CHAPTER II: GOD AS THE GROUND AND PROTOTYPE OF THE MORAL LIFE AND AS THE AUTHOR OF THE LAW.

GOD AS THE GROUND AND PROTOTYPE OF THE MORAL LIFE AND AS THE AUTHOR OF THE LAW. __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXI.

As morality is connected with religion in an indissolubly vital unity, hence the God-consciousness is the necessary presupposition and condition of morality, and the character and degree of the morality is consequently also conditioned on the character and degree of the God-consciousness, although a higher degree of the latter does not necessarily work also a higher degree of morality. Hence true morality is only there possible where there is a true God-consciousness, that is, where God is not conceived of as in some manner limited, but as the infinite Spirit in the fullest sense of the word. Only where the moral idea has its absolutely perfect reality, in the personal holy God, has morality a firm basis, true contents, and an unconditional goal.

If morality is in any manner conditioned by religion, then is also the quality of this morality different in different religions. We have already shown that morality is not conditioned by the mere God-consciousness, but only by it as having grown into religion, for a God-consciousness which does not become a religious one, but remains mere knowledge, cannot become a moral power; and this is the simple explanation of the fact, that while a feebler God-consciousness cannot produce a higher degree of morality, yet a higher God-consciousness does not necessarily create also a higher degree of morality,--namely, when it does not develop itself into a religious life-power. When it does so develop itself, however, then it is unconditionally true that the degree of morality perfectly corresponds to the degree of God-consciousness;--otherwise we would be forced to modify our previously assumed position, that religion and morality are two indissolubly united and mutually absolutely conditioning phases of one and the same spiritual life. Where God is conceived of as merely an unspiritual nature-force, as in China and India, there morality cannot rest on the free moral personality of man, but, on the contrary, it must throw the personality into the back-ground as illegitimate; where the divine is conceived of only in the form of an antagonism of mutually hostile divinities, as with the Persians, there the moral idea lacks its unconditional obligatoriness, and in fact the contra-moral has its relative justification; and where the divine is conceived of as a plurality of limited individual personalities, there the sphere of morality is invaded by the pretensions of the arbitrarily self-determining subject, and moral action lacks a solid basis. It is only where there is a consciousness of the infinite personal Spirit that both the moral personality is free, and the moral idea absolutely unconditional and sure. The heathen do not really have the divine law; they have only, lying in the very nature of the rational spirit, an unconscious presentiment of the same [Rom. ii, 14, 15].--Though Polytheism is with us no longer in fashion, still we are all the more infested with Pantheism, or such a form of Deism as differs therefrom only by an unscientific arbitrary inconsequence,--not, however, by any means with that vigorous and comparatively respectable Pantheism of India which drew, with moral earnestness, the full practical consequence of its world-theory, and presented in an actually-carried-out renunciation of the world the very contrary of our natural and legitimate claim to happiness,--but, on the contrary, with a Pantheism that is in every respect morbid and characterless, and which, greedy of enjoyment, delights itself in a world robbed of God. Pantheism lacks the antecedent condition of all morality, namely, personal freedom; with the universal prevalence of unconditional necessity there is no place for choice and self-determination; it also lacks a moral purpose, seeing that it knows no ideal, reality-transcending goal of morality, but, on the contrary, must acknowledge the real as per se the fulfillment of the ideal, that is, as good,--and for the reason that that which appears as a goal of life-development, is, in fact, realized from necessity; it lacks also a moral motive, for the sole causative ground of the absolutely necessary life-development is, as unfree and as unfreely-acting, non-moral,--is only a conscious nature-impulse. On the assumption that the entire being and activity of the individual is simply a necessary expression of the existence and life which God generates for himself in the world, it follows that each and every being is fully and perfectly justified in whatever nature and activity he may chance to appear, and no one can reproach another because of any seeming moral depravity. The moral tendencies of Pantheism, and of the therewith essentially identical Naturalism, must not be judged of from individual instances of men who are still unconsciously imbued with the moral spirit of the community, but rather from the effects that result where this world-theory has taken hold on the masses,--as at the time of the Reign of Terror in France, and in the bearing and aspirations of our more recent demagogues of reform, nearly all of whom are imbued with Pantheistic views. __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXII.

