Chapter XI · MORAL GOVERNMENT. II. ITS NATURE, CONDITIONS, METHOD, AND END.

"The times of this ignorance God overlooked, but now commandeth all men every where to repent; because He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness."—St. Paul.

The relations existing between God and man, especially the correlations of paternity and filiation, constitute the ultimate foundations of Moral Government. This is the conclusion of the preceding discussion. If God is intimately near to man—if He is immanent in man, and man is immanent in God—if God is "the Father of the human spirit," and man "the offspring of God," then man must bear some resemblance to God—he must have a spiritual and immortal nature, must be a free personality, must be capable of knowing and loving God, and therefore must be under solemn responsibility to God, and within the sphere of the eternal and immutable laws of moral life; in a word, he must be the subject of moral government.

We proceed now to consider, more especially, the nature, the conditions, the methods, and the ends of moral government.

I. The nature of moral government.—Government, in general, is control—control with a view to the maintenance of order. This may be effected by direct coaction or forceful compulsion; or by the reaction of natural consequences; or by the pervasive influence of moral motives. The first is constraint, the second is restraint, the third is authoritative direction. We must, therefore, distinguish between physical, natural, and moral government.

The physical government of God is the absolute control which He exercises over the material creation. He is the Fountain-head of all the forces, and the Author of all the laws according to which passive, unconscious matter is resistlessly impelled; and because his power and wisdom are infinite, and his purposes are immutable, therefore material nature is uniform, and there is an all-pervading order in the physical world.

The natural government of God is that constitution of nature, and of man in so far as he is a part of nature, by which the sensations of pleasure and pain result directly and necessarily from the actions of man; and inasmuch as he is able by an induction from experience to foresee these consequences, and to determine his own conduct in view of them, they are not improperly called rewards and punishments. Thus it is found by experience that disease and suffering result from acts of intemperance and licentiousness, and men are restrained from the commission of these acts by the fear of their foreseen results. This is control by the reaction of natural consequences in that intermediate sphere which we may designate the physico-moral order of the world.

The moral government of God is that kind of control which a wise and virtuous parent exercises over his family, or a just and equitable magistrate over his subjects.[508] It is a government by laws or rules addressed to the reason, by moral motives which appeal to the conscience, and by moral sanctions which appeal to the emotions. It is a constitution in which God has declared his will to man, and taught him, prior to the experience of retributive consequences, what is right and what is wrong; a constitution under which man is endowed with the capacity of perceiving the inherent righteousness of the Divine law, of feeling the imperative claims of duty, and of apprehending a future retribution, and also a real causative power of self-determination and choice. Finally, it is an economy in which ample scope is afforded for the development of responsible character. It is a probation in which there are tests and temptations, in which forbearance is exercised and consequences are delayed, in which remedial agencies are plied and opportunities are afforded for repentance and reformation, and in the final consummation of which virtuous character shall receive its meet reward, and sinful character its merited punishment. This is the ideal order of moral life.

This twofold distinction between the physical and the spiritual, and between the natural and the moral, runs through the entire domain of existence and action, of being and becoming.

The terms physical and spiritual are employed as collective terms to connote the essential, changeless, and permanent attributes of certain entities or realities which are regarded as ultimate, viz., matter and spirit. The attributes of matter are extension, divisibility, absolute incompressibility, and inertia; the attributes of spirit are sensitivity, reason, power, spontaneity, and memory. The term physical is further employed to denote certain "affections of matter"—that is, mechanical effects which are the result of the action of force upon matter. It is true we often speak of "physical forces," as though force were an essential attribute of matter. But this is one of the many ambiguities of language. All that we mean by physical force is a force which acts upon matter, and produces in the motions and collocations of matter its appropriate effects.[509] Spirit-force is the only force in the universe; all that our physical science deals with is "forms of energy which have their origin in force." "Mind," says Dr. Carpenter, "is the one and only source of power."[510]

The terms natural and moral are employed to denote opposite modes of action and classes of effects. In the one case the mode of action is fixed and uniform, and the effect is necessary; in the other case the mode of action is free and volitional, and the effect is contingent and variable. The first is the order of nature where force reigns, the second is the order of moral life where freedom prevails. "Whatever is comprised in the chain and mechanism of cause and effect, of course necessitated, and having its necessity in some other thing antecedent or concurrent, this is said to be natural, and the aggregate and system of all such things is nature."[511] While, on the contrary, that which lies within the agent's power, and to which he determines himself by an act of free choice; and especially that which the agent knows he ought to do, and in choosing which he is conscious of power to put forth, in the same unchanged circumstances, a different volition instead, is called moral.

Thus does morality commence with "the sacred distinction" between thing and person. "On this distinction all legislation, human and Divine, proceeds." That which fundamentally distinguishes a person from a mere thing of nature is free causality—that is, "the power or immunity to put forth in the same circumstances either of several volitions." A thing is unconscious, involuntary, and powerless, and consequently limited to one sole possible eventuation. A thing has no responsibility for its movements, which it has not willed, and of the nature and consequences of which it is ignorant. A person alone is responsible, because he is intelligent and free; that is, he can foresee the consequences of his action, and freely determines himself to its performance. A thing has no dignity; dignity attaches only to personality. Personality is inalienable, sacred, and inviolable; it can not be abrogated, surrendered, or transferred, and it demands to be respected. In a word, it has both duties and rights, while things have neither.[512]

Thus do we find that all dignity, all sacredness, all responsibility, all morality belong to and are predicable only of the personal being, because intelligence and freedom are the essential moments of personality.

Furthermore, the sphere of the moral is to be determined by another important limitation. Not all the actions of men are personal and responsible acts. Sensation is not a voluntary operation. When the external object is brought into proper relation with the animated organism, perception necessarily occurs. The intuitive apperceptions of the reason are impersonal; when a change transpires, the reason necessarily affirms the existence of a cause. Reflex nervous action is involuntary. Many muscular movements are spontaneous, but not volitional. A responsible action is an intentional action—that is, an act performed to realize an end which lies within the agent's contemplation. Spontaneity or self-determination only thereby becomes will. A moral act is consequently a premeditated, intentional, voluntary act, and the merit or demerit of an agent is as his actual intention.

The last and most important limitation of the moral sphere is to those voluntary actions which have relation to personality, human and Divine. "The peculiar distinction of moral actions, moral character, moral principles, moral habits, as contrasted with the intellectual and other parts of man's nature, lies in this, that they always imply a relation between two persons."[513] Morality is the relation of person to person.

We sum up what has been said in the preceding paragraphs in these words: The moral government of God is a legislation which has respect to personality, especially the relations of person to person; and it is an administration under which the subjects have power to resist and violate its requirements, but which is provided with ample means to vindicate its authority, and maintain the moral order of the universe.

II. The subjective conditions of moral government.—It will be apparent from what has been already said that the following conditions are essential to moral government:

(1.) The subject of moral government must be intelligent. He must be able to understand the Divine requirements, to perceive their inherent rightness, and to feel the sense of obligation to comply therewith. He must also be susceptible of certain pleasurable or painful emotions which follow as the direct consequences of his actions, and secure an adequate retribution. In a word, he must have a moral consciousness, or, briefly, a conscience.

(2.) The subject of moral government must be a free power. He must be the efficient cause of his own action, and he must be conscious of this power of self-determination—that is, he must be conscious of power to put forth, in the same unchanged circumstances, either of several volitions. In short, he must have a free will.

These, then, are the essential conditions of moral agency—the possession of a conscience, and the power to obey or disobey the requirements of moral law. Both these conditions of accountability exist in man. By virtue of his constitution as a spiritual being made in the image of God, he is capable of perceiving what is inherently right, just, and good. His reason intuitively apprehends the good, and affirms the imperative obligation to choose the good. His judgment pronounces upon the relation of human conduct to the law of right, affirming man has or has not done right. And his emotive nature yields him complacence and joy as the reward of well-doing, or inflicts pain and remorse as the punishment of wrong-doing. In the words of Chalmers, "he is endowed with a conscience which performs within his bosom all the offices of a lawgiver and a judge."

The possession of this faculty necessarily supposes the existence of power in the agent to comply or not to comply with its behests. A moral law is designed only for the government of a free being, and nothing is moral or immoral which is not voluntary. If there is no self-determination, there is no proper personality to which the law of reason can attach. Remorse, on the one hand, satisfaction on the other, are emotions which are inconceivable and impossible in a being who is not consciously free.

