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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.

39. 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. xii. 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 obligation 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

called by our ancestors an enemy (hostis)."* And Plautus says: “A stranger is to a man, not a man, but a wolf."† Similar sentiments were long dominant in ancient civilization. The Phenicians and the Greeks conceived of the state as a city ruling the surrounding territory. The same was the Roman conception. Even in the times of the empire citizenship was theoretically citizenship of Rome. So long as man thus conceived of himself as identified with a small community, he recognized his obligations to that community and its members; others he regarded as natural enemies and conceived it right to conquer and enslave them. In like manner, so long as a man identified himself with a caste or order, he recognized his obligations to those of his own rank, but absolved himself from obligations to others. The solidarity and fraternity of mankind, the obligation of every person to serve mankind, found slight recognition and never became a power in ancient civilization. Yet as the smaller communities were merged in larger states and men came more and more to know the countries and inhabitants of the earth, these great ideas make their appearance and the obligation of man to man as such is recognized. Max Müller says the word "mankind" never passed the lips of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. § Yet at a later period the Stoics had the idea of a city of the world, a commonwealth transcending all particular states. Cicero said: "For a man to detract anything from another and to increase his own advantage by the damage of another, is more against nature than death, poverty, grief, than anything which can happen to a man in body or estate. Nature prescribes that a man consult the interest of a man, whoever he may be, for the reason that he is a man." || "We are members of a vast body. Nature made us kin duced us from the same things and to the same ends." my country and the gods its rulers." M. Aurelius Antoninus says: "My nature is rational and social; my city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man it is the world. The things which are useful to these are alone useful to me."**

Seneca says: when she pro"The world is

3. The Law requiring love to God as supreme and to our neighbor as ourselves cannot be understood in all the significance of Christian Theism without considerable advance both in intellectual and moral culture. Its full significance presupposes the idea of the universe both

De Officiis, B. I., c. 12.

"Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quum qualis sit non novit:" Asinaria, Act 2, scene 4, line 88.

Plato, Laws, B. I., 625, 626.

? Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. II., p. 5. De Officiis. Lib. III., cap. V., 21, and cap. VI., 27. De Beneficiis.

**Thoughts, VI., 44.

as a Cosmos or urity and order of all material worlds, and as a moral system in which all rational beings exist. And, again, this presupposes an idea which the human mind was slow to attain, the idea of a universal religion, of one God, in their common relation to whom men of all nations and ages are brought into unity in a moral system. But even this idea of one universal system has its germ in the rational intuition that absolute being must exist; and in the intuitive knowledge of obligation, and therein of a law transcending myself and coming down from an authority above me, which is universal, unchanging, imperative and supreme. In whatever form man, in different stages of development, pictures to himself this authority, it is always the supreme.

4. We see that sin, which is the essential evil, consists in self-isolation. Buddhism regards the existence of finite beings as essential evil, because they are individuated, and in their individuality distinct from the infinite one; from this evil the only redemption is reabsorption into the infinite. Christianity, on the contrary, emphasizes the individuality, responsibility and dignity of personal beings, and sets forth their unity in a moral system under the law of love. Sin and evil arise when a person, by his own free choice, isolates himself from the system by choosing himself as his supreme object of service, and so puts himself into antagonism to both God and man and does what he can to mar the order and beauty of the system and to resist and annul its supreme law.

essential in the rational

We see also that man's

We see, therefore, that the law of love is constitution of the universe. God is love. knowledge of the law of love is rooted in his constitution as a rational being and asserts itself in its germinal and rudimentary form as an intuition of reason. Man is so constituted that, as his reason normally unfolds, he knows himself under law and knows that the law requires universal love.

IV. That man is constituted for subjection to the law of love is indicated in his emotional nature.

He is constituted susceptible of both egoistic and altruistic motives and emotions. In babyhood the child yields almost exclusively to impulses tending immediately to its own sustenance and comfort. This is natural because in its helplessness it is dependent on others. But as it becomes capable of acting, the altruistic feelings appear. Affinity for others, the desire for their society, sympathy with their joys and sorrows, compassion for their distresses and the disposition to help them in their needs are spontaneous impulses of the human heart.

Both are essential to the well-being of the individual and of society.

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