The personal God is the basis of the moral, (1) in that He, as holy will, is the eternal fountain and embodiment of the moral idea. The good is not a mere object of a possible willing, not merely ought to be willed, but is eternally willed by an eternal will, and is nothing other than the contents of this will itself; God is the absolutely moral spirit, the holy spirit--perfectly at one with himself in his free personality, and eternally self-consistent,--and who as such guarantees to the moral life-task of his free creatures, full truth, unconditional and permanent validity as God's requirement, and unshaken certainty, and perfect, constant unity and consistency.

Outside of the Christian God-consciousness the moral idea lacks all certainty and strength. It is easy to say, that we should do the good for its own sake, that the moral law presents itself as a "categorical imperative," but in the reality of life such generalities will not avail. For a mere idea without any sort of reality, no human heart can grow actively warm; here there is at best only an intellectual interest, but not a morally-practical one. The validity of the moral idea must have a deeper basis than a mere intellectual process. Before I can do the good for its own sake, I must love it; before I love it, I must with full certainty know it. So long as I am in doubt as to what is good, or as to whether there is any good, I have no object of love. The essence of the good, however, implies that the same is not my merely subjective opinion, but that it is universally valid--good per se. Now, should I leave the God-consciousness out of sight, then there would remain for me, in order to determine the unconditional validity of a supposed moral precept, and to avoid the possibility of a mere arbitrary judgment, no other resort than the impracticable test of Kant. [8] ." Suppose, however, that, apart from religious faith, there were in fact a scientific source for a certain knowledge of the moral law, still this would not yet answer the purpose;--not every one can be a philosopher, but all are required to be moral. Hence the moral consciousness cannot be based on mere scientific demonstrations, but must have a basis available for all rational men; now just such a resource is the God-consciousness. So soon as I know that a mode of action is God's will, then am I perfectly certain that it is good, that it has universal and unconditional validity;--I have not to infer that because it is universally valid, therefore it is God's will, but the converse. Without certainty of moral consciousness there can be no moral confidence; in this connection all doubt works ruin. The question is as to certainty of moral consciousness, and hence essentially as to God's will's becoming known to me.

So soon as there exists a consciousness of God, all good must be referred absolutely to God's will; whatever God wills is good, and whatever is good is God's will. The divine order of the world assumes, in the sphere of the free will of creatures, the form of a moral command; the "must" becomes a "should;" this is not a lowering, but an exalting of the law, for freely realized good is higher than the unfreely realized, seeing that God himself is freedom. If a moral duty is God's will, then I am also further certain that it cannot be in real conflict with other moral duties. This is the high moral significancy of faith in the living God, namely, that it alone can give a full unity and certainty to the moral consciousness; with every limitation of the idea of God the moral consciousness also becomes uncertain and doubtful. Hence the Scriptures, even in the Old Testament, attribute such high significancy to the unity and unchangeableness of the holy and almighty God as moral law-giver, and base thereon, in contrast to heathenism, all morality,--as, for example, in Gen. xvii, 1; Deut. vi, 4 sqq.; x, 14, 17. In the first passage God's omnipotence is emphasized in order to awaken in man a consciousness of his dependence; inasmuch as all existence is absolutely in God's hand, therefore should also man's free activity subordinate itself to Him,--therefore also is the sinful effort to be independent of God, that is, to be equal to God, unmitigated folly. Hence also he, who walks before the Almighty, has the assurance that he will attain to his goal; thou canst, for the reason that thou shouldst, for it is God who places upon thee the "should."