The nature and authority of conscience is a question which is earnestly discussed. Among philosophers and theologians there are diverse and conflicting opinions. It has been variously characterized as a witness of our past actions; as a judgment passed upon our actions; or as a feeling arising in view of our actions. By one, conscience is regarded as an appetite—a craving for the right, but not a faculty intuitively perceiving the right. Another defines it "as a capacity and a tendency to inquire into duty, but not as supplying a law of duty."[514] While a third regards it as a state of the sensibility—"a simple feeling, emotion, or vivid sentiment which arises immediately in the mind in presence of certain actions, and to which we give the name of moral approbation."[515]

These definitions of conscience may all be regarded as containing some truth. They are all defective, however, in this one respect—they fail to recognize an internal law which constitutes a subjective standard of right, and an intuitive perception of moral distinctions and qualities in human action.

As an essay toward a clearer apprehension of the nature of conscience, we present the following propositions:

1. Conscience is not a distinct faculty of the mind. Conscience (conscientia = joint or double knowledge) is the knowledge of self in relation to a known law of right and wrong. Conscience and consciousness may therefore be regarded as, in some respects, identical. The terms in their etymology and their general import are synonymous. There is, however, a technical distinction to be made. Consciousness expresses self-knowledge in general. Conscience expresses self-knowledge relative to responsibility. Consciousness is the recognition by the thinking subject of its own states and affections. Conscience is the knowledge of an act or an affection as having some moral quality—as being right or wrong.

2. Conscience is, like consciousness, a complex phenomenon, the result of the simultaneous action of the primary powers of the mind. The simplest fact of consciousness is a synthesis of sensation and reason in a primitive psychological judgment. Sensation alone is not knowledge, and it becomes consciousness only as it is illuminated and informed by the reason. And so a mere state of the sensibility—a mere feeling of approbation or disapprobation—does not constitute conscience until it is informed by the reason. Conscience is the unity of feeling and reason in a judgment which has respect to voluntary action.

3. Conscience is the common field in which is revealed the result of the operation of all our faculties in their especial relation to moral law. As consciousness is the common field in which the results of the operation of all our faculties come to light, so conscience is that department of the same field in which is revealed the action of the mind in relation to the unchangeable principles of order and right which dwell in the bosom of the Infinite. Conscience is pre-eminently the Godward side of our mental being, which reflects the moral character of God, and brings us into relationship with Him. It is that which carries us per saltum to the immediate recognition of a God, the Lawgiver and the Judge who is over man, and which holds him in mysterious but indissoluble bonds of obligation. Conscience is therefore,

(1.) The reason intuitively apprehending universal moral ideas and laws. It furnishes the idea of the good. It affirms that the good is universally obligatory. It asserts that the good has desert, worthiness, and dignity. And it demands for the good an appropriate recognition and a just reward.

(2.) The understanding apprehending the relations in which we stand to God, to our fellow-beings, and to self as a moral personality endowed with reason and freedom.

(3.) The judgment comparing the acts of a voluntary agent existing in certain relations with the immutable ideas and laws of the reason, and affirming this is right and worthy of praise and reward, or that is wrong and deserving of blame and punishment.

(4.) A particular state of the sensibility—the painful or pleasurable emotions which spontaneously arise in presence of right or wrong in our own actions or in the actions of our fellow-men.

Thus conscience is, as it were, the focal point at which are united and blended the varied acts and states of the soul in its immediate relation to the moral law. It is the synthesis of moral ideas, cognitions, and feelings in a moral judgment.

The co-operation of these powers and susceptibilities of the soul in their relation to the good has a parallel and an illustration in their operation in relation to the beautiful.

The ideas of order, proportion, harmony, fitness, and unity in variety are unquestionably fundamental and necessary ideas of the reason. In the Divine reason these ideas have always existed as the laws in accordance with which He fashioned the material universe. And inasmuch as the human reason is configured to the Divine, these ideas must also exist in the human mind. Like statuary in the inner palaces of the soul, they are the models by which we recognize and the standards according to which we judge the forms of beauty in the external world. The correspondence between these external forms and the inner ideals of the reason is recognized by the judgment. And the delight we experience in presence of the beautiful in nature and art is a particular direction of the sensibility.

This is not, however, the chronological order in which the idea of the beautiful is developed in the mind. The sense of beauty first reveals itself in the spontaneous consciousness in presence of the order and harmony and fitness which pervade the universe. We experience delight without being able to specialize the precise causes of our pleasure. But the reflective consciousness, which is pre-eminently analytic, brings out into clear light the fundamental ideas of order, harmony, fitness, and unity, which had a prior existence in the reason, and have now recognized themselves as mirrored in the universe. The repeated observation of the forms of beauty around us, and the comparison of these with the standard ideas of the reason, will result in the beau-ideal of a pure and correct taste—true αἰσθητικόν.

So in relation to the idea of the good. It does not stand forth to the eye of consciousness, in the first instance, as an abstract conception. The moral sense—the affection of the sensibility in presence of voluntary and responsible action—is first revealed in the spontaneous consciousness. When we behold an act of justice, of kindness, of beneficence, we experience the fullest satisfaction. We admire and esteem the actor. We feel that his conduct is praiseworthy, and that he is deserving of honor and reward. These sentiments spring up spontaneously and involuntarily in our bosoms long before we have defined their reason and law. The reflective consciousness subsequently elicits the rational ideas which underlie these emotions—the ideas of the useful, the just, the beneficent, the noble, and the perfect, all which are finally embraced in the idea of the good. And the repeated comparison of the conduct of voluntary agents existing under certain relations, with the fundamental ideas of the reason, these standards of right erected in the soul, will result in an ideal of moral excellence—a true ἐθικόν.

If this doctrine of conscience be the product of a true psychological method, it will enable us to account for the apparent want of uniformity in its suffrages in individual cases, and the varied phenomena presented in different men.

Conscience, like consciousness, has its gradual development. Though natural and necessary to every human soul whose powers are normally developed, it is not exercised at the beginning of its existence, but only after certain conditions of growth and stages of growth have been attained. This development may be arrested or it may be perverted. The absence of proper conditions, the lack of suitable discipline and culture in any one of the faculties whose operation enters into the concrete phenomena, will modify the general result. An excess of sensibility will give a morbid conscience; the lack of sensibility, a slumbering conscience. A defective apprehension of the relations in which we stand to God and to our fellow-men will prevent our seeing our specific duties. Inattention to the character of our own motives, or ignorance of the real intentions of other men, may mislead the judgment in discriminating between the quality of actions. There are also natural differences in the soundness and accuracy of the judgments of individual men. We meet those who with a limited acquaintance with particular facts and abstract notions are nevertheless endowed with sound practical judgment; while others, with a larger knowledge of facts and general principles, are strangely defective in judgment. Finally, unless men accustom themselves to reflection, to analysis, the ideas of the just, the right, the good, do not come clearly into the light of consciousness. Hence the different manifestations of conscience in individual men.

We claim, however, that the moral ideas of the reason are in all men identical; that they exist and operate, even though unconsciously, in all minds, determining their moral judgments; and that when the same relations of personality are clearly before the mind the moral judgments of men are uniform.

