkinsians, that in order to be saved one must be willing to be damned. As long as we live, acts of virtue, of faith, hope, and charity, are necessary; and to be indifferent to heaven or hell, is to be indifferent whether we please God or offend him, whether we are united to him or alienated from him.
It is a great mistake to represent the doctrine the church opposed to quietism or to Fénélon as the selfish theory of morals. To act from simple fear of suffering or simple hope of happiness, or to labor solely to escape the one and secure the other, is, of course, selfish, and is not approved by the church, who brands such fear as servile, and such hope as mercenary, because in neither is the motive drawn from the end, which is God, as our supreme good. What the church bids us fear is alienation from God, and the happiness she bids us seek is happiness in God, because God is the end for which we are made. Thus, to the question, "Why did God make you?" the catechism answers, "That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next." With him, not without him. The fear the church approves is the fear of hell, not because it is a place of suffering, and the fear of God she inculcates is not the fear of him because he can send us to hell, but because hell is alienation from God, is offensive to him: and therefore the fear is really fear of offending God, and being separated from him. The hope of happiness she approves is the hope of heaven, not simply because heaven is happiness, but because it is union with God, or the possession of God as our last end, which is our supreme good.
Here neither the fear of hell nor the hope of heaven is selfish; for in each the motive is drawn from the end, from God who is our supreme good. It therefore implies charity or the love of God. And herein is its moral value. It may not be perfectly disinterested, or perfect charity, which is the love of God for his own sake, or because he is the supreme good in himself; but to love him as our supreme good, and to seek our good in him and him only, is still to love him, and to draw from him the motive of our acts. The church enjoins this reference to God in which, while she recognizes faith and hope as virtues in this life, she enjoins charity, without which the actor is nothing.
If Mr. Lecky had known the principle of Catholic morals, and understood the motives to virtue which the church urges, he would never have accused her of approving the selfish theory, which proposes in no sense God, but always and everywhere self, as the end. He will allow us no motive to virtue but the right; that is, in his theory, duty has no reason or motive but itself. No doubt his conception of right includes benevolence, the love of mankind, and steady, persevering efforts to serve our country and the human race; but he can assign no reason or motive why one should do so without falling either into the selfishness or the utilitarianism which he professes to reject. The sentimental theory which he seems to adopt cannot help him, for none of our sentiments are disinterested; all the sentiments pertain to self, and seek always their own gratification. This is as true of those called the higher, nobler sentiments as of the lower and baser, and, in point of fact, sentimentalists, philanthropists, and humanitarians are usually the most selfish, cruel, heartless, and least moral people in society. Men who act from sentimental instead of rational motives are never trustworthy, and are, in general, to be avoided.
Mr. Lecky maintains that right is to be done solely because it is right, without any considerations of its particular or general utility, or regard to consequences. But he shrinks from this, and appeals to utility when hard pressed, and argues that considerations of advantage to society or to mankind, or a peculiar combination of circumstances, may sometimes justify us in deviating from the right—that is, in doing wrong. He contends that it may be our duty to sacrifice the higher principles of our nature to the lower, and appears shocked at Dr. Newman's assertion that "the church holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions of its inhabitants to die of starvation in extreme agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one venial sin, tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing, without excuse." This is too rigid for Mr. Lecky. He places duty in always acting from the higher principles of our nature; but thinks there may be cases when it is our duty to sacrifice them to the lower! He supposes, then, that there is something more obligatory than right, or that renders right obligatory when obligatory it is.