But the certainty of the moral idea is only one of its phases, the other is its actuating power. It is true, the idea itself of the good should move the will; but its power is immeasurably greater When it is itself the expression of a holy will than when it merely speaks to the human will. It is the sacred awe of the Holy One that lends it this power. In a mere idea I can have pleasure, but it cannot inspire me with awe. The command that emanates from the Living One, gives life; a mere idea pre-supposes life as a condition of its efficacy. The moral idea becomes truly influential on the personal spirit only by its being the actual will of a personal God. "The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes" [Psa. xix, 8].

The question: is a thing good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? contains for us no contradiction. It would do so, however, if the first clause meant, that it is accidental and arbitrary that God declares this or that to be good, and that He might also just as well have declared good the very opposite (Duns Scotus, Occam, Descartes, Pufendorf). God cannot will anything else than what is God-like--corresponding to his nature; this "cannot" is a limitation only in the form of expression, in reality it is the highest perfection. A being that can come into contradiction and antagonism with itself, is not perfect. If the good is that which corresponds to the divine nature, and if God's will is necessarily an expression of his nature, then, whatever is good is good because God wills it, and God wills it because it is good. God's declaration: "I am that I am" [Exod. iii, 14] is valid also for his holy volitions. The idea of the good is not something existing without and apart from God, it is a direct beam from his inner nature. __________________________________________________________________

[8] Namely: "Act so that the maxim of thy conduct shall be adapted to become a universal law for all men __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXIII.

God is the basis of the moral, (2), in that He reveals himself in his universe as the Holy One,--discovers himself to man as the prototype of the moral, as the personally holy pattern after which man should form himself. In this consciousness of God as prototype of the moral, man conceives morality as Godlikeness, and himself,; in his true moral dignity, as God's image and as a child of God.

The idea of a moral self-revelation of God is of wide-reaching moral significancy. Heathenism knows nothing of such a self-revelation; it is true, in the higher heathen religions, moral laws are referred to a divine origin, but this signifies simply either a revelation of the general laws of world-order, or, at best, a revelation of the divine will in regard to men, but not of the real moral nature of God. According to the Christian world-view, the good is not merely to be realized, but it exists already in full reality from eternity; morality is not to create something absolutely new, but only to shape the created after the model of its divine Creator; the free creature is to become like the holy God,--to come into free harmony, not simply with a naked idea but with an eternal reality. As a consequence of this, morality has an incomparably higher certainty and vitality than if the moral law appeared merely under the form of an idea. There can be no more convincing logic than the word: "Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy" [Lev. xix, 2; xi, 44, 45; xx, 7; comp. Deut. x, 17 sqq.; 1 Pet. i, 15, 16; Eph. v, 1]; and Christ himself repeatedly presents the moral essence of God as the true pattern for man, both in general and in particular [Matt. v, 48; Luke vi, 36]. Even as in education there is no better moral instruction than that by personal example, so is there also in the moral education of humanity no more deeply influential moral revelation than that of the holy personality of God; and as the child naturally seeks not so much to realize a lifeless law as to become like a beloved and revered personal example, so is it likewise the case in the moral development of humanity in general; and this is not childlike immaturity, but rational truth; and herein also is the child a proper example. In realizing morality man does not present himself in the All as a solitarily-shining star, but as a God-loved and God-loving image of the invisible God,--as a human resplendence of His holiness.