In spite of all the topical moralities to which factitious circumstances may have given birth, there is unquestionably a universal and immutable morality. In every nation under heaven, veracity, justice, and beneficence are separated by a clear, unmistakable line from falsehood, injustice, and cruelty; nor can all the casuistry and sophistry in the universe transpose or confound them. Custom, prescription, conventions of human opinion, factitious circumstances, can never blur over and obliterate these lines which separate right and wrong. Beneath all these apparent differences, the conscience will make her voice heard in the depth of the soul, in the common sentiments of mankind, and in the statutes of universal jurisprudence. The great ideas of justice and right were prominent and well defined among the nations of antiquity. "Nemesis and Themis were not only their abstractions and deities—they were embodied in their systems of jurisprudence. Law secured property and sanctified life. Law guarded every relation and ordered every act. Law was the theme of their philosophy and the burden of their song. We are not unacquainted with the jealousies and disputes of their schools of philosophy. They placed the good of man and the reason of morality in the most incongruous things, but they never differed concerning the conduct which was right. Epicurus and Zeno knew no divergence here."[516] Indeed, they asserted the immutability of moral law for all times and places—

"There is," says Cicero, "one true and original law, conformable to nature and reason, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfillment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and which calls with that irresistible voice which is felt in all its authority wherever it is heard. This law can not be curtailed or abolished, nor affected in its sanctions by any law of man. A whole senate, a whole people, can not dispense with its paramount obligation. It requires no commentator to render it distinctly intelligible, nor is it different at Rome, at Athens, now and in ages before and after, but in all ages and all nations it is and has been and will be one and everlasting—one as that God, its author and promulgator, who is the common Sovereign of all mankind, is Himself one. Man is truly man as he yields himself to this Divine influence. He can not resist it but by flying, as it were, from his own bosom, and laying aside the general feelings of humanity, by which very act he must already have inflicted on himself the severest of punishments, even though he were to avoid what is usually accounted punishment."[518]

Among the most savage tribes, as among the most refined and polished nations, are also to be found the same common principles of morality. Theft, murder, adultery are offenses condemned and punished by every nation under heaven. The high qualities of virtue are the things which win esteem and command respect in every country, however rude. Were proof demanded, we might bring it at once from the darkest corners of the earth. The savage Fijian regards theft, adultery, abduction, incendiarism, and treason as serious crimes.[519] And Dr. Livingstone tells us that, "On questioning intelligent men among the Backwains as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of God, and of a future state, they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects. Respecting their sense of right and wrong, they profess that nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise, except the statement that it was wrong to have more wives than one."[520]

We conclude that the universal consciousness of our race, as revealed in human history, languages, legislations, and sentiments, bears testimony to the fact that the ideas of right, duty, accountability, and moral desert are native to the human mind; and consequently the existence of the first condition of moral government—namely, the possession by its subject of a conscience—is an unquestionable fact.

The second condition of moral government is the existence, in the subject, of free self-determining power: the agent must be the real cause and the sole cause of his own actions; he must have freedom both to and from the act.

Under a reign of necessity there can be no moral government and no just retribution. It is, at best, a mere physical or natural government; for moral government must be of beings who are free and self-determined, and not of mere machines. To blame a necessitated thing is irrational, to punish it is a cruelty and an injustice. The necessitarian himself is unable to conceal his conscious embarrassment in presence of these difficulties, and to save his theory he becomes reckless in assertions. He affirms that "the whole system of morality—its duties and responsibilities; the whole scheme of moral government, with its rewards and punishments—remains, on his theory, as entire and stable as ever."[521] This affirmation runs athwart all the dictates of common-sense, and collides with the universal conviction of humanity. He is the only consistent necessitarian who rejects the Christian doctrine of sin, denies all accountability and retribution, and reduces the government of God to mere physical impulsion and the management of a universal mechanism. The necessitarian dogma can not be made to quadrate with our primitive convictions; it is out of harmony with all our instinctive beliefs. The innate idea of right, the native sense of duty and accountability, the consciousness of sin, our faith in the justice of God, our religious hopes and fears, all impel us onward to find a rational and valid basis for human responsibility and moral government in the freedom of the will.

That man does possess an alternative power of self-determination and choice is evident:

1. From the direct testimony of consciousness. We know that any doing of ours might have been reserved—we feel, by that same direct consciousness which certifies our existence and our reason, that we have the fullest power of choice. No subtlety, no abstraction of argument, can convince us that we are otherwise than free. "Men are not conscious of compulsion of any kind, not conscious of certain mental states, called choices, which are either wholly or partially independent of their free agency; but they are perfectly and distinctly conscious of entire liberty, and of complete inward power to choose."[522]

That we have a direct consciousness of freedom is the doctrine of most of the writers on moral science. Cousin is emphatic in the assertion of this doctrine: "I am conscious of this sovereign power of the will. I feel in myself, before its determination, the force that can determine itself in such a manner or in such another. At the same time that I will this or that I am equally conscious of the power to will the opposite; I am conscious of being master of my resolution, of the ability to arrest it, continue it, repress it."[523] The distinguished Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Calderwood, teaches the same doctrine: "It is in our consciousness of self-control for the determination of activity that we obtain our only knowledge of causation. Every one knows himself as the cause of his own actions. In the external world we continue ignorant of causes, and are able only to trace uniform sequence, as Hume and Comte have insisted. But in consciousness we distinguish between sequence and causality. We are conscious of our own causal energy by knowing the origin of our activity in self-determination."[524]

The direct consciousness of freedom is denied by Sir William Hamilton. This denial is a necessary consequence of his doctrine of relativity. If we are not conscious of self as a reality, but only of certain modes or affections, then, of course, we can not be conscious of self as a free power. But as Mansel has forcibly replied: "Does it not rather appear a flat contradiction to maintain that I am not immediately conscious of myself, but only of my sensations or volitions? Who, then, is the I that is conscious; and how can I be conscious of such states as mine? In this case it would surely be more accurate to say, not that I am conscious of my sensations, but that the sensation is conscious of itself; but, thus worded, the glaring absurdity of the theory would carry with it its own refutation.... Self-personality is revealed to us with all the clearness of an original intuition."[525] With an inconsistency which shows the fallacy of Sir William Hamilton's whole theory of relativity, he admits that, "As clearly as I am conscious of existing, so clearly am I conscious at every moment of my existence that the conscious Ego is not itself a mere modification, nor a series of modifications of any other subject, but that it is itself something different from all its own modifications, and a self-subsistent entity."[526]

If, then, we admit, as we must admit, the existence of an immediate consciousness, not merely of the phenomena of mind, but of the personal self as actively and passively related to them, we must also admit the direct testimony of conscience to the fact of liberty. "I am conscious not merely of the phenomenon of volition, but of myself as producing it, and as producing it by choice, with a power to choose the opposite alternative."

The necessitarians are all compelled to concede that the universal conviction of our race is, and always has been, that man is free. They have, however, asserted that this dictate of common-sense is not to be accepted as philosophically true. Lord Kames admits the natural conviction of freedom from necessity, though he declares it to be an illusion:

And Hommel, certainly one of the ablest and most decided of fatalists, says, "I must believe that I have a feeling of liberty, at the very moment I am writing against liberty, upon grounds which I regard as incontestable. Zeno was a fatalist only in theory; he did not act in conformity with his convictions."[527]

The possession of alternative power is a fact of consciousness as clear and indubitable as the fact of personal existence. It is admitted by the necessitarians that all men have "a natural conviction of freedom;" they believe themselves to be free beings, and they act upon this belief in all the relations of life. If this fact of consciousness is an illusion, then our existence is also an illusion, for that same intuition which certifies to me that I exist certifies also that I am free. If the testimony of consciousness is invalidated, there is no criterion for truth. If one of its deliverances is found to be false, how can we vindicate the veracity of any? "Our faculties are bestowed upon us as the instruments of deception; the root of our nature is a lie, and universal skepticism is the only goal."

2. The idea of moral obligation necessarily presupposes the freedom of the will. This is a principle so obvious that it needs no elucidation. If man have duties, he must possess the power of fulfilling them. He ought to be free if he ought to obey law, or human nature is in contradiction with itself. The direct certainty of obligation implies the corresponding certainty of freedom. Hence Kant's well-known canon, "I ought, therefore I can." Though denying the direct consciousness of freedom, Kant maintained with earnestness that the fact of liberty is guaranteed by the existence of the moral law, whose categorical imperative thou shalt necessarily implies a corresponding thou canst. To the same effect are the words of Sir William Hamilton: "The fact that we are free is given to us in the consciousness of an uncompromising law of duty.... Our consciousness of the moral law, which without a moral liberty in man would be a mendacious imperative, gives a decided preponderance to the doctrine of freedom over the doctrine of fate."[528] Physical causation and moral obligation can not coexist side by side. In proportion as we extend the domain of necessity we must diminish that of duty.

