VI
Its Sanction
Introduction.—In our previous discourse we dealt with conscience as the inner and secondary rule of duty, as law is its primary and outward. To-day we propose to speak of the rewards and punishments attached to the observance or infraction of duty. Every breach of the law of conduct, in the sense in which we use it here, every violation of conscience, is a sin, because a known transgression of the moral law. This makes it an offense against God, for the reason that the moral law is the expression of His will. To run wilfully counter to this law of God, and its just derivatives, is, therefore, to oppose His will, in which the essence of sin rests. There is a tendency to-day to separate morality from its author, and make of law a sort of idol, or fetish, quite independent of a divine Being, whose will it voices. Now we can not too strongly insist on the truth—which really gives to duty its sanction that law is always the expression of some will determining some sort of order to be kept. If we fall in with this order we get rewarded; if we oppose it we get punished. Even the laws of nature—the regular course, the constant sequence of cause and effect, that we observe in the material world, are not independent forces or entities in themselves; but the supreme Mind, arranging all things, and the supreme Will carrying them out. The sanction accompanying law is measured by the will and power of its framer. We have a faint image of will as the fount of law, duty, obedience and sanction, in our own wills, impressing their commands on the various muscles of the body and in directing the conduct of others. The will of man within certain limits, and acting with the laws of nature, effects marvels in this world. We see what one powerful will can do in the way of law or influence on others, in such instances as those of a Caesar, a Napoleon or a Bismarck. But the divine Will is infinite and supreme. All order is subject to it; and all beings are carrying out this supreme order, either consciously or unconsciously, willing or unwillingly. If we do not choose to comply with this order in one line or direction, we must do so in another. Even chaos, moral or physical, has its laws, from which divine order will duly come. The permission of what we call evil does not mean that God lets go the reins. He remains as supreme and absolute a master as ever. His will, though not always done in one way, yet must be done in the end. The all pervading law we see reigning in and around us is but another word for God’s will in action. Many see only blind forces obeying blind law in the world; but surely behind this “reign of law” visible either in chemical affinity, the march of planets or the wonders of life, anyone “with eyes to see and ears to hear” can clearly observe infinite mind and infinite will—in other words, God acting through fixed law.
But in dealing with duty we deal with moral, not physical, law. One striking peculiarity of the order reigning in the world of matter is that we can conceive the laws making up this order reversed without any inherent difficulty or absurdity. The relation they give rise to are contingent. If the law of attraction ceased or acted in another way, if the sun rose in the west and set in the east, if fire ceased to burn or water to flow, there would be no inherent contradiction in the change. No necessary truths or relations spring from these laws. But it is different with the moral. I could not possibly conceive a good and just God approving a lie, condoning injustice, or looking with equal indifference on virtue and vice. By the very nature of His being He must love and wish what is right and good and loathe what is wrong and vile. It is the foundation of ethics that a moral person or will loves good and hates evil. Every will is drawn to and motived by good, either real or apparent. There are certain truths founded on essential relations, such as those of number two plus two equals four, or “the whole is greater than its part,” the opposite of which is unthinkable, because involving a contradiction; so in ethics, or moral science, there are certain necessary moral relations giving rise to certain necessary moral truths. That theft or ingratitude, or neglect of and cruelty to children, should be virtuous, and not vicious, we deem absurd and morally contradictory. That duty should not bind, or that God should be indifferent to its neglect or observance, is morally unthinkable.
And this brings us to the main subject of our discourse, the sanction of duty. We may elude or evade a physical law without any consciousness of doing wrong. We are morally free to make water flow up hill or hinder the course of nature in its physical aspect. And yet, if we thwart or infringe the laws of nature, we get punished for our mistakes. If we breathe bad air, take bad food, wear unseasonable garments, the result is disastrous. Good health is the reward of keeping the laws of nature; bad health, or even death, avenges their infringement. The result, call it punishment, if you will, of transgressing physical laws may be separated by a long interval from its cause. We sow groundsel or thistles; it may be in error, but we pay for our mistake when the harvest comes round.
