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devoting his constant and total activity to the welfare of his fellows in loving service, thus obeying the perfect law of love and liberty, and thus attaining, as an unsought consequence, both his own and their happiness. The ideal of an

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ultimate and absolute good is that of a complete organism whose members coöperate in entire harmony; which implies the fulfilling by every organ of its normal functions, and hence the perfect wholeness of the organism. It denotes, negatively, the absence of all discord, of all impurity; positively, the perfection of functional activity.1 In the moral sphere, each rational being is himself an organized whole, and also an organized member of wider organisms. since in every organic whole each member is at once means and end to every other, the law of an intelligent organism requires that each member become voluntarily an active imparting means, as well as a passive receptive end. Herein is the ideal of welfare, and the sphere of the moral law, which commands every man to seek, not his own, but another's weal.2 Its observance regards that wholeness which is the summum bonum.

The correlative concomitant of wholeness or holiness is beatitude or blessedness. This is more than happiness, as holiness is more than virtue. Virtue implies a struggle, and a virtuous being is still under and continuously endeavoring to conform to the law. But in holy beings there is no struggle, they are not under the law, but dwell in a realm of perfect love, liberty and bliss.

1 See supra, §§ 15, 16.

2 See 1 Corinthians, 10: 24, 33, and Galatians, 6 : 2.

8 Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus, bk. ii, ch. 9, notes a difference between happiness and blessedness. Hesiod and Homer, in speaking of the gods, call them, in an absolute sense, μákapes, blessed ones.

CHAPTER XIII

DEITY

§ 98. The existence of God is a postulate of Ethics.1 A speculative system may be evolved from the mere conception of a deity, a conception such as is found, with many modifications and varying in degree from obscure to clear, in every human mind. But a true ethical theory, thoroughly established as a correct representation of its matter, to be complete and fully rounded out in accord with the demands of philosophical system, must posit as essential, not merely the conception, but the reality of Deity. We might adopt, relative to ethical system, the saying of Voltaire that "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he does exist."

In modern times the attempt has been made, especially by the Comteists, to devise a system of humanitarian ethics, shutting out even the thought of God. To give such scheme philosophic unity and completeness, its authors have been necessitated to find a common end for all lines of moral activity, and they propose the general welfare of Humanity. This Humanity is personified, and set up as an object of reverence, and even of worship.2 Or the deity recognized in the affairs of the world is "the Stream of Tendency that

1 See supra, § 13.

2 See Frederick Harrison's Apologia pro nostra Fide, in Fortnightly Review for Nov., 1888. In a work by H. Gruber, Der Positivimus, u. s. w., 1891, may be seen an account of the ceremonies of the orthodox positivists of France and England. They have their liturgy, prayers, sacraments, pilgrimages, everything but God; his place is supplied by Humanity.

makes for righteousness," which is "the Eternal, not ourselves." 1 A modified view substitutes "the Unknowable," which, notwithstanding the negation, is defined to be “formative force, working according to its inner necessity."2 But it is very certain that a generalized abstraction, rhetorically personified by a capital letter, will never satisfy the minds and hearts of men, nor even meet the demands of a godless philosophy. Such proposed end of human endeavor is at most either a logical generalization, gathering up in an abstract formula the moral causes manifest in secular history, or an enfeebled pantheism. True ethical theory, however, arises, not from impersonal generalities, but from individual men and combinations of rational beings in their actual relations; not from intellectual abstractions, but from concrete realities the most vivid and stern.3

1 Matthew Arnold.

2 Herbert Spencer.

8"If, as is the case," wrote Cardinal Newman, "we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is one to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If in doing wrong we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if on doing right we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind which follows on receiving praise from a father—we certainly have within us the image of some Person to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smiles we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings within us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being."

"Man is not mere understanding," says Professor Paulsen, "he is above everything else a willing and feeling being. Feelings of humility, reverence, yearnings after perfection, with which his heart is inspired by the contemplation of nature and history, determine his attitude to reality more immediately and profoundly than the concepts and formulæ of science. Out of these feelings arises the trust that the world is not a meaningless play of blind forces, but the revelation of a great and good being whom he may acknowledge as akin to his own innermost essence."

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"Our human consciousness," says Professor Findlay, "being without a counterpart or explanation in the world of nature, reaches out to some over

One point may be particularly noticed. Ethical schemes that do not recognize a personal sovereign Deity are unable to provide for the perfect administration of justice; they find no court of appeal beyond the consensus of men. Now, from the patriarchal day of Job until this late and enlightened day of ours, it has been and still is the common conviction of thoughtful observers that the distribution of rewards and punishments, the avenging of wrongs, the adjustment of claims, in the historical life of our race, fail of righteousness. But such is the profound faith of mankind in the ultimate triumph of the principle of universal justice that this further conviction prevails: There must of necessity be a supreme court of appeal which shall, in an after life, administer retribution, vindicate justice, and establish righteousness. Unless there be such provision, there is no ground for faith in the unity and supremacy of moral law.1

§ 99. The ethical theory herein proposed posits as essential the real existence of a personal Deity. The one eternal God, from everlasting to everlasting, the almighty maker of the world, himself a spirit and the father of our spirit, the founder and center of all truth, the supreme ruler and final judge, unfailing in strict justice while abounding in tender mercy, a perfect person conscious of holiness and ruling in love he it is on whom an intelligent faith rests as the

consciousness, some personal God in whom it may rest and find its element. The finite spirit demands the infinite, as each atom of matter the boundless space." See supra, § 50, note.

1 "In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law; but 'tis not so above:
There is no shuffling, there the action lies

In his true nature, and we ourselves compell'd
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults
To give in evidence."

- Hamlet, Act iii, sc. 3, 1. 67 sq.

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original source of authority, as legislator, judge and executor in one, who shall finally perfect all righteousness.

To those objecting to the anthropomorphic character of this conception, a sufficient reply is that no other kind of notion is possible to the human mind. For us God is thus, or he is not. Holding this to be the true conception does not degrade the Deity to the human rank, but lifts the He has made us in his image, a little human to the divine. lower than divinity, that in his likeness we may become partakers in his glory.1

Should it be objected that the introduction of a supernatural element into an explanation of natural phenomena is unscientific, we admit this to be true of physical science, which is concerned with second causes only, having no reBacon in his Organum, and Newton course to a first cause. in his Principia, make frequent and devout reference to the Deity, though not as a factor in their systems; but Laplace, it is said, when asked by Napoleon why he made no reference to God in his Méchanique Céleste, replied: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis. So the physics of to-day very prop

1 Nothing less than personality in the Deity will satisfy humanity. Pantheism freely uses the name of God, and Spinoza, perhaps the most famous of pantheists, was surnamed "the God intoxicated." But this God is not our God. The God of the pantheist is Nature, impersonal, unconscious, necessitated. See infra, § 142. Pantheism can never be a religion, meeting the demand of the soul for a sympathizing person as an object of adoration, petition, worship. "If we will but listen attentively, we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite, a love of God. Whether the etymology which the ancients gave of the Greek word veρwños, man, be true or not (they derived it from ỏ vw ȧ0ρŵv, he who looks upward); certain it is that what makes man to be man, is that he alone can turn his face to heaven; certain it is that he alone yearns for something that neither sense nor reason can supply." - MAX MÜLLER, Science of Religion, Lec. 1.

"Pronaque cùm spectent animalia cætera terram,

Os homini sublime dedit, cœlumque tueri

Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere valtus."

-OVID, Metamorphoseon, i, 2.

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