A much deeper impression than that made by the revelation of the holy personality of God through speech, is made by the revelation of the same by actual reality in the person of Christ. We cannot answer here the oft proposed question as to whether the Son of God would have become man even had not sin entered into the world; the Scriptures give us on this point no decision; and even those who affirm it do not place the advent of the perfect man at the beginning of the race. Hence, even in this view, the coming of Christ is not held as a necessary condition of the moral life. But as Christ is in fact not merely the Redeemer suffering for and through sin, but also the true personal manifestation of the perfect image of God--the absolutely perfect prototype of human morality,--hence, for us, who are no longer in the condition of original sinlessness, the knowledge of pure morality is essentially conditioned on a knowledge of Christ. The first sin-free human beings needed not this historically-personal example in order to have a truthful moral consciousness, and to be able to realize morality; but we need it--we who have had to be redeemed from the curse and power of sin; we need, also as a help to a knowledge of the morality of unfallen man, this example that did not rise out of sin but stood above it. In a much higher degree, in fact, than Christ is the example for the redeemed, Is he the true criterion for a knowledge of unfallen human nature; for there is much in the moral life of the Christian for which Christ's own life cannot be a direct example; for instance, the continuous struggle against the still-remaining sin in the human heart,--in Christ there was no such struggle; to him every thing that was sinful was foreign and external, but never inward and personal. On the. contrary, there could be nothing in the moral life, of unfallen man which could not be directly connected with the person of Christ, though indeed, not all the special phases of human morality could have their particular expression in the life of Christ. Thus we have occasion here to make at least allusion to Christ. __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXIV.

God is the basis of the moral, (3), in that, omnipresently ruling and judging in his universe, He wisely, lovingly, and justly guides and furthers toward its eternal goal the moral life of his creatures, without, however; interfering with their moral freedom. This consciousness gives to the moral life full confidence and joy in the fulfillment of the divine will, and the proper fear of all that is ungodly.

The thought of a merely impersonal moral world-order may seem in itself simple and attractive; for real life, however, it is of no efficiency. Even the proud equanimity of the Stoic is unable definitively to find any better remedy for the antagonism of the reality of existence with his self-conceived ideals, than suicide; and those who, in recent times, assuming that the Christian World-view is gloomy and unhumanitarian, prefer to it the domination of eternal impersonal necessity, and explain away all evil and anarchy as mere appearance, gain after all from this pretended self-explaining and all-reconciling view, little other profit than a complacent satisfaction with themselves and with their own system.. So long as man cannot rid himself of his consciousness of freedom and of the possibility of its misuse, as well as of his consciousness of the reality of evil in the world, just so long will the notion of a world-order unembodied in a personal God prove to be powerless. The Greek had a much higher world-theory than that of ordinary Pantheism, and yet he could not explain away the antagonism that exists between the moral life and non-moral fate, or the excess of real evil; and he gave utterance, in his noblest intellectual productions, either to a melancholy lament over the mysterious tragedy of life, or to a blank hopelessness as to the triumph of the good. Greek tragedy is, by far, more moral than the anti-Christian Pantheism of recent date. To feel and bewail the antagonism of existence even with out-spoken hopelessness, approximates more nearly the truth than to explain it away with delusive sophistry. In a world where the misuse of moral freedom may create evil and disturb the harmony of existence, there can be hopefulness and confidence in moral effort only in virtue of a firm faith in the personally-ruling almighty and holy God; without this there is for the rational spirit no possibility of an unshaken conviction that a truly moral conduct will, in fact, bring real fruit, and not prove to be a useless vain undertaking, an empty play of a restless activity-instinct.