The same holds in moral law, only with much more disastrous results. We fail in duty—we sin, and we feel conscious of guilt. A mere error is often followed by great, deep and long suffering. Witness the effects of disregarding the laws of health; yet sin, or failure in duty, seems to escape. But it is only apparent, the punishment of transgressing a law, from which even God could not dispense, if not swift, is sure.
It is true we should fulfil the moral law out of a sense of duty, for its own sake; out of love, in fact, and not through any selfish motive of fear of punishment or hope of reward. But granting all this, sanction, i.e., reward or punishment, is an inherent part of law. Duty, according as it is observed or neglected, necessarily entails one or other. The great driving force impelling to duty should certainly be love; but taking men in the mass, they can not even be ruled, much less made dutiful, in full sense of the term, without whip and spur. And, after all, even the semblance of duty in forced observance of law is better than anarchy.
Apart from this, rewards and punishments enter into the nature of law. If people did not benefit, i. e., if they were not rewarded, by law, laws would not be made. No law-giver is, or possibly can be, indifferent to the observance of the laws he enacts. Indeed a code of laws often reads like a list of punishments following their violation. Now, if this is so in merely civic affairs, touching only the surface of life, how much more in duty, cutting down to the division of soul and spirit—made up, in great part, of necessary laws from which even God himself can not dispense. Punishment is, therefore, the necessary consequence of the violation of duty. It is part of justice, the reverse of the medal. It is like a sequence in logic or physics. If I owe one man fifteen dollars and another five, I am necessarily in debt to the amount of twenty dollars. If a man casts himself down from a high tower on the stones, he must inevitably fall and kill himself; as easily escape these issues as the punishment inherent in the infringement of duty. Moral law thus broken can no more be flouted with impunity than any other. It is but a branch of eternal order that must hold sway in spite of all resistance. Impressed on dead or irrational creatures, it bears down irresistibly; impressed on free, rational beings, like men, it may be resisted and violated by sin; but the debt thereby incurred must be paid down to the last farthing. There is no outlet. The guilty must restore the balance of divine order he dared to disturb, or suffer, till someone restores it for him. By strict law a shadow is cast if we stand in the light, so in morals or the realm of duty. Who shall remove the shadow cast by a sinful world on the divine sun-dial? It needed the incarnation and atonement of a God.
And yet most people flatter themselves that they can escape the violation of duty with impunity. Each singly thinks himself secure—the spoilt child of an avenging God. He will and must punish others, we know and admit, in due course; but there will always be a loophole of escape for us. But God can not compromise. He can not condone sin. Even if forgiven through Christ, it has a certain sanction left in punishment. God could make a man imponderable, He could make fire stay its devastating march, He could suspend the law of gravitation; but He could not sanction a lie or condone illicit love. To any moral being, least of all the Supreme, this would be impossible.
One main reason, now that faith in a future life, to be determined by one’s conduct in this, is growing dim, of the widespread disregard of moral duties, except externally, is that we are so accustomed to see effect follow cause immediately in nature, and not observing punishment follow sin, we rush to the conclusion either that there is no sanction at all attached to duty, or that if its secret violation is punished we may minimize, if not escape it altogether. We see very well that if, unable to swim, we leap into the ocean we drown; if we fall into the fire we burn; if we take poison we die; but it is not apparently so in morals. Men often steal, lie, calumniate, kill even, hate, and the rest, without any harm, nay, often with great pecuniary gain, and they are tempted to think all danger of punishment is over. “I have sinned and what evil hath befallen me?” is an expression as much in vogue among sinners to-day as in David’s time. But it is not true even in this life that effect immediately follows cause. Early death or long drawn out diseases are often separated by long intervals from the errors or sins of youth that gave rise to them. Ignorance, poverty and ill-success in life are often the result of idleness at school. Sowing and reaping are parted by long intervals of time. An acorn is dropped into the ground—is forgotten, or utterly lost to view; and yet after many years a noble oak tree, with its yearly crop, is the reward of our slight labor in planting. We are reaping to-day the harvest of good or evil planted by our forefathers thousands of years ago. In morals or in nature the harvest is far from being contemporary with the sowing. What we know for certain is that in both, “What a man sows that he will reap,” and that usually each grain sown is reaped a hundredfold, whether the seed be wheat, grapes or thistles.