3. The sense of responsibility presupposes the freedom of the will. This sense of responsibility is native to the human mind. Every man feels himself to be accountable for his own conduct, not only at the bar of his own conscience, but before the moral judgment-seat of his fellow-men. Every where he recognizes the right of his fellow-men to inquire into his character, to sit in judgment upon his conduct, and to esteem and treat him accordingly. We necessarily impute blame when an unjust action is performed by another; we feel conscious of guilt and unworthiness when a wrong is done by ourselves. These are facts of universal consciousness. But these sentiments are irrational and absurd if man is a mere machine impelled by natural causes, and has no self-determining power.[529] Whatever disasters may overtake us in the course of nature, however we may suffer by the wild tornado or the blighting mildew, how much soever of our property may be swallowed up by the ocean tempest or the devouring flame, we impute no blame; and we experience here emotions essentially different from those which we experience when a wrong is intentionally inflicted upon us by our fellow-men. "Suppose yourself to have been the victim of some act of injustice and villainy by which you were reduced to penury, and your family to want and indigence. By what philosophy can you eradicate the sense of wrong or cease to impute blame to the man whose perfidy has despoiled your life? You may forgive him, and follow him with your prayers to the last hour of your life, but you will still pray for him as a guilty man whose crime has been the burden of your life." Now what is this radical and fundamental difference between the events of the material universe and the actions of men? and what is the rational basis for the different feelings we experience and the diverse judgments we pass in regard to them?

There is only one answer to this question. The ultimate ground-difference is found in the fact that one class of events is necessary—there is no adequate power in the thing to be or do otherwise; the other class of actions is free—they need not have been performed, the actor had full power for a contrary choice. In the world of nature force reigns; in the world of moral life liberty prevails. The fundamental principle of difference is the freedom of the will.

This second condition of moral government—namely, the possession of free alternative power on the part of the subject to comply, or refuse to comply, with the requirements of moral law—is thus established, first, by the direct testimony of consciousness, from which there can be no appeal, and, secondly, by necessary inference from collateral facts of consciousness, which can not be invalidated by counter-proofs.

Unhappily, the restlessness of speculative minds, the necessities of false theories in philosophy, or the unwarrantable assumptions of dogmatic theologians, have led to the disregard of the affirmations of universal consciousness. Men have asked, How can freedom be possible in a dependent creature? How can it be consistent with our belief in the principle of universal causation? How can it be harmonized with the fact that man always acts under the influence of motives? How can it be reconciled with the omnipotence and absolute prescience of God?

We shall now address ourselves to the consideration of the arguments against the doctrine of the freedom of the will which are suggested by these queries.

1. The first is the Metaphysical or Causational Argument. The rational intuition that "every event must have a cause" is a universal and necessary truth. It must therefore be rigorously applied to all mental as well as to all physical phenomena. Every volition must have a cause, and if caused it can not be free. This is the grand argument upon which the necessitarian mainly relies, and it is urged with eloquence and force by Edwards, Chalmers, and McCosh.

Now that "every event must have a cause" is an à priori truth, which is as readily accorded by the freedomist as it is vehemently insisted upon by the necessitarian. No philosophic writers have more ably and clearly enounced this law of causality than the freedomists Reid, Stewart, and Cousin. They rely upon it as one of the main pillars of the Theistic argument. And they apply it, in all its integrity, to mental as well as to physical phenomena. They hesitate not to say that "every volition must have a cause." That cause is the efficient creative power which resides in a free, spiritual personality. And that power is not, like a material or physical cause, shut up to one sole mode of effectuation: it is an alternative power, a pluri-efficient cause. Where, then, is the discrepancy between the universal principle of causality and the doctrine of alternative causation? Is the infinite First Cause confined to one solely possible mode of effectuation? If so, how will you account for the endlessly varied effects which appear in the physical universe? God is the Eternal One; whence the plurality and diversity of his creative acts if He be not an equipotent cause? And yet, of all the events which have transpired in the universe, whether natural or supernatural, we affirm "every event must have had a cause."[530] The endless diversity of effects which originate in the alternative causation of God is in perfect harmony with this universal law of causality.

But on a closer examination it will be found that when the necessitarian attempts to invalidate our consciousness of alternative power by the application of the causational argument he adroitly shifts his ground. He assumes another proposition, which is neither equivalent to the above axiom, nor in itself axiomatic and self-evident, nor justifiably assumed without proof. McCosh says "the doctrine of necessity is founded on the intellectual intuitions of man's mind, which lead us, in mental as in material phenomena, to anticipate the same effects to follow the same causes"[531]—that is, every cause is inalternative or unipotent; one effect, and only one can follow.

Now that a given phenomenon must have a cause is one assertion; that the same cause will again and forever produce the same effect is another. The first is an axiom, the second is an induction. That "every event must have a cause" is a rational intuition. That "like causes will produce always like effects" is a generalization from our limited experience, and on a further analysis will be found to apply only to our cognitions of the material universe. It is grounded simply on what we know empirically of the uniformity of nature. Now we have no à priori intuitive conviction of the uniformity of nature. As the result of maturer thought, McCosh admits this in his work on the "Intuitions of the Mind:" "It is vain to speak of the belief in the uniformity of nature as a self-evident, a necessary, or a universal truth" (page 276). It is perfectly conceivable that the world might have been so constituted that there should have been no regularity in the succession of events. The causes of all the events in nature might have been supernatural, and consisted in the immediate free volitions of the Deity, or subordinate angelic agencies.[532] They might have been all "miraculous," and yet the true law of causality would not have been violated, or in any way invalidated. And so when man, in the exercise of his free alternative power, produces a new succession of events in physical nature, or moves disorder and ἀνομία into the moral sphere, this is no way inconsistent with the axiom that "every event has a cause."

"In our very definition of freedom of will we assume in the volitional sphere the inapplicability of the maxim that 'like causes ever and always produce like effects.' We assume that either one of several effects is legitimate from the same cause. And while we admit that in non-volitional causation the law that 'every event must have a cause' means that every event must have its own peculiar cause, adequate for itself alone, in volitional causation an event may have a cause adequate either for it or for other event; and whichever event exists, the demands of the laws of causation are completely satisfied."[533]

Driven from this boasted stronghold, the necessitarian resorts to his favorite dialectic strategy. He demands the explanation of equipotent causation, how one cause can be adequate to several effects. He asks, What causes the will to put forth one particular volition rather than another?

Now when we have shown that, as a fact of consciousness and experience, a personal, spiritual cause is adequate to several results, we are entitled in reason and justice to protest against any attempt to push the inquiry a step farther. We have attained an ultimate fact, and we have no right to cast doubt upon its authority by raising perplexing questions as to the how or why of that which is. This is precisely the method by which the atheist Holyoake would invalidate the argument for the existence of the infinite First Cause. He subjects the Deity to this universal law of causality, and asks, What caused the Creator to create? "The atheist holds that the universe is an endless series of causes and effects ad infinitum, and therefore the idea of a first cause is an absurdity and a contradiction." The "infinite series" of Edwards and of Holyoake are constructed on the same principle. They both ask a cause for the cause.

When, therefore, it is asked, What causes the will to effect one volition rather than another? our answer is, Nothing whatever!

"Of its own effect, WILL, in its proper conditions, is not a partial, but a full and adequate cause. Put your finger upon any effect (volition) and ask, What caused this result exclusively of the others? and the reply is, The will, or the agent in willing. Ask then what caused the will in its conditions to cause the volition, and the reply is, Nothing. Nay, you are a bad philosopher in asking; for for its own effect will or the willing agent is a complete cause: as complete a cause as any cause whatever; and every complete cause produces its effect UNCAUSEDLY. The volition, like every other effect, is completely accounted for when a complete cause is assigned. To ask what caused the complete cause to produce the effect is to ask the cause of causation."[534]

But such an "alternative" power, the necessitarian affirms, is incomprehensible and inexplicable. To which we need only reply in the language of Hamilton, "The scheme of freedom is not more incomprehensible than the scheme of necessity."[535] "Omnia exeunt in mysterium"—there is nothing the absolute ground of which is not a mystery. In saying so much, however, we by no means grant the affirmation of Hamilton that "we are unable to conceive an absolute commencement [of being or motion]; we can not therefore conceive a free volition."[536] This is not admitted by Mansel, the disciple and annotator of Hamilton, as flowing even from his mental "law of the conditioned." "It may be true, as a fact, that no material atom has been added to the world since the first creation; but the assertion, however true, is certainly not necessary. The Power which created once must be conceived as able to create again, whether that ability is actually exercised or not. The same conclusion is still more evident when we proceed from the consideration of matter to that of mind. Of matter we maintain that the creation of new portions is perfectly conceivable as a result, if not as a process. Every man who comes into the world comes into it as a distinct individual, having a personality and consciousness of his own; and that personality is a distinct accession to the number of persons previously existing.... I believe that every new person that comes into the world is, as a person, a new existence."[537] So a volition is a new existence, an absolute origination, "a beginning of motion" which has its source in the primordial power of the human spirit as spirit. The fact is undeniable, the mode is inexplicable. But the inconceivability of the mode in which the will creates a volition no more renders the fact doubtful than the impossibility of conceiving how a new and distinct self-conscious personality comes into existence invalidates the fact that "I exist, and know myself as a distinctly existing being."

