able distinction between good and evil and sets him to studying what that law requires; beneath that command to be a good boy and giving it significance, is the law of God. Note the immense difference between an education which says "Be a good boy," and that which should say, "Be rich, my boy"; or, "Seek your own pleasure, my boy"; or "Never mind whether you are good or bad, my boy." The dawning of the knowledge of duty in a child's mind is like the dawning of the day.

2. The formal principle declares the real principle to be law. It is not mere advice to love God and your neighbor; it is not merely the didactic information that love is beautiful, agreeable or profitable. It is law, Thou shalt; it is law, declared by the authority of God and enforced by penalty for disobedience. Without this strength and authority of law, righteousness is displaced by the desire to please, virtue liquefies into a gush of feeling, and love is dissolved into mere amiableness and sentimentality.

3. It recognizes the important aspect of virtue as doing duty, as obedience to law, as subjection to rightful authority, as loyalty to government; and, on the part of the administrators of government, the enactment, maintenance and enforcement of just laws. Loyalty etymologically means fidelity to law. Loyalty to a person is a secondary meaning of the word, and is inferior in dignity to loyalty to principle and law. If the American people are loyal to the constitution and laws rather than to persons, it is because they have attained a higher grade of civilization and political culture. If, however, in losing loyalty to persons they have lost also loyalty to law and government, reverence for rightful authority and the very consciousness of subjection to it, they have sunk rather than risen in the scale of civilization. It is this sense of duty, this loyalty to law and authority which is asserted and emphasized in the formal principle of the law.

4. It also gives the important aspect of virtue as the harmony of the will with the reason, and the consequent harmony of the man with himself.

5. It gives also the important aspect of virtue as the harmony of man with God, and so with the constitution of the universe.

IV. As declaring the requirement of the law, the Real Principle is indispensable to the law and to its practical efficiency.

Without it the formal principle gives no information as to what the law requires.

Without it duty, if it could be known, would be done without love. Virtue would be mere obedience to a categorical imperative. But love is the fulfilling of the law. I obey God because I love him. I serve my neighbor because I love him. Christ recognizes love as the essence

of virtue. The sense of duty alone cannot rise to the sweetness, beauty, freedom and dignity of right character. Sir Thomas Browne presents a wholly inadequate conception of Christian duty when he says: “I give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the will of God; I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that enjoined it; I relieve no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating dispo sition; for this is still but moral charity and an art that oweth more to passion than to reason."* At this point, also, Kant's Ethics is defective, grand as it is in its presentation of duty. He attempts to construct ethics from the formal principle of the law alone. The only motive which he acknowledges as purely moral, is the sense of duty desiccated from all feeling.

From the same error has arisen the belief that the greater the struggle in doing right, the greater the virtue; the more spontaneous, easy and joyous the right action is, the less its virtue. Whereas, the contrary is true; the greater the love, the greater the spontaneity and joy of the service, and the greater the virtue. Love in its perfection outstrips the sense of obligation and anticipates the categoric imperative of conscience.

And, in the issue, duty done merely in obedience to authority becomes debasing. Conformity merely to the formal principle of the law would be a submission to law in ignorance of what the law requires. It would be a blind submission to another's will, not an intelligent submission to Reason. It would be the obedience of a Turkish Janissary, as ready to do wrong as right, if so commanded.

In the moral education of a child it is necessary from its very helplessness that it be first taught submission to authority. Thus it learns that it does not live for itself alone; thus it is trained to the consciousness of duty, to obedience to authority, to the knowledge of the neces sity of rendering service to others, and through this to the spirit of selfsacrificing love. It has been suggested by some profound thinkers that God proceeds in the same manner in training the human race in its infancy and childhood. Man is found first under a patriarchal government, in which the ruler is obeyed as the father of the clan or tribe. And thus, as the first step in moral development, man is taught the ideas of authority, law and obedience. And this accords with the proverbial maxim expressing the common sense of mankind, that no one is fit to command till he has first learned to obey.

But history as decisively proves that a training merely to unquestioning submission to authority is debasing and crushing, rather than

* Religio Medici, Part II., ii., pp. 116, 117.

ennobling and developing. Anthropologists tell of the slave kissing the hand that strangles him; of the savage, accused of a crime which he did not commit, not attempting to save his life by denying it; the consciousness of personality and personal rights had been entirely crushed out of them. And the child trained merely to unquestioning and unintelligent obedience is likely, at the first opportunity, to break away from all authority alike of man and of God.

It must be added that the will cannot consent to the formal principle of law otherwise than in the act of love to God and man which the real principle of the law requires. Moral education must train first to the consciousness of duty and obligation, and to obedience to law. But it must also give the knowledge that the obedience is not rendered to superior power, but to rightful authority; not to the caprice of arbitrary will, but to the behests of perfect reason; that the law obeyed is the truth of reason and the requirement of perfect wisdom and love; that the commandment is addressed to rational intelligence and the service required is a reasonable service, the service of universal love. Hence it is only in the act of love that the will consents to the formal principle of the law. And this is the teaching of Christian ethics. God, the Absolute Reason, sets forth the truths of Reason as the law to Will; in Christ he comes at once as lawgiver and redeemer, setting forth under human conditions his own obedience to the law in self-sacrificing love to bring sinners back to obedience; and in Christ he calls men to the duty and the exalted privilege of loving all men as God in Christ has loved them, and serving them as God in Christ, taking the form of a servant, has served them. The conception of virtue as the harmony of the will with Reason and with God is, as we have seen, important. But the will can come into harmony with Reason and with God only as we actually love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.

