IV
Law: Outward Rule of Duty, and Its Administrators
By what standard are we to regulate our conduct, in other words, what is the rule, or norm of duty? Is there any fixed, unerring guide of morality, or duty, beyond that furnished by the light of reason, common to every man born into this world?
It is commonly admitted that there is a twofold rule or standard of duty, one external to and independent of ourselves—the moral law, law of nature, or law of God; the other internal and personal conscience. Of the former of these rules, viz., law, I propose to speak to-day. Not that law and conscience are two distinct and divergent rules of conduct. Both converge in each act of duty. Law is the general rule, and conscience applies it to details, or concrete action. The result is duty.
Now, what is meant by law? Wherever and whenever we observe regularity or fixed order, we at once say there is a rule or fixed law at work. Hence, we speak of the laws of nature, the laws of thought, and the rest. Indeed, as order and regularity are observed in all things, we say the reign of law is universal. God is necessarily a God of order, and by one supreme act of will binds all creatures to act, according to their requirements and nature. What is called the eternal law is supreme order or regularity, in the divine Mind, working itself out in creation. Nothing escapes it. It embraces rational and irrational creatures, physical, intellectual and moral. It is infinitely simple, yet, owing to the narrowness of our minds, we break it up into phases, or facets, to which we give various names: we say the law of nature, the moral law, the laws of thought; and science is the discovery and grouping of the facts and rules that make up this order in any given line or branch.
Strictly speaking, there neither is, nor can be, any break or interruption of this supreme, eternal law. What we call disorder, or violation of law, is but part of a higher order. Miracles, and answers to prayers, are phases of supreme law, like the jar produced by a change of key, or chords, held in suspension in music, they are parts of the great harmony of the universe. Both in its physical and moral aspect the natural order of things is interfered with and set aside by free will of man, but the will of God expressed in supreme order, or law, ever gains its end eventually. Man works in time, God in eternity. His purpose is never defeated, His law or will never defied in the smallest detail, with impunity. If we interfere with the order He has established, we must take the consequences, “What a man sows that he will reap,” in any and every order.
Now this eternal law of God, recognized as dictating rules of conduct to free, intelligent beings, we call the moral law. Man is a free agent, and is ruled in accordance with his nature. The moral law binds, but does not compel to a fixed mode of action. Its main outlines are traced by way of knowledge on the reason, and acts on the will by way of motive. For free creatures there is no such thing as blind, determining impulse; there must always be within the region covered by liberty more or less deliberation, followed by free choice. Hence, light and freedom ever accompany duty or guilt. Within the mind and consciousness of all rational creatures God has written His law in characters sufficiently clear to enable them to guide and regulate their conduct. Men ever had, and still have, the light of reason, making known to them all, in dim outline at least, their Creator’s will—the essential difference between right and wrong—the rudiments of duty, in short. All find the alphabet, the primary elements, of duty, as it were, traced on reason by an unseen hand. Hence St. Paul says, “The Gentiles were inexcusable, inasmuch as they had the law, i. e., the rule of duty, written in their hearts, their own conscience bearing testimony to it.” Every human being all the world over has this law, this sense of right, this feeling that justice should be done, more or less developed. It is simply the moral law, fixing roughly men’s rights and duties; rights that are due to others, duties that ought to be done by ourselves. Now, this law shining on the reason is the outward, eternal, never-changing standard of duty. It is the ideal of justice, with which all human laws, customs and regulations of duty have to be compared, to test their worth and binding force. Legislators of all times have embodied it, wholly or in part, in their codes. Summaries of its main precepts were committed to writing, as we find on Assyrian and Babylonian tablets still extant, previous even to its summary and promulgation in the law of Moses. The most perfect epitome of the natural or moral law, however, is that summed up in the ten short, pithy, precepts known as the Ten Commandments, or law of God, revealed to Moses. It is the expression in substance of what is already contained in right reason, but put in such a way as to come home to the multitude and give them a clear, short, working law of duty.