2. The Psychological Argument.—This may be briefly stated in the following terms:

It is a fact of observation and experience that motives do stand to the will in the relation of causes which necessitate volition. They have an exact mathematical commensurability, and their prevalence is in the precise ratio of their antecedent intrinsic strength. If motives are wanting, there can be no choice; but when the same motives are presented to the same mind, it obeys them with such remarkable uniformity that human actions may be reduced to statistical tables as reliable and as accurate as tables of mortality.

We might here at once, and with justice, enter our caveat against the attempt to invalidate a primitive datum of consciousness by alleged deductions from the exterior phenomena of human life and history. A primitive datum of consciousness is unquestionable and infallible. A process of induction is liable to the interpolations of error. The latter is therefore a lesser authority than the former, and a merely derivative assurance can not be argued against an ultimate fact. We must regard it as a philosophic canon that an experience cognition can not conflict with an intuitive belief. The exterior phenomena of life and history, properly interpreted, must harmonize with the interior facts and laws of the human mind, for what is history but the development, under the conditions and relations of time, of the primitive powers, ideas, and laws of humanity? If, then, consciousness attests the presence in man's spiritual nature of a power, in the same circumstances, to choose either of several ways, we may confidently expect that the phenomena of the moral world will not belie that testimony. Now it is a palpable fact that an unbroken law of continuity and uniformity pervades the material universe. It is locked up in an unchangeable status. There is no deviation and no progression. All things remain as they were since the beginning. The fundamental fact lying at the basis of this undeviating uniformity of nature is that material causes are unipotent, and shut up to one solely possible mode of effectuation.[538] And it is equally palpable that the phenomena of the moral world, the sphere of human life and history, reveal contingency, diversity, alteriety, and progression. Humanity has not revolved in cycles, neither has it run in the inflexible grooves of an anterior causation, nor remained in the dead-lock of an unchangeable status. History is not an inflexible frame-work in which all events have been shaped by necessity; it is a development of the inherent powers and capabilities of humanity, and it teaches us that new trains of causes have been originated, and new conditions have been superinduced by man. The ground-fact which underlies all the diversity, contingency, and progress which appear in the moral world is that volitional causes are equipotent and efficient for any one of the several results.[539] In moral development the progressive principle is just the freedom of the will. The facts of the inner and outer world are therefore in harmony.

The theory of the necessitarian assumes that the will is a mere passivity, a simple conductor of the impulse which motive power exerts, a mere transition-point where ideal force is transformed into physical force, and desires, inclinations, moral convictions, divine influences become necessary acts. Motives thus prevail by their antecedent intrinsic power just as physical forces prevail in mechanical and vital dynamics. And, proceeding upon this assumption, he labors to construct a science of Ethology in which he would anticipate human action by statistics, and show how individual character must be in accordance with physical and mental causation. Whereas consciousness asserts that the will "is not a bleak mechanical thing." It is a free alternative power. It is a full, complete, adequate cause. It is spirit, not matter.

Now it is freely granted that the mind acts in view of motives, acts in accordance with motives, acts in a certain qualified sense under the influence of motives; but the freedomist emphatically denies that the will is necessitated to action by motives. Motives may be reason for action, conditions under which will acts, but they are not causes of action. They may solicit, invite, urge to action, but they can not constrain, compel, and force action.[540]

Motives have no fixed correlation to the will. They address themselves to the feelings, the judgment, the conscience, and not directly and immediately to the will. They may awaken desire, fear, inclination, preference, a sense of obligation; but these are all states of the intellect and sensibility, and may coexist in the same mind with a state of indetermination and non-differentiation in the will. That which is desirable may appeal to the feelings, that which is eligible to the judgment, that which is obligatory to the conscience, and these may excite the mind in different degrees of intensity; but none of them have power to move the will. We may be able intellectually to perceive that some motives are intrinsically "higher" than others, that some have a prevolition power to excite all minds more intensely than others; but they do not prevail and secure action in any ratio with their supposed à priori strength. They can only become real motives for the will by its voluntary placing its interest in them and making them objects of its choice.[541] All the actual strength which a motive has is derived from the action of the will. On this subject we offer the following propositions:

(1.) The so-called strength of a motive is the degree of probability that the will will act in accordance with or on account of it. "And it is most important to remark that the result is not always, nor in most cases, necessarily as the highest probability. The will may choose for the higher or for the lower. And as the will may choose for a lower rather than a higher probability, so the will may choose on account of what is called antecedently a weaker over a stronger motive. And hereby is once for all established the difference between mechanical force and motive influence—that whereas in the former, by necessity, the greater effect results from the greater force, in the latter the less is possible from the greater, the greater from the less."[542] That result is not as the highest probability Dr. Whedon has shown most conclusively from the doctrine of Contingencies or Probabilities. And on this he grounds his doctrine of contingent motive probability. "This contingent character of motive influence is correspondent with the alternative character of that which is its sole possible object—will. An alternative will and a contingent motive influence are correlatives. They mutually explain and sustain each other. To admit either is to admit both. And so a unipotent will and a necessary motive influence are correlatives. He who is compelled to admit one is compelled to admit the other. It will be a mere controversy about a word to say that an influence which does not produce effect is no influence. That may legitimately be called an influence, it is important to add, which is conceived as possessing an intrinsic probability for result, though the higher probability be a contingency for which there exists power of failure. If so, then the doctrine of contingent motive influence is established, and the doctrine of volitional necessity is at an end. The relation between physical force and effect is necessity. The relation between motive and volition is contingency."[543]

(2.) The so-called strength of a motive is the comparative prevalence which the will assigns to it by its own action. It is impossible to erect any standard by which the intrinsic "strength" of motives can be determined previous to volition. "A cold intellection is not intrinsically commensurable with a deep emotion, nor a sentiment of taste with a feeling of obligation, nor a physical appetite with a sense of honor." Now by what standard can the comparative force of these influences be determined? There is no more commensurability between them than between "the brightness of day and the force of magnetic attractions." Or if we could possibly determine, by some rational à priori method, that a feeling of obligation is intrinsically stronger than a physical appetite, or that the love of life is stronger per se than a sense of duty, we can not affirm that the one or the other shall therefore uniformly and necessarily prevail. These influences derive all their prevalency, and consequently their comparative strength of motive, from the will alone. The will places its interest in the one or the other. It decides the mental position. "It settles the question of preferences between alternatives, dismisses the counter-motive from view, and closes the debate."[544]

The "strength" of a motive, in its relation to the will, can only be known by the test of prevalency. This is unwittingly conceded by the necessitarian. He says "the strongest motive prevails because that is the strongest which the will chooses." This really concedes the position assumed by Dr. Whedon, that "the strength of a motive is the comparative prevalence which the will, in its own action, assigns to it, or the nearness to which the will comes to acting on account of it." Men do not always choose that which is most desirable, nor that which is most eligible, nor that which appears most obligatory. But from whatever motive men may choose to act, however base and unworthy, the necessitarian affirms it was intrinsically the strongest motive because it was chosen; which simply amounts to this—the strongest motive is always chosen because the motive chosen is always the strongest motive.

The attempts of the necessitarian to fix upon some standard by which to estimate the antecedent strength of motives have all signally failed. The most plausible is that of Edwards. He asserts that the volition is always as the greatest apparent good. But by what standard is that good estimated, by which faculty is it recognized and pronounced good? by the reason, the conscience, the judgment, or the appetites? Can that be pronounced good which is chosen in obedience to passion and lust? Does the man who inflicts a premeditated injury upon his neighbor choose the greatest apparent good? Does the murderer believe that in taking away the life of his fellow-man "the volition is as the greatest apparent good?" Certainly not. "Never," says Bushnell, "was there a case of wrong, a sinful choice, in which the agent believed he was choosing for the strongest, weightiest, or most valuable motives." The great mass of sinful men are conscious of choosing sinful indulgence against their "highest good."

(3.) Motives are the conditions, but not the causes of volition. "Of volition the cause, the sole cause, is will. Motives are collateral conditions ... for the volition to be; with which there is adequate power for the volition not to be.... The motive is only the occasion, and all its acts of excitement amount to no more than this, that they stand as probable conditions opening the way toward which the will thereby acquires opportunity to act with full adequate power of not acting."[545] The relation between motive and volition is not a necessary but a contingent relation. The will is the controlling conscious self in the exercise of direct causative power in producing volition.