But this doctrine of doing right for the sake of the right is utterly untenable. Right is not an abstraction, for there are no abstractions in nature, and abstractions are simple nullities. It must be either being or relation. If taken as a relation, it can be no motive, no end, because relation is real only in the related. If being, then it is God, who only is being. Your friends, the Stoics, placed it above the divinity, and taught us in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius that it binds under one and the same law both God and man. But an abstraction which is formed by the mind operating on the concrete can bind no one, for it is in itself simply nothing. The weaker cannot bind the stronger, the inferior the superior, or that which is not that which is. But there is no being stronger than God or above him; for he is, in every respect, supreme. Nothing can bind him, and right must either be identified with him or held to grow out of the relations of his creatures to himself. In the first case, right is God, or God is right; and the obligation to do right is only the obligation to do what God commands. Right, as being, cannot exist distinct from God, and can bind men only in the sense in which God himself binds them. Their sovereign, in such case, is God, who, by his creative act, is their lord and proprietor. But right and God are not identical, and, consequently, right is not being, but a relation. What binds is not the right or the relation, but he who, by his creative act, founds the relation. Rejecting, then, right as an abstraction, we must understand by the right what under this relation it is the duty of the creature to do. Right and duty are then the same. Ask what is man's duty; the answer is, what is right. Ask what is right, and the answer is, whatever is duty.
But right does not make itself right, nor duty itself duty. Here is the defect of all purely rationalistic morals, and of every system of morals that is not based, we say not on revelation, but on theology, or the creative act of God. Right and duty are identical, we grant; but neither can create its own obligation, or be its own reason or motive. To say of an act, it is duty because it is right, or it is right because it is duty, is to reason, as the logicians say, in a vicious circle, or to answer idem per idem, which is not allowable by any logic we are acquainted with. We must, then, if we assert morals at all, come back to theology, and find the ground of obligation or duty—which is simply the right or authority of God to command us—in our relation to God, as our creator or first cause, and the reason or motive in our relation to him as our last end or final cause.
No doubt the reason why the rationalistic moralists in modern times are reluctant to admit this is, because they very erroneously suppose that it means that the basis of morals is to be found only in supernatural revelation, and is not ascertainable or provable by reason. But this is a mistake, growing out of another mistake; namely, that the creative act is a truth of revelation only, and not a truth of science or philosophy. The creative act is a fact of science, the basis, rather, of all science, as of all life in creatures, and must be recognized and held before revelation can be logically asserted. That God is, and is our creator, our first cause, and our final cause, are truths that do not depend on revelation to be known; and the theological basis of morals which we assert, in opposition to the rationalistic moralists, is within the province of reason or philosophy. But the rationalists, in seeking to escape revelation, lose God, and are forced to assert a morality that is independent of him, and does not suppose or need him in order to be obligatory. They are obliged, therefore, to seek a basis of morals in nature, which in its own right has no legislative authority; for nature is the creature of God, and is nothing without him.
The intuition of right, obligation, duty, which, according to our author, is the fundamental principle of morals, is only, he himself maintains, the immediate apprehension of a principle or law of human nature, or of our higher nature, from which we are to act, instead of acting from our lower nature; but our higher nature is still nature, and no more legislative than our lower nature. Nature being always equal to nature, nothing is more certain than that nature cannot bind nature or place it under obligation.
Besides, when the author places the obligation in nature, whether the higher or the lower, he confounds moral law with physical law, and mistakes law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as first cause for law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as final cause. The physical laws, the natural laws of the physiologists, are in nature, constitutive of it, indistinguishable from it, and are what God creates: the moral law is independent of nature, over it, and declares the end for which nature exists, and from which, if moral nature, it must act. It is supernatural in the sense that God is supernatural, and natural only in the sense that it is promulgated through natural reason independently of supernatural revelation. Natural reason asserts the moral law, but asserts it as a law for nature, not a law in nature. By confounding it with physical laws, and placing it in nature as the law of natural activity, the author denies all moral distinction between it and the law by which the liver secretes bile, or the blood circulates. He holds, therefore, with Waldo Emerson that gravitation and purity of heart are identical, and, with our old transcendentalist friends, that the rule of duty is expressed in the maxims, Obey thyself; Act out thyself; Follow thy instincts. No doubt they meant, as our author means, the higher instincts, the nobler self, the higher nature. But the law recognized and asserted is no more the moral law than is the physical law by which the rain falls, the winds blow, the sun shines, the flowers bloom, or the earth revolves on its axis. Physical laws there are, no doubt, in human nature; but the theologians tell us that an act done from them is not an actus humanus, but an actus hominis, which has no moral character, and, whatever its tendency, is neither virtuous nor vicious.