It may be objected that “duty, like virtue” is its own reward, and infraction of it its own punishment. The trend of opinion is against belief in any sanction for duty beyond this; and, moreover, that all punishment, to be just, must be meant for correction and not for vengeance, which is immoral; hence the mildness of prison discipline and the growing repugnance to the penalty of death. No doubt a great deal of barbarism existed formerly, and in some places still lingers in the methods of administering justice—but it still remains just that the violation of duty should and must be punished. Mere vengeance, implying unjust anger and rage and brutal treatment, is imperfect; but the punishment of wrongdoing merely as such is sound and right. To wreak vengeance for private wrongs, to exceed the just measure of chastisement, may be denounced, but not otherwise. Apart from all idea of correction, example or deterrent force, sin rightly brings punishment in its train. Who will say that the brute who outrages and murders an innocent child, or the man who betrays his country to the enemy, should not be punished apart altogether from any thought of correction. And yet such punishment expresses the cry of vengeance, or indignation, if you will, on the part of society against the wrongdoer. We neither blame nor punish an animal, or madman, because there is, nor can there be, any violation of duty; but we punish a criminal. For crime or sin, or any dereliction of duty whatsoever, is no mere bodily disease: It is a human act—the free, deliberate choice of a depraved will; and as such ought to be, and eventually is, punished. Blame and punishment are as much deserved results of free action as praise and reward. The contrary is the mere cant of determinism, a mere euphemism for fatalism. “Punishment,” says Hegel, “is the other half of sin.” “If a man,” says St. Anselm, “chooses to evade the will (i. e., law, one’s duty) of God commanding, he falls under the same will punishing.” The high capacity for duty involves also the low capacity of sin—a terrible responsibility, which no free creature in the present order can escape.
II. Now there is a double sanction attached to duty—imperfect in this life, perfect in the next. Though the reward of duty here and now is only imperfect, still it is very real, tangible and visible. In fact, duty even in this world more than pays its way. Though duty binds against all risks and consequences, even death itself, yet in most, I may say, all cases, it meets with heaven’s sanction in its results here below. So true is this that the utilitarians themselves confound the pleasure and other temporal advantages of duty with duty itself, whereas it is by its very nature opposed both to pleasure and utility. If these are its sole motives and foundations, it ceases to be duty, as we have already said. They are only consequences. First of all, broadly speaking, the fulfilment of duty perfects self. It roots, strengthens and develops what is best in us—will, reason and conscience; and, therefore, produces that inward essential peace and happiness for which we were made. A man who habitually shirks duty is at war with self in its higher aspect. To violate known duty is to act against conscience, and such a man can never be truly happy within, whatever his outward circumstances may be. And no matter what the outward results of dutiful conduct are, the inward self-satisfaction and contentment more than make up for any loss, trial or misfortune that may fall upon us in being true to duty.
On the other hand the violation of duty is its own avenger, the feeling that we are not living, I do not say, up to our Christian standard, but even up to our common nature. Man is man not through his animal nature, but his rational—his intelligence, will and conscience. Hence the neglect of duty usually produces either feverish restlessness or intense and settled melancholy. Even from a purely natural point of view, the conscious infringement of duty must wear away eventually every shred of self-respect, and with that everything goes. Cleverness, wit, genius, wealth and health may be left, but the soul that animates and gives value to them has fled. There is nothing left to enkindle, and keep alive anything like sustained effort and self-sacrifice; and what is man without them? “A mere reed shaken by the wind.”
Then, again, duty, though not necessarily, nor in all cases, conduces to health of body and competence, if not wealth. Putting aside the supernatural altogether, duty limited even to the exercise of the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, tends, and in the nature of things must tend, to make both men and nations “healthy, wealthy and wise,” so to say. The practise of the three common duties of truthfulness, honesty and sobriety is the best insurance one can make for “peace and plenty” in one’s old age. The honest and truthful servant, the sober and industrious workman, the upright tradesman, lawyer, doctor and clergyman have ninety-nine chances to one in their favor of succeeding well in life against those who lack these qualities—who, in short, neglect their common duties in life.