It is by the rule of duty made known to reason that all men, outside the light of revelation, were, and are, judged. But the moral law alone avails little for the “healing of the nations” or the observance of duty without supernatural light and aid. Look at the sad moral history and present state of non-Christian nations, or individuals, and masses, that break away from revelation, and you will be readily convinced that reason and the moral law are utterly insufficient to teach even, and much less to enable, men to live up to anything like a high ideal of duty. Apart even from the fall, the supernatural would seem a necessary corollary of the natural. And so it has ever been. The light of revelation has always supplemented that of reason in teaching the race its duty. From its cradle and the early dawn of its history we find the race in personal touch, so to say, with the Almighty, receiving divine instruction and commands over and above those furnished by reason, and handing them down traditionally through patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets, till Christ, the Messias, came, in whom all nations were to be blessed,” Christ, the head and founder of the Christian religion, the true light, “enlightening every man that cometh into this world.”
He was, and is, the final teacher of duty, its Alpha and Omega, in whom ethical truth, gradually unveiled in the Old Testament, finally culminated; and, as true God, He has made due provision for its preservation and application to the complex, ever-changing moral problems of the day without losing any of its fulness, beauty and splendor in the one holy, world-wide body, called the Catholic Church. She holds up, without fear or favor, the highest, holiest and purest standard of duty of any teaching body in the world. Even those who dislike her dogma are compelled to admire the loftiness, reasonableness and speckless purity of her teaching on the vital subject of duty. Surely, then, if conduct determines the value of a life here, and hope of a favorable judgment hereafter, men are safest in her fold. No recognized school of morals even claims to uphold a higher or holier mode of living. By listening reverently and attentively to her teaching, we easily learn what our duties are in all the various relations of life. The heads of what we owe, by way of duty, to God, our neighbor and ourselves, are very briefly and clearly set forth in the Catechism put in the hands of all her children. Indeed, in what are called the “essentials,” “what every Catholic is bound to know,” viz., the “Lord’s Prayer,” the Ten Commandments, and the moral dispositions of heart, needful for worthy reception of her chief Sacraments, even “the lowest in the kingdom of God possesses a code and standard of duty immeasurably higher than what was known to all the sages and moralists of antiquity or their would-be restorers in our own day.
But the fact is, we are not free in the matter. If the moral law is supreme, external to our reason, and binding, we must accept Him as its interpreter, whom God authorized to extend and expound it, and who is to us “the way, the truth, and the light”; as also the system He has framed and left to teach us our duty. Law, to be of any practical value, must be administered. Now, where is the court, and where are the judges, set up to dispense the law or ethical code of Christ in the kingdom of God? We are not pure spirits, but flesh and blood, and, therefore, need to learn our duty not from angels, but from men, like ourselves, provided only they are duly qualified and legally appointed teachers of this highest of all arts. God is “supreme reason”; and the service He requires, says St. Paul, a reasonable one; sure, then, the society that binds us together in discharge of this service or duty, must be formed on a rational basis. Now this it would plainly not be if every man were a law to himself; and, as in kingless Israel, “Each man did what was right in his own eyes.” An external rule, or law, needs external application, even in divine things. Hence, the Church is the guardian of the moral law, wherein the teaching of the most perfect of all moralists is perpetuated, wherein, indeed, He promised to abide all days even “to the end of the world.” She holds up the mirror of duty to reason and well ordered reason beholds therein all that is “high and holy and of good repute.”
Do not mind the “can’t” that is uttered about her dogmatism. No doubt, like every other teacher, she talks in the indicative and imperative moods rather than the subjunctive, “Tanquam auctoritatem habens”; but all teaching, to be worth anything, must be dogmatic. And are not our ethical judgments, i. e., truth about duty, as important as those that deal with the stars. Sound information, all the truth that can be had about the great outward rule, or law of duty, is as important in our eyes as true knowledge about the laws of health or the law of attraction. Many people glibly say, “Let us do our duty and leave the clergy to quarrel over the theory of it.” But what is my duty? What is right and conformable to the moral law in the many dark ethical problems of the day? Can I commit suicide when useless and tired of life? Can I divorce a nagging, perhaps an adulterous wife? Was Onan justified in his views and practise of married life? Can we answer these and other perplexing problems of duty without dogmatizing? What more reasonable than that there should be a living voice, from which there is no appeal, to explain and determine the contents both of reason and the sacred books regarding the all-important question of duty, especially in view of the fact that away from this living voice there is a Babel of discordant notes even about its first principles.