--We are here as yet not dealing with a world actually disordered by sin; but also for the unfallen state all moral effort becomes impossible, becomes even idle folly, so soon as we assume even the possibility of a disturbance of the harmony of the world,--unless there exists at the same time the consciousness of a holy God freely ruling above all creature-life, and conducting the moral order of the universe. But the possibility of such a disturbance through the misuse of freedom, is directly implied in the idea of freedom. Hence the notion of a merely general world-order without a personally-ruling God does not suffice, even for the unfallen state, to give to moral effort the necessary confidence. The question is here as to a certainty not merely that the moral efforts of the individual will bear the expected fruit for himself,--though we must consider this also as a perfectly legitimate claim,--but also, in general, that his moral efforts will not be in vain for the furtherance of the perfection of the whole,--will not be counteracted by the possibly interfering power of evil. Without the confidence that by virtue of the all-potent wisdom of the personal God, all truly moral effort will bear legitimate fruit, and that evil can never prevent him who continues faithful, from reaching the last and highest goal of the moral, and that consequently the anarchy that evil Brings into the world will fall only on the heads of the evil-doers, while even the "prince of this world" can effect nothing against the just [John xiv, 30],--without this confidence, the courage and vitality of all morality are paralyzed. Also in the unfallen state human knowledge must still be limited,--must be unable to see into the ultimate depths and ends of existence, and least of all into the future. Hence, without confidence there is no means of rising above doubt as to the success of moral effort, and consequently also of a degree of discouragement in the same. The true moral courage is not a blind defiance of fate, but a rejoicing in the consciousness that all things work to the good of those who love God [Rom. vii, 28], and that "in Him we live and move and have our being" [Acts xvii, 28],--that God, the ground and source of all morality, is not far from any one of us, but works in and with us for the accomplishment of his holy will.--And as effort for the good can be potent only through confidence in God, so also is the moral dread of evil effectual only through the fear of God. Not as if a mere fear of punishment were to restrain man from evil, but rather a holy awe of the holy and all-knowing God. This is also fear,--not, however, slavish, selfish fear, but moral reverence, befitting shame in the presence of the pure and holy One. To say that man should shun evil even irrespectively of God, is empty talk; if he believes in God, then he cannot leave Him out of thought at the sight of evil; and if he believes not in God, then he believes also not in the holiness of the moral command, and he will in fact not shun the evil,--he will simply deny it, as modern observation proves. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and also of morality [Psa. cxi, 10]; "fear the Lord and keep his commandments," says the Preacher [Eccles. xii, 13]; this is the fundamental idea of morality in the Old Testament [comp. Deut. x, 12, 13]. There is one Lawgiver and Judge who is able to save and destroy [James iv, 12]; in the unity of the lawgiver and judge lies the guarantee and holy potency of morality. Whoever believes, not merely in an All, but in the living God, and knows that all that is hidden from human eyes is known to the all-knowing One, and that all secret sins rest under the curse of Him who can kill and make alive, who can wound and heal, and out of whose hand there is none that can deliver [Deut. xxvii, 15 sqq.; xxxii, 39],--such a one will evidently have a very different dread of evil from that of him who regards it as a mere world-inherent necessary transition-stage to perfection. __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXV.