But apart altogether from mere worldly success, duty ever wins influence, respect and esteem. It is no rare thing to find people without any aid, arising from name, wealth or talent, commanding the lifelong confidence of their fellowmen, raised almost against their will to positions of trust and power, their sole recommendation being that they are men of duty. It is the old story, personality means character, and character, good or bad, is determined by the way in which a man does his duty. Where duty decays, all worth goes, too. What we call a good, sound, public spirit, the very life and soul of a nation, depends entirely on the way in which citizens discharge their duty. Character is built on duty. In proportion to the way they fulfil or neglect their moral duties, the character that people form is worthy or worthless. And, after all, the main asset of a nation is the character of its people. Art, wealth, learning, all that goes popularly to make up civilization, soon get swept away if there is not a strong dutiful race to guard them. People forget, too, that the greatness and happiness of a people depend entirely on their moral character, i. e., on their doing their duty. Existing material prosperity may be the reward of past, not the substance or even proof of actual duty. Worthless nations, like worthless individuals, may inherit and waste the inheritance, material, moral, or intellectual, of dutiful ancestors. Duty to be rewarded, even imperfectly in this life, must be personal. The reward is mainly interior in the peace and content that accompanies a life of duty.
But when all is said and done, duty never finds nor can find its full, adequate sanction in this life. All we can say is that in most cases its observance brings more decided temporal advantages to mind and body than its violation. But how very few would even attempt to face the difficulties of a dutiful life, in all its integrity, if there were no beyond? If all ends at the grave then the only wise man is the sensualist. Duty, if death ends all, would be supreme folly; pleasure, the height of wisdom. All men are naturally drawn to pleasure, in fact they hunger and thirst for it; whereas duty is cold, hard, and, considering the force of animal passion, repulsive. Individuals would never think of the common good or weigh the prospective advantages of the observance of duty over the actual pleasure of its violation. If all is over at death, they would think, and rightly think, only of themselves, i. e., of their own butterfly pleasures during the short summer day of a brief life. I speak now of duty in the full extent of the term, duty based on high, worthy motive and covering the whole field of rectitude in thought, speech and action. Now duty in this sense never receives full recognition or reward in this life, nor its opposite due blame and punishment. Duty is, as I said, often taken in a narrow, limited sense to mean the conduct that goes to form a good soldier, a good citizen, a good husband, or the rest—a sense quite compatible with the grossest moral delinquencies in all branches of duty save one. Now the highest types of perfect duty which our race has produced have all been men and women that suffered most in this world—the saints and martyrs. All men were made for happiness, and seek it, either by the paths of duty or pleasure, yet in the full perfect sense it eludes all. None reach it, but least of all those who deserve it most by their self-sacrificing lives of duty. The others have, at least, the fleeting joys and pleasures of a sinful life. If duty found its full sanction here, its full measure of reward or punishment, then the higher life, the life of reason, will and conscience, would be irrational. No! God often detaches pleasures, happiness, contentment from the practise of the loftiest duty, but only for a time. Justice and equity so marked in the other realms of God’s kingdom will resume their natural course and duty meet with the reward it merits, and vice that escapes punishment here its due measure of retribution hereafter. Should Christ suffer poverty, insult, torture and death, while a Nero or a Caligula revel in delights? No! rest assured that God’s rule is not one of anarchy and injustice. “What a man sows that he will reap” either in his land or his conduct. Every law that God has framed, whether in the material or moral order, will, in due time, work out his divine Will and bring us sanction. His moral law, if observed, brings its reward partly and imperfectly here; fully and completely hereafter. Heaven is the only rational answer to the suffering and obloquy of the just; as hell is to the success, pleasures and carnal joys of the wicked.
Remember that heaven is high and reached only by the steep, hard, thorny road of Christian duty; hell is low and easily reached by the broad, flowery path of pleasure. Choose, now that opportunity is offered. Work, i. e., do your duty, while you have the day of life, for the night of death is fast approaching, when no man can work.