139. Evidence that the Law of Love is the real Principle of the Law.

The question next to be considered is, how do we know that the law of love is the real principle of the moral law? How do we know that the law requires universal love?

What love is will be fully explained in a subsequent chapter. It is necessary, however, briefly to define it here, in order to give an intelligent answer to the question before us. The command of the moral law is addressed to man as rational free-will. The love which it requires is not natural affection; it is not emotion, or desire, or passion; it is the free choice of the supreme object of service. The law forbids a man to employ his energies supremely in serving himself; it requires him to

choose God as the supreme object of service and his fellow-man to be served as having rights equally with himself under the universal government of God.

I. As Christians we find this requirement of universal love in the laws of Moses, sanctioned as the all-comprehensive principle of the law by Jesus Christ. (Deut. vi. 5, Lev. xix. 18, Matt. xxii. 37-39). At present, however, I confine the inquiry to evidence aside from revelation.

II. The rational ground of the belief that the law requires love is the fact that every man is related to other rational beings in a moral system. Man finds himself intimately related to other persons in society; his own welfare and his sphere of achievement depend on their action, and theirs on his.

That man exists, not isolated but in a system, seems to be involved in the very act of knowing. Knowledge is the relation between a subject knowing and an object known. In the act of knowing I know myself not only as distinct from other beings, but also in relation to them; I look out on the outward world and know myself as a center of relations radiating in every direction and connecting me with other individuals. And further, in the knowledge of myself as a person, I know myself related to other persons in a rational system. And this is inherent in the very possibility of knowledge. Thus in the very act of knowing I know myself related to others in a rational system; and this relationship is the intellectual basis of the law of love.

Still further, in knowing the truths of reason as law to will, man knows himself in a moral system. He has intuitive knowledge of the formal principle of the law that a rational being ought to obey reason. In knowing himself rational man knows himself under the law of reason. He knows this law as universal, unchangeable, imperative, and of supreme authority, as the law of Reason supreme, absolute and eternal. He recognizes himself and all men on the same level as subjects of this common law, owing reciprocal duties to each other. Thus he finds himself in a moral system, owing duties and service to others under the law of reason equally binding on them all. He knows that in all his action bearing on another rational being he ought to consult the rights and interests of the other as really as his own.

Therefore we are not in a moral system because we are required to love one another; we are required to love one another because we are in a moral system. Love is required by the constitutive law of the system.

We have seen that moral law is distinctively law to free-agents in the

exercise of free-will. Now we find another quality distinctive of moral law; it is law to a free-agent in his action towards other free-agents. Law is properly called moral only so far as it declares the duty of a rational free-agent to a rational free-agent in a moral system.

It is evident that in such a system no man liveth for himself;" a selfish life has no legitimate place. For the selfish life translated into thought would affirm the absurdity that the system and all the beings in it exist only to serve this selfish man. The maxim on which he selfishly acts, if made a universal law, would bring every man into deadly conflict with every other; human life would become impossible, and the social system would be destroyed.

III. The knowledge of existence in a moral system being presupposed, the knowledge of the real principle of the law is immediate and self-evident in rational intuition.

1. This intuition, that the law requires love to God and our neighbor, arises, like all others, on some particular occasion in experience and is practically operative before it is recognized and formulated in thought. When a man finds his own action affecting the interests of another person, and recognizes the fact that he and the other exist together in a rational system, he knows intuitively that he ought to respect the rights of the other equally with his own. The formal principle of the law, so soon as we recognize other rational beings with us in a rational system, carries us on to the knowledge of a reciprocity of duties and rights which involves obligation to reciprocity of love and service. This intuition is germinal in the virtual consciousness before it is recognized and formulated in thought. The law of love is not known in intuition completely formulated as Christ proclaimed it. Rational intuitions act in the concrete before they attract attention to themselves, and it is only by reflection on particular cases in which they have thus acted that we get the principle and the idea and formulate them in words. So it is with the law of love. It is known in intuition primarily in particular cases when, in acting with reference to another, the obliga tion is felt to regard his rights and interests equally with our own. From this equality the word equity is derived.

2. The application which any person makes of the law will vary with his own conception of the moral system to which he belongs.

When man knew himself only as a member of a clan, he was aware of obligations only to his clan. Having scarcely knowledge of the existence of men beyond a few neighboring clans, whom he knew only by their maraudings, it is not wonderful that he felt no obligations to regard their rights and interests. Hence arose the ancient sentiment which regarded a stranger as an enemy and treated him like a wolf. Says Cicero: "One whom we now call a foreigner (peregrinum) was