God is the basis of the moral, (4), in that as holy Lawgiver he reveals his eternal, holy will in time. The totality of created being is, in the design of the creative will, to be in harmony with God and with itself. The idea of this harmony, as active in God under the form of will, is God's law. Unfree creatures have it as an inner necessity, and must fulfill it; free creatures have it as a moral command, and should fulfill it; for the former it exists as an unconscious instinct or impulse, for the latter it is revealed; as God's law, it is made known to rational creatures by revelation. The moral law is therefore the revealed will of God as to the rational creature,--namely, that the same should bring its entire life, consciously and with free will, into harmony with God's purpose.

A law which cannot be derived from God's will is not a moral law, but at best a civil one. That the moral law is based in the inner essence of the human reason is not controverted by the proposition, that it is God's will, but it is in fact confirmed. Human reason is conditioned by the same divine will which wills the good; and as, among the goods which God himself created, the highest is reason, hence the inner essence of the reason must involve also the moral,--not, however, as something conditioned independently of God, but in fact as God's will revealed to the reason, in so far as the latter has kept itself unclouded. However, this moral law, as immanent in the reason, is not to be conceived as implying that the rational will gives law unto itself; it is the part of the will to submit itself to the law, but not to give it; the moral law is above the will, above human reason in general; and the latter, in its consciousness of the same, recognizes it in fact as divine, and consequently as absolutely valid and beyond the scope of human determination. As little as man can give to himself reason and its dialectical laws, so little can he give to himself moral law. Freedom of will has to do only with the fulfilling, but not with the conditioning of the law. The morally cognizing reason simply finds revealed within itself the divine law, but does not make it. The Scriptures uniformly present the moral law as being essentially the will of God, without, however, thereby interfering with the idea that the same is the expression of the inner purpose of being itself. "Be ye transformed," says Paul, [Rom. xii, 2], "by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God;" the "will" of God is here the fundamental; any thing is "good" only because it expresses the will of God which is itself good per se; the "acceptable" is that which is good relatively to the spirit that is contemplating it,--that excites approbation in the rational spirit, and is in harmony therewith,--in a word, that is in harmony with God and his thoughts, and with God-related spirit in general; and the "perfect," the goal-attaining, is whatever is the realization of the divine and good end. Thus the apostle expresses the essence of the good under all its phases; the good is good both as to its origin, as to the cognizing spirit, and as to its end. __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXVI.

In treating of the moral law as the expression of the divine will, we have two points to consider, first, the communication of this law by God to man, and then its inner essence.

I. THE REVELATION OF THE DIVINE WILL TO MAN.

This revelation reveals to us not only the contents of the divine law, but must also reveal it as the divine will. This manifestation of the holy will of God is of a twofold character. In reason, which is the more especial embodiment of the divine image, and which is consequently the God-ward phase of man, man has the power of recognizing the divine will in regard to reason,--the rational life-purpose of the rational spirit. Hence, by virtue of his rationality, man has the divine law in himself as a personal knowledge attained to through free self-development. The divine will-revelation is therefore primarily an inner revelation within the rational spirit conditioned by the creative will itself. As, however, this knowledge cannot be a directly-given one, but must be first attained to by morally-spiritual activity, hence it cannot be for morality the sufficient antecedent condition. There is a necessity therefore, in order to the commencement of the morally-rational life of humanity, of a special training of the same by God unto moral knowledge,--of a direct extraordinary objective revelation by means of which man may have from the very beginning a definite consciousness as to the divine will, and a firm guarantee of the truth. __________________________________________________________________

(a) The extraordinary, positive and supernatural revelation of the divine will, in the educative guidance of man by God, precedes indeed his own reason-knowledge as arising from the inner, general, natural revelation, but in a normal development of man it then gradually retires into the back-ground in proportion as his spiritual ripening advances. Its purpose is to awaken rational knowledge, and to conduct the awakened spirit to its spiritual majority; and hence it involves the virtualizing of the moral freedom and of the independent personality of the rational spirit.

The seeming contradiction that lies in the facts, that rational knowledge cannot be given in an immediate and ready form, but must be first attained to through moral effort, and that, on the other hand, all moral activity presupposes already the consciousness of the moral, is reconciled solely and simply by the fact that the creating God is also an educating one,--that He reveals to man Himself and his will,--even as also the child does not ripen to reason and maturity by being abandoned to itself, but by being educated by reason and to reason,--by having the moral consciousness which as yet slumbers in it awakened by instruction, and, when once awakened, then strengthened by actual moral example. Without instruction and training the child never becomes a truly rational person; and when, in harmony with the Christian system, we affirm the same thing of the first man, we do not thereby state anything inconsistent with the nature of man, but in fact simply that which is implied in the very nature of rational spirit-development. If for a moment we should, with Rousseau, conceive of the first generations of man as in a condition of animal unculture, creeping on all fours, and without speech, then we are utterly unable to learn from any of the champions of this theory in what manner these human-like animals could ever attain to reason and to a moral consciousness. We have in fact, in the case of the uncivilized tribes of the race--who, low as they are, are yet not so low as the above-supposed semi-men,--positive proof that man when once sunk into the condition of a savage never again rises to a higher culture, of his own strength.