On grounds that bear the test of reason, we hold that God has supplemented the light of reason with that of revelation, thus unveiling His will in regard to faith and morals, belief and duty. Christ’s mission in this respect is still carried on by His Church, firmly rooted in the world for this very purpose. New phases of thought, and life, and conduct, call for new applications and interpretations of the moral law; and it is her function to set the world right in the realm of law and duty. She is their guardian. Be on your guard against the cry of morality, or duty, without religion and dogma. There is no such thing, nor can there be. People say Christ led and taught a simple life of duty. His life, they say, was a protest against the professional clergy of the day. So far is this from being true, His sayings bristle with dogma. He was self-assertive and positive, like His Church to-day. The Sermon on the Mount, wherein He proposed and enforced His new code of ethics, is in reality cemented in dogma.
By the nature of things, it must be so. All forms of truth, whether ethical or otherwise, are necessarily exclusive, i. e., dogmatic. A teacher who tells me that it is my duty to be poor in spirit, love those that wrong me, and shun worldliness, is just as assertive and dogmatic as one who says that there is but one God in three persons. Dogma is at the back of duty, as of faith. Right thinking about matters of duty must go before doing it. We act on our thoughts and views. People, and there is a large school of them nowadays who think that individual self-interest and pleasure should be followed as guides in life rather than reason and conscience, make short work of duty in the usual sense of the term. They who would divorce duty from doctrine make merry over the fact that the good fathers at Nice nearly came to blows over a single letter in the wording of a dogmatic decree about Our Lord’s person. The sneer is as ill-timed as it is vulgar, for those keen-witted Greeks saw, as we see to-day, that in the choice of that single letter there rested on them the awful responsibility of declaring whether Jesus Christ was a mere teacher of morals, like Plato or Aristotle, with no higher credentials than those of a modern professor of ethics; or Christ, the Son of the living God, sent to teach us our duty.
It is to Him, living in His vicar and holding court authoritatively in the New Jerusalem, that we appeal in knotty points, bearing on the law of God. England was lost to the Church through a question of duty decided at Rome against the appeal of a king; yet all admit now that in the point of morals in question the Pope was right, and the university professors, lay and clerical, in favor of the king were wrong.
Two great dominating thoughts are absolutely necessary to keep mankind from committing intellectual and moral suicide—belief in a personal God and the duty of unquestioning obedience to His will expressed in law, i. e., the moral law, and all just laws built on it. Now it is the Catholic Church that alone of all great social bodies witnesses to these two great facts. She holds aloft the banner of belief of a free, loving, personal God—our Father in heaven, to whom we are bound by the equally personal relations and duties of children. No doubt, as we have seen, reason teaches all the outlines of moral duty; but how powerless to persuade and impress. We crave and need the contact and force of personal authority. All law is remotely at least an expression of the divine Will.
Now the distinctive characteristic of duty in relation to Christ is not so much difference or originality of the matter of the law, but in His authority and power as a teacher. “He taught as one having authority.” Many even of the sublime ideas in the Sermon of the Mount are found, perhaps, in works based on reason only; but He claimed to impose and authorize them personally, by virtue of His character and office. Other moralists could only exhort and propose; they could not impose, or help their pupils to act up to the ideals they dimly saw in reason. They could not even personally practise what they taught. The Church, like Christ her founder, speaks with no uncertain voice—points to her Lord and the crowds of saints, who bravely walked the roughest and highest paths of duty. She tells us to do the same, and if feeble and unable, then must we draw moral strength to do so “from the Saviour’s fountains” in grace.
We have now briefly dealt with the great external rule of duty—the moral law. All ramifications of duty are but phases of it, and they derive all their binding force from agreement with it. By it, too, shall we be judged, according to the light, liberty, and grace granted to aid us in keeping it. It is put before us in all its purity and splendor in Catholic teaching on duty. But remember the essence of duty in regard to law is not in knowing, but in doing it. Let us learn the law, i. e., the will of God; but above all, keep it. Be it not said of us, as was said of the Athenians, “The Athenians know what is right, but the Lacedemonians do it.” “Catholics know the great law or rule of duty, but outsiders observe it.”