Some modern writers of the necessitarian school, McCosh for example, admit the existence of "self-activity" in the will. But what can be the meaning of "self-activity" if the will have not the power of either resisting or yielding to motives presented, and in the same unchanged circumstances of choosing a different alternative? To be moved absolutely by motives is not self-movement. A power to move in only one given direction is a mere nature-force; it can not be self-activity. The distinguished writer above named also admits that "causation in the will is entirely different from causation in other actions."[546] If he mean that motives act upon the will in a manner "entirely different" from that by which physical causes secure action or change in the material world, what right has he to call it causation at all? And if he mean that volitional causation is "alternative," and not, like physical causation, "unipotent," then the controversy is at an end.

(4.) We have no such experience of "uniformities of volition" as shall enable us to generalize a universal law of volitional causation. The facts of uniformity which present themselves in the continuous life of some men who were absorbed in one great life-purpose, as also in the conduct of aggregate masses of men, are not denied. We affirm that the correct definition of a free will supposes that it may choose in a generally uniform manner. Much of the uniformity in the life of an individual may be accounted for by corporeal nature—disposition, standard purpose, and habit. "Upon a basis of corporeal, psychological, and mental nature are overlaid a primary stratum of dispositions blending the natural and the volitional, and a secondary formation of generic purposes wholly volitional, and formed by repetition into a tertiary of habits; and thus we have, in his mingled constitution of necessitation and freedom, an agent prepared for daily free responsible action."[547]

Now it may be readily granted that character forms a basis of reliable probability as to how in given circumstances a man will act. We may be able to judge, with some degree of accuracy, how a man will work in his freedom; but we can never calculate with absolute certainty, because we have numberless examples of men acting strangely "out of character," and disappointing our most confident expectations.

"There is often the action, great or small, which reverses the record of a life or a protracted course of action. He who well watches his neighbor, however blind he may be to his own practical self-contradictions, is sure to find, even in the life most uniform in its great outline, plenty of minor inconsistencies. Or as Müller, in his 'Doctrine of Sin,' well says, that both our observation and our subject's temptation may occur just at the moment of one of his great volitional turning-points. From the apostasy of the first angels and the fall of man, through the whole course of human history, we have innumerable instances of revolutionary volitions, not only out of the previous character, but shaping a new character. The one disastrous sin of Moses, the one great complicated crime of David, the apostasy of Solomon, the wisest of men, are all proofs how, not only in contrasted traits, but in revolutionary acts, a man may be

Statistics are cited by Buckle, in his "History of Civilization in England," showing that crimes, suicides, marriages, etc., occur with remarkable uniformity, as the result of general conditions of human society; and he thence infers that all the actions of men are governed by a uniform law of causation. This uniformity may, however, be as easily accounted for on the doctrine of freedom as on the doctrine of necessity. In the calculations of contingencies, while results of compared large aggregates in the same conditions may approach equality, the contingency of each individual case remains still a contingency. The actuary of an insurance company can assert with accuracy the average duration of human life in different countries; but were he to attempt to predict the duration of any one individual life he had insured, he would certainly fail. The insured may falsify his predictions by a voluntary act of suicide. So though large aggregations of free volitions, surrounded by the same motives, may approach equality, the freedom of the individual will remains.[549]

And as Mansel very justly remarks, "it is precisely because individual actions are not reducible to any fixed law, or capable of representation by any numerical calculation, that the statistical averages acquire their value as substitutes. No one dreams of applying statistical averages to calculate the period of the earth's rotation by showing that four-and-twenty hours is the exact medium of time, comparing one month's or one year's revolution with another's. It is only when individual movements are irregular that it is necessary to aim at a proximate regularity by calculating in mass."[550]

3. The Theological Argument.—The main points of the theological argument may be thus presented: Freedom in a created being is incompatible with the absolute sovereignty and prescience of God. To suppose a being capable of acting either of several ways is to suppose a being out of the control of God. And a free agent can not possess power to do otherwise than God foreknows he will do.

In regard to the first of these supposed incompatibilities, we need only remark that if the Deity, in order to the existence of an equitable moral government, and the consequent possibility of free responsible action by the creature, shall please to subject his omnipotence to conditional limitations, the necessitarian has no business to object.[551] We need feel no solicitude about the Divine sovereignty. God will take care of his own honor and defend his own high and holy prerogatives. Such self-limiting laws prescribed by Divine wisdom and love do not place man beyond Divine control. The necessitarian will not deny that such self-limitation is essential to the very existence of the kingdom of nature. God has established an order in nature, a uniformity of antecedence and sequence, with which Omnipotence shall not interfere. "Such a Divine law of non-usance of power is still more necessary in the kingdom of living agents, and most of all in the realm of responsible agents; it being observable that the more close the Divine self-restraint, and the larger the amount of powers in the agent left untouched, the more the creative system rises in dignity, and the higher God appears as a sovereign. Even in the system of living necessitated agents, as necessitarians must admit, God forbids Himself to disturb the agent's uniform and perpetual acting according to strongest motive."

The second of these incompatibilities is really predicated upon our ignorance, and not upon our knowledge. We can not understand how the Divine Intelligence foreknows all future events. To enable us to understand the exact manner in which an Infinite Intelligence contemplates succession in time, it would be necessary that we should be infinite also. The fact that God foreknows all future events is all that is revealed to us; the manner of it He has left in darkness, and we can throw no light upon it by our verbal speculations.

Of one thing we may rest assured, that as perception precedes volition in the finite intelligence, so knowledge must precede determination in the Divine Mind. God can not will or act in absolute darkness. Divine predestination must be conditioned on Divine foreknowledge.[552] His foreknowledge does not depend upon his will, or on the adjustment of motives to make us will thus and thus; but He foreknows every thing first conditionally, in the world of possibility, before He creates, or determines any thing to be, in the world of fact. Otherwise, all his purposes would be grounded in ignorance, not in wisdom, and his knowledge would consist in following after his will, to learn what it had blindly determined.[553]

Another important principle clearly and vigorously maintained by Dr. Whedon is "that the freeness of an act is not affected by the consideration of its being foreknown." First, because the Divine knowledge must always correspond to the reality. A free action must be known as free. "If there be in the free agent, ascertainable by psychology, or required by intuition, or supposably seen by the Divine eye, the power of putting forth the volition with full power of alteriety, then God knows that power."[554] Secondly, the occurrence of an event or act may be certain to Divine foreknowledge, and yet perfectly contingent in itself. Foreknowledge renders nothing necessary; it is the consequence, not the cause of events.

If there be a necessity at all in the case, "the necessity lies not upon the free act, but upon the foreknowledge. The foreknowledge must see to its own accuracy. Pure knowledge, temporal or eternal, must conform itself to the fact, not the fact to the knowledge."[555] The real difficulty is, not how an act can be a free act and yet be foreknown (for the act of knowledge can not change the object of knowledge), but how God can possibly know with certainty a future contingency which may or may not happen.

It is a clear and immediate revelation of consciousness that man has a free power of self-determination. No revelation can contradict this revelation. This fact of consciousness can not be invalidated by any conceptions of the logical understanding in regard to the omnipotence or prescience of God, for these by their very nature transcend all human comprehension.

III. The method of moral government.—We have seen that government, in general, is control exercised with a view to the maintenance of order. In the material world, order is secured by the direct compulsion of omnipotent force. The things of nature are inertly passive under the hand of God. They can offer no resistance to the Divine control, and consequently, in the sphere of nature, there can be no real disorder. But in the realm of self-determining powers there is the possibility of collision, because there is the power to resist the will of God. And, as a matter of fact, we know there is opposition, lawlessness, and sin. In that sphere, where above all others the demand of the reason is for order, there is the presence of disorder—that is, there is disconformity to law and consequent suffering.

And now the question arises, By what method is order to be maintained in the sphere of freedom? How are beings that have the power to determine for themselves what they will choose and do, to be brought to act in harmony with the eternal laws of righteousness and love?

There are inconsiderate souls who dream that this may be achieved by force. God, say they, is omnipotent; if He will the non-extension of evil, He is able to destroy it; if He desire the maintenance of moral order, He can compel it. Such reckless declaimers know not what they say.