Without a consciousness of God and of his will, man is as yet, on the whole, not rational; but man was created by God after his own image, and hence unto reason and unto morality. This implies of itself that this consciousness was necessarily shared in even by the first man. Now as man knows nothing of nature save as nature communicates herself to him through sensuous impressions, so also can man know nothing of God unless God reveals himself to him; and in fact a God who should not reveal himself is utterly unconceivable. If now a consciousness of the moral, that is of God's will, is the necessary antecedent condition of all moral activity, and if, at the same time, all real rational knowledge springs from a moral using of such knowledge, then is it perfectly self-evident that the beginning of this knowledge must have been directly prompted by God himself. The fact that this first revelation is termed, in distinction from the self-wrought-out knowledge, an extraordinary and supernatural one, does not imply that it stands in contradiction or antagonism to the inner revelation in the self-developing spirit. On the contrary it is for the development of humanity in general both very natural and in harmony with general order; for, all life of individual objects, both in the spiritual and in the natural world, requires a first stimulation, an awakening influence from other already developed objects and beings; and this stimulating rises toward educative training in proportion as the perfection of the species rises; man has therefore, by virtue of his rational nature, a claim upon an educative influence from the rational spirit; and this is in fact the historical revelation. Man is not by his birth or creation already really a morally-rational spirit, he becomes so only by an educative influence from the rational spirit, and hence, in the case of the first man, from a primarily objective revelation from God. This revelation, however, does not remain in this objective character, but, in stimulating man to a moral consciousness and to moral activity, it brings him to the inner revelation in the rational nature of man himself--to a consciousness of his own God-likeness, and hence also to a consciousness of the divine prototype. The first man sustained to God an absolutely child-like relation, as to an educating father; and such is precisely the Biblical account of the primitive state. If we do not presuppose such an educative primitive revelation of the moral, then, either the moral law would have to exist, (as in irrational nature-creatures, so also in man) as a direct instinctive impulse,--in which case man would not be a moral being, but only a peculiar species of animal; or, a rational knowledge of the moral would have to be already created in him,--which would be contrary to all our notions of man's spiritual development, and surely a much greater miracle than the one which it was designed to dispense with. That which has no need of training is either not a rational being, or it is God himself. The educative revelation presupposes indeed a corresponding moral endowment in man; but this moral endowment, the unconscious germ of the moral, has need, in order to its developing itself into reality, of a spiritual training. This training does not create the moral consciousness, but only awakens it--gives to it primarily definite contents, which the thus stimulated morally rational consciousness then perceives as not in antagonism but as in harmony with itself, and for that very reason appropriates to itself.

In order to man's being really moral he must be conscious that in his free acting he freely subordinates himself to the will of God; but he can do this only when he recognizes the moral, not merely as such, but also as being of divine origin, and this he can do only when he distinguishes the divine will from his own; this distinguishing, however, is possible, for the first man, only when the divine will presents itself to him as other than his own, as objective to him,--when God expressly reveals himself to him. On this definite distinguishing of one's own personal, from the divine will, depends all morality; a merely unconscious following of propension is not moral, but immoral. Man must become conscious that he does this or that act not simply because it pleases him, but that it pleases him because it pleases God. In this conscious, discriminating, free choosing of the divine will as distinguished from the merely natural individual will, man is expected to discover his essential difference from nature, his belonging to the kingdom of God; he is to learn to distinguish between "can" and "should," between his ability and his obligation, and thus to become conscious of his moral destination to freedom. Were the moral consciousness or the moral impulse inborn in man, then he could not come to a consciousness of his freedom--of his ability morally to rise above his merely individual being, and freely to choose the divine. Herein lies the high moral significancy of the notion of an historical divine revelation. In the interest of freedom, in the interest of the training of man into a moral personality, we would have been forced philosophically, to presuppose such a revelation, did we not already know of it from Biblical teaching. __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXVII.

