In this way and in other ways also, I say. For we have hitherto spoken of the human mind only as contemplating the external world;—as discerning, to a certain small extent, the laws of the universe. We have spoken of the world of things without: we must now speak of the world within us;—of the world of our thoughts, our being, our moral and personal being.
7. (From ourselves we learn something concerning God.)—We must speak of this: for this is, as I have said, another starting point and another line in which we may proceed from what we know, and see how far our knowledge carries us, and how far it teaches us anything concerning God.
Looking at ourselves, we perceive that we have to act, as well as to contemplate: we are practical as well as speculative beings. And tracing the nature and conditions of our actions, in the depths of our thought we find that there is in the aspect of actions a supreme and inevitable distinction of right and wrong. We cannot help judging of our actions as right and wrong. We acknowledge that there must be such a judgment appropriate to them. We have these Ideas of right and wrong as attributes of actions; and thus we are moral beings.
8. And again: the actions are our actions. We act in this way or that. And we are not mere things, which move and change as they are acted on, but which do not themselves act, as man acts. I am not a Thing but a Person; and the men with whom I act, who act with me—act in various ways towards me, well or ill—are also persons. Man is a personal being.
The Ideas of right and wrong—the moral Ideas of man—are then a part of the scheme of the universe to which man belongs. Could they be this, if they were not also a part of the nature of that Divine Mind which constitutes the universe?—It would seem not: the Moral Law of the universe must be a Law of the Divine Mind, in order that it may be a Law felt and discerned by man.
9. (Objection answered.)—But, it may be objected, the Moral Law of the universe is a Law in a different sense from the Laws of the universe of which we spoke before—the mathematical and physical laws of the universe. Those were laws according to which things are, and events occur: but Moral Laws are Laws according to which men ought to act, and according to which actions ought to be. There is a difference, so that we cannot reason from the human to the Divine Mind in the same manner in this case as in the other.
True: we cannot reason in the same manner. But we can reason still more confidently. For the Law directing what ought to be is the Supreme Law, and the mind which constitutes the Supreme Law is the Supreme Mind, that is, the Divine Mind.
10. That the Moral Law is not verified among men in fact, is not a ground for doubting that it is a Law of the Divine Mind; but it is a ground for inquiring what consequences the Divine Mind has annexed to the violation of the Law; and in what manner the supremacy of the Law will be established in the total course of the history of the universe, including, it may be, the history of other worlds than that in which we now live.
Considering how dimly and imperfectly we see what consequences the Divine Governor has annexed to the violation of the Moral Law, He who sees all these consequences and has provided for the establishment of His Law in the whole history of the human race, must be supposed to be infinitely elevated above man in wisdom;—more even in virtue of this aspect of His nature, than in virtue of that which is derived from the contemplation of the universe.
11. Man is a person; and his personality is his highest attribute, or at least, that which makes all his highest attributes possible. And the highest attribute which belongs to the finite minds which exist in the universe must exist also in the Infinite Mind which constitutes the universe as it is. The Divine Mind must reside in a Divine Person. And as man, by his personality, acts in obedience to or in transgression of a moral law, so God, by His Personality, acts in establishing the Law and in securing its supremacy in the whole history of the world.