Had it so pleased God, He could have made beings in human form without any sense of moral right and wrong, and without any power to commit sin; but they would not have been rational beings, would not have been free beings, would not have been moral beings; neither could they, in any high and proper sense, be happy beings, because they could experience no sense of rectitude, no approval of conscience, no delight in moral excellence, no blessedness in duty and sacrifice. God, indeed, has made many such creatures that can not sin. The bee, the ant, the swine, the ape—these can not sin; but they are mere things, not free powers; they have no sense of dignity and moral worth, no approving conscience, no joy of sacrifice, and no immortal hopes. Lived there ever a sane man who would change his lot with one of these, even though in being a man he has the fearful power to sin, and in sinning, the fearful susceptibility to suffer—yea, to suffer eternally? Is there any thing on earth whose value does not fade away when compared with the priceless value of being capable of duty, of virtue, of devotion, and of sacrifice? In the eyes of God, the humblest of moral beings is worth more than all the firmament of stars, and all the teeming myriads of brutal forms of sense that dwell upon the earth. Because God preferred to rule over free powers, and not mere things—free powers that could be governed by truth and reason and love; because He loves moral character, and cares for it more than all the things "that can be piled in the infinitude of space, even though they were diamonds," therefore He bestowed on man this high capacity of character—the capacity to know, to choose, to love, to enjoy, and in a conscious communion with God to be blessed forever.

But when God thus determines to create a rational and free being—to make "man in his own image"—He determines to make a being who in acting freely may act in opposition to the mind of God, and in violation of his holy law. In creating a free self-determined being who shall be the cause of his own action, God puts his own omnipotence under conditional limitations, and renders it morally impossible for Him, by mere force, to constrain the will of man. The notion of a free will, which is an efficient cause, being governed by force, is a contradiction. Omnipotence may, if it please, annihilate man, but it can not control man in the sphere of his freedom. "Powers governed by the absolute force or fiat of omnipotence would in that fact be uncreate and cease."[556]

The moral government of God must deal with man as man, must treat him as intelligent and free, and must govern him solely by moral influences. He must be controlled by the voice of reason and the sense of duty, by persuasion and sympathy, by hope and fear; in short, by motives addressed to the judgment, the conscience, and the heart. A self-determined being can be brought into harmony with the Divine order only by "the schooling of his consent." He can be perfected—that is, fully established in harmony with the character and will of God—by the discipline of the will. He must, therefore, be placed in such circumstances as invite consent, and at the same time permit resistance. He is to be trained, furnished, and perfected, and to this end he must be carried through just such experiences, changes, and trials as will best help the formation of a noble human character, and will best prepare man for the plenitude and blessedness of that life for which the present is a course of education and discipline.[557]

Furthermore, God's moral government of the world must deal with the actual man—that is, with man as he exists in society with certain hereditary taints that are not his fault, and under certain unfavorable conditions in which he has been placed without his consent. With reverence, we affirm that God Himself is under moral obligation to treat man equitably, to take account of the weakness which he inherits, the perverted education that has been given him, and the depraved associations that surround him, and graduate his responsibility on the scale of his available light. Finally, the moral government of God must deal with the man that will be—with that fixed character which may be formed by man in the exercise of his free power of self-determination, amid the circumstances of his earthly probation. This character must contain within itself the elements of a blessed or a wretched futurition, and thus a retribution be secured by fixed nature, and inflicted by an inflexible necessity.

That the moral government of God is a probationary economy, in which ample scope is afforded for the development of character, and in which we are in the act of being proved, is evident,

(1.) From the fact that all our future interests are dependent upon our present conduct. God has endowed us with some degree of foresight, and has thus made us provident beings. We have a native tendency to take account of and forecast the future. By the aid of reason we can, in some measure, foresee the tendencies of our actions; we can lay our plans for the future, and anticipate events which are yet remote. We can also bring to our aid the lessons of experience, and from this also we can learn that our present action will have a powerful influence upon our future condition. We know that the circumstances which surround us to-day have been in a large degree created or moulded by ourselves, and that many of our misadventures and our miseries may be easily traced back to particular acts of imprudence and folly on our own part as the cause. So that there is no truth we more certainly know than this, that our future happiness of the next moment, and of every succeeding stage of our living, is dependent upon our present conduct.

(2.) This is further evident from the fact that the present scene is filled with moral tests and temptations. There is in the present life an admixture of good and evil. On the one hand there are numerous solicitations to evil; on the other there are motives and inducements to virtue, the plain intention of which is to prove us. In the words of Bishop Butler, "We have here free scope and opportunity for that good or evil conduct which God will reward or punish hereafter." This is necessary to moral government, because moral government can not exist without freedom of choice, and consequently the existence of those circumstances in which that freedom can be exercised. That we have freedom of choice we know; and our every-day experience of the temptations to wrong-doing, and of the difficulties in the way of a uniform adherence to virtue, teaches us that we are in a state of trial, where our principles are being continually put to the test.

(3.) That our present life is a probation for a future life is evident from the fact that in the present life punishment is deferred, consequences are delayed, to give play to the exercise of moral motives.

By "moral motives" we mean regard for what is right and just, because it is right and just, respect for the voice of conscience, and reverence for the will and requirements of God. If the consequences of our moral conduct were to follow immediately on the heels of the act, if reward or punishment were instantly to ensue, then moral motives could have no exercise. If there were no delay—no interval between sin and its punishment, moral government would cease, and a merely natural government would remain, such as prevails over irrational creatures. Man would then be influenced purely by motives of personal interest or safety or enjoyment, and his obedience would not be the result of moral motives, consequently neither virtuous nor vicious. God has, therefore, put the consequences of much of our conduct into the future, that we may have room for free deliberate choice, while just so much of consequence is permitted to appear as will clearly indicate that we are under moral government, and awaken the anticipation that all our conduct will be brought into judgment.

(4.) That our present life is a probation for a future life is more fully proved by the fact that as a moral economy the present life is incomplete. The present is a sphere too contracted for the equitable administration of rewards and punishments, because some of the last actions of men's lives, some of their best actions or some of their basest actions, would come under neither. The blood of the martyrs who died for the faith, or of the patriot who bled for his country, would cry alike in vain for vengeance or reward. The man who first took away his brother's life, and then his own, has evaded justice, and escaped punishment. The hand of violence has robbed the virtuous man of his present reward; and the suicide, by breaking in upon the sanctuary of his own life, has defied and defeated the government of God, if there be no future life.

In the present life retribution fails in uniformity. It is a proposition which the reason of every man must approve—that the government of God must be perfectly equitable, and that under it every man must receive his just due. But men do not receive their requital in this life, consequently we are bound to affirm that in the present life the Divine administration is incomplete. We can not conceal from ourselves the fact that events occur in the present life which we can not conceive as benevolently or righteously consummated. These events lift the tyrant to power, and trample down the patriot and the freeman. The orphan eats the bitter bread of misery, while the man who has robbed him of the paternal inheritance revels in luxury. The ungodly prosper in the world, "their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish," while the righteous suffer affliction, and are in need. And if there is no future life in which God will balance accounts with the universe, and render to every man according to his works, then moral government is incomplete, injustice has triumphed, wrong has prevailed. An imperfect retribution and an unequal providence demand a future life for their vindication—a future life both for the good and the bad, so that God may reckon with all of them—and teach most convincingly that the present life is a probation. The experiences, changes, conflicts, trials of a probationary economy, are all intended to prove men, to test their principles and make manifest their real character.

The government of God is a moral discipline by which men are trained in the practice and confirmed in the habits of virtue, and thus brought, by the "schooling of their own consent," into harmony with the Divine order.

It is a question which may be properly entertained, whether a free self-determined being can be made perfect in moral character in any other manner than by the discipline of the will. There certainly can be no created moral desert. Responsible character must be the product of free choice. A man can no more become virtuous without the discipline of the will than he can become intelligent without the discipline of the understanding. For wherein consists the virtue of a self-determined being? Is it not in his free choice of what is right and good, his resistance to temptation, his voluntary submission to the Divine will? Is it not in his integrity, his patience, his fortitude, and his resignation? But how can these virtues exist, how can they be exercised, and how brought to maturity, except in the midst of difficulties and hinderances? Where can patience and resignation and fortitude and sympathy have a place, if there are no sufferings to be endured? How can firmness and diligence and courage be developed, if there are no difficulties and hinderances to the practice of virtue?

