Practical Ethics

by William De Witt Hyde

We can make him the keeper of our moral precepts and the guardian of our lives. And then when we are in need of guidance, help, and strength, we can go to him, and by devoutly seeking to know and do his will, we can recover the principles and reinforce the motives of right conduct that we have intrusted to his keeping; and ofttimes we get, in addition, larger views of duty and nobler impulses to virtue than we have ever consciously possessed before. Just as the love of father or mother clarifies a child's perception of what is right, and intensifies his will to do it, so the love of God has power to make us strong to resist temptation, resolute to do our duty, and strenuous in the endeavor to advance the kingdom of righteousness and love.

Into the particular doctrines and institutions of religion it is not the purpose of this book to enter. These are matters which each individual learns best from his own father and mother, and from the church in which he has been brought up. Our account of ethics, however, would be seriously incomplete, were we to omit to point out the immense and indispensable strength and help we may gain for the moral life, by approaching it in the religious spirit.

Ethics and religion each needs the other.—They are in reality, one the detailed and particular, the other the comprehensive and universal aspect of the same world of duty and virtue. Morality without religion is a cold, dry, dreary, mass of disconnected rules and requirements. Religion without morality, is an empty, formal, unsubstantial shadow. Only when the two are united, only when we bring to the particular duties of ethics the infinite aspiration and inspiration of religion, and give to the universal forms of religion the concrete contents of human and temporal relationships, do we gain a spiritual life which is at the same time clear and strong, elevated and practical, ideal and real.

THE VIRTUE.

Just as God includes all objects in his thought, all duties in his will, all virtues in his ideal; so the man who communes with him, and surrenders his will to him in obedience and trust and love, partakes of this same wholeness and holiness.—Loving God, he is led to love all that God loves, to love all good. And holiness is the love of all that is good and the hatred of all that is evil.

Complete holiness is not wrought out in its concrete relations all at once, nor ever in this earthly life, by the religious, any more than by the moral man. Temptations are frequent all along the way, and the falls many and grievous to the last. But from all deliberately cherished identification of his inmost heart and will with evil, the truly religious man is forevermore set free. From the moment one's will is entirely surrendered to God, and the divine ideal of life and conduct is accepted, a new and holy life begins.

Old temptations may surprise him into unrighteous deeds; old habits may still assert themselves, old lusts may drift back on the returning tides of past associations; old vices may continue to crop out.

In reality, however, they are already dead. They are like the leaves that continue to look green upon the branches of a tree that has been cut down; or the momentum of a train after the steam is shut off and the brakes are on.

God, who is all-wise, sees that in such a man sin is in principle dead; and he judges him accordingly. If penitence for past sins and present falls be genuine; if the desire to do his will be earnest; He takes the will for the deed, penitence for performance, aspiration for attainment. Such judgment is not merely merciful. It is just. Or rather, it is the blending of mercy and justice in love. It is judgment according to the deeper, internal aspect of a man, instead of judgment according to the superficial, outward aspect. For the will is the center and core of personality. What a man desires and strives for with all his heart, that he is. What he repents of and repudiates with the whole strength of his frail and imperfect nature, that he has ceased to be.

Thus religion, or whole-souled devotion to God, gives a sense of completeness, and attainment, and security, and peace, which mere ethics, or adjustment to the separate fragmentary objects which constitute our environment, can never give. The moral life is from its very nature partial, fragmentary, and finite. The religious life by penitence and faith and hope and love, rises above the finite with its limitations, and the temporal with its sins and failings, and lays hold on the infinite ideal and the eternal goodness, with its boundless horizon and its perfect peace. The religious life, like the moral, is progressive. But, as Principal Caird remarks, "It is progress, not towards, but within, the infinite." Union with God in sincere devotion to his holy will, is the "promise and potency" of harmonious relations with that whole ethical and spiritual universe which his thought and will includes.