Therefore, in order that men may be trained and educated and perfected, they are placed amid such scenes, experiences, and trials as shall draw out the moral powers of the soul, shall strengthen and confirm the will in goodness, and establish them in the law of their being, so that their moral future is secure. "Life, thus ordered, is a magnificent scheme to bring out the value of law, and teach the necessity of right as the only conserving principle of order and happiness; teaching the more powerfully, if so it must, by disorder and sorrow." Suffering is a chastisement which is wholesome: it teaches the blessedness of purity and the sinfulness of sin; and it may develop into "a godly sorrow" which shall heal and purify the soul.

The moral government of God is an equitable administration, in which responsibility is graduated on the scale of available light and opportunity. "This is the condemnation that light is come into the world." Light is the symbol of knowledge, because it reveals the right and clearly manifests what duty is. Light is consequently the exact measure of responsibility. Our knowledge of what we ought to do, or ought not to do, determines the degree of our accountability. An absolute and involuntary ignorance would be the most perfect plea of innocence. The imputation of sin in such a case would be made void, but thereby the completeness of human nature be destroyed. That which would relegate man from the sphere of responsibility would also banish him from the sphere of rationality.

St. Paul distinctly recognizes an alleviation of responsibility and guilt in the "ignorance" of heathen life, and speaks of a Divine "overlooking of the times of that ignorance"—a non-imputation of sins committed in ignorance. But he does not by any means account the sinning heathen as free from all guilt. He shows that they were not in utter ignorance, and that much of their ignorance was voluntary. He refers to the original consciousness of God, and to the fact that this consciousness is kept alive by the revelation of God in nature; and he shows that the disorder of their religious and moral life resulted from the voluntary suppression of this consciousness—"When they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened." He also appeals to the no less definite power of conscience in the heart of the heathen, "which shows the works required by the law to be written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness to this law, and their thoughts approving or condemning each other," and their civil laws "adjudging their crimes as worthy of death." So far as their ignorance was involuntary it was an alleviation of guilt, though not an excuse for all sin. Whatever light they had, be it little or much, it was the standard and measure of their accountability.

The Founder of Christianity distinctly recognized this principle of moral government. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin"—clearly teaching that ignorance would be a negation of guilt, and knowledge an aggravation of guilt. Not that we are to suppose that the Jews, without the light which Christ supplied, were absolutely guiltless; their ignorance was a mitigation of their guilt. Christ lays it down as a universal principle that knowledge of the Divine law or ignorance of the Divine law by the person who violates it is the ground of a distinction in the different degrees of culpability. "That servant which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes."[558] This is the uniform rule of the Divine government among all nations.

Increase of light and knowledge necessarily enhances human responsibility. "To whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." More is expected of the man than of the child. More is demanded at the hands of the man who has been blessed with the advantages of a Christian civilization than from the untutored savage. The man who has been favored with a liberal education is held to a more rigid account than the man who has been cradled in ignorance and schooled in vice. And when the kingdom of God comes nigh to men, human responsibility must be enlarged in commensuration with its blessings. There is a holier, richer trust, and consequently a deeper obligation. There is a greater light and a greater condemnation.

"Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works which have been done in thee had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for thee."[559]

This aspect of the Divine government, which Dr. Whedon has felicitously styled "the equation of probational advantages," relieves our sadness in view of the moral condition of the world. "The Judge of all the earth will do right" in the case of every human soul that has passed through this probationary scene. His omniscient eye can take in at one view all the influences and circumstances, favorable or unfavorable, which have surrounded each individual, and fix the precise amount of responsibility. He will "overlook" the "defect of doubt and taints of blood," the faults of education and sins of ignorance, and He will make a due allowance for the power of temptation, the trammels of evil associations, and an enfeebled and perverted nature. "He is full of compassion, and his tender mercies are over all his works." "He knows our frame, and He remembers that we are dust." We may safely conjecture that a negro hamlet in Central Africa, however inferior in its temporal moral aspects, may, in its prospect for an eternal destiny, be superior to many an American village. And in the dregs of our large cities there are numbers who are excluded as effectually from the knowledge of the truth as the heathen, and are scarcely developed to the level of responsibility. These may be the least in the kingdom of heaven, but by the law of moral equation they can not be excluded.[560] In every nation under heaven, he that has feared God and wrought righteousness, according to his knowledge and ability, will be "accepted of God."

The moral government of God secures an infallible and equitable retribution by binding character and consequence in indissoluble bonds, and evolving a reward or a punishment out of that permanent moral state of the soul which has been induced by the free self-determination of man.

"Character," says Novalis, "is a completely fashioned will (vollkommen gebildeter Wille). It is that ultimate stress and determination of the soul which results from the coherence and complexure of habits, and habit is the result of repeated acts of voluntary choice. From the persistence of habit a fixed disposition and cast of the inner man is evolved which constitutes his moral individuality."

Even in this formative process we can discern the workings of the law of retribution. One good deed handsels a second, and renders its performance more easy and pleasurable. The man who obeys his conscience feels that he can respect himself. He has a consciousness of growing power; a sense of dignity and moral worth. The moral law is for him "a law of liberty." On the other hand, one sinful deed involves a second, and drags it after it. One lie demands another to maintain its consistency. One act of injustice emboldens to the next. Self-respect is broken down by license, and the path is prepared and cleared for further iniquity. Thus, by the repetition of sinful deeds, restraints are overborne, depraved habits are engendered, vice acquires a mastery over the man, and he becomes a slave. There is a deep humiliation in this sense of degradation and unworthiness. The sinner despises himself because of his weakness, and blushes in secret places at the remembrance of his own debasement.

The principal happiness or misery of man consists in the settled state of his own heart, and not in the outward conditions of his daily life. All human plaudits are as naught compared with the approval of one's own conscience; and no penal inflictions can compare with the anguish of remorse. The inward peace of the righteous soul, the disquietude and misery of the sinful soul, are the blossom and the fruitage of the seed which has been sown, and the stem and branches which have been nurtured by the voluntary choices and acts of man. "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting." The connection between sin and punishment is no arbitrary or accidental connection. It is just as much a relation between cause and effect as the relation between sowing and reaping in the physical world. "To cause the mind to punish itself, to work a retribution out of ourselves, to secure it by fixed nature, to inflict it by inflexible necessity, to convert the capacity of sin into the instrument of suffering, is the prerogative of Divine rule."[561]

IV. The end of moral government.—We have said that the end of government, in general, is the maintenance of order. The end of moral government is the maintenance of moral order in the realm of free self-determined powers. The moral order must consist in conformity to the idea of the absolute good. The personality of God (the essential momenta of which are reason and freedom, holiness and love) is per se, in its totality, the absolute good. Infinite Personality is but another name for Absolute Perfection.

The highest good for a created dependent personality is "to resemble God" in all those attributes or perfections which constitute personality. It is to be fully established in harmony with God's moral character, unified with Him in will, glorified with Him in holiness, and perfected with Him in the blessedness of love. The highest perfection of personal being is moral order, and therefore human personality, conceived in its purity and perfection, is the end of the Divine government.[562]

This we have called "the ideal order of moral life," because it is not yet realized in the world. We must believe, however, that the final triumph of goodness is a part of the great world-plan. We must not only believe, but know, that the great design of creation, the reason for which the world exists at all, is that in it goodness may come to its final realization. And this conviction is grounded on the fact that the moral life of humanity has its source in the same Being who called the world into existence, and who is conducting this present dispensation to a glorious consummation, in which He shall "reconcile all things unto Himself,... whether they be things in earth or things in heaven," and "gather together in one all things in Christ," that "God may be all in all."

Christianity bases all the obligations and sanctions of morality on the great truths that God is near to man, that He sustains him every moment in life, that He is the Father of the human spirit, and that He governs man in order to perfect his nature and bring him into an everlasting fellowship with Himself. Christianity knows nothing of "a science of morals" which is not based upon the correlations between man and God, nor of a morality which forgets God and disregards the most sacred and fundamental of all duties, namely, the duties we owe to God. A morality based solely upon the relations in which we stand to our fellow-men is at best but secular and utilitarian. A morality which is grounded upon the relation of volition to the state of the sensibility, and regards "happiness as our being's end and aim," is egoistic and selfish. A morality which rests upon our relation to God, the absolute good, and which looks backward rather than forward for its motive, is unselfish and Christian.