(b) The inner revelation of the holy will of God in the rational consciousness of man is not a mere instinctive impulse, as this is the characteristic of irrational nature-creatures, nor is it a mere feeling, inasmuch as this, so far as relating to spiritual things, always presupposes a knowledge, a consciousness, but it is a real consciousness, which, however, is at first only obscure and indefinite, and receives more definite contents only through educative revelation, whereby it is developed into full clearness. The inner and the objective revelations, though differing from each other as to the order of their taking-place and as to their form, do not differ in their essential contents, nor indeed as to their certainty; and the objective revelation is no more rendered superfluous by the inner one, than is the latter by the former; each mutually calls for the other.

Just as the educative influencing of the child does not render superfluous its own active moral self-development, but in fact calls for the same as its end, and as the latter without the former is not possible, so is it also with the twofold revelation. If the historical revelation did not lead to a knowledge of the moral law as immanent in the reason itself, man would remain in perpetual nonage,--would not come to a consciousness of his rationality; in fact this revelation has its own withdrawal into the back-ground as its ultimate end,--as indeed since the accomplishment of redemption it has actually, in a large degree, so withdrawn.--By inner revelation, here, is not to be understood a real inspiration as in the case of the prophets, for this would in fact be supernatural and extraordinary; it is simply the gradual coming forward of the divine image in man,--the rational spirit's becoming-conscious of itself as such image. This becoming-conscious on the part of one's own rational nature is properly called a revelation, for the reason that this God-likeness is not conditioned by man himself but is created by God in the state of a germ, and is by the free activity of man, simply developed. The positive revelation is the light whereby this divine image, hidden in man's inner nature, becomes visible to his understanding, or more properly, it is the warming sunlight under whose influence the germ of rationality unfolds itself out of secrecy into day. The inner revelation is neither in antagonism to, nor is it identical with, the objective; it is no more in antagonism therewith than is man's own active self-development to moral maturity in antagonism with his training received from others; nor is it so nearly identical therewith as to amount to a repetition of the same thing. Their respective difference of origin continues to hold good also for the morally mature; even for the regenerated Christian, though he possesses the law of the Spirit as a living power within him, the historical revelation continues to serve as a permanent unvarying basis for the development of his moral consciousness, and as a sure criterion for testing the truth of the light within him; Christ came not to destroy the law.--As in their origin, so also in their form, they are different; the positive revelation bears a thoroughly historical character; the inner, a psychological. The former assumes the form of positive laws given at particular times, and through particular personal instrumentalities; the latter is continuous in every individual throughout his life.

On this inner revelation through the God-likeness of the rational spirit the Scriptures lay some stress, notwithstanding that they speak of it simply in connection with man as perverted by sin, in whom the natural consciousness of God and of his will is seriously obscured and in need of special illumination,--for which reason the natural inner, and the supernatural inner, revelations are not strictly and formally distinguished. In allusion to moral wisdom, it is said: "It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Most High, that gives him understanding" [Job xxxii, 8; comp. Prov. xx, 27]; and it is prophesied of the new Covenant: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" [Jer. xxxi, 33],--as in contrast to the Old Covenant under which the law was predominantly objective and in sharp antagonism to the sin-blinded heart. But what is true of the New Covenant is likewise true of the unfallen state. This prophecy refers, it is true, to the working of the Holy Spirit, but unfallen man was per se already filled with this Spirit. Paul speaks of a natural consciousness of God and of the moral, even in the heathen [Rom. i, 19 sqq.]; by how much more must this be true of man as unfallen. This natural God-consciousness is the general manifestation of that "life" which was the light of men [John i, 4].

It is a favorite manner with some to speak of a moral "feeling," and even of a moral instinctive "impulse," as the primitive germ which subsequently develops itself into a moral consciousness. If by such feeling or impulse so much is meant as a knowledge as yet indistinct--a presentiment rather than a comprehension,--we can readily admit it, though in any case the expressions are very inappropriate, and serve only to confusion. Understood in their proper sense, we must emphatically reject them; for feeling is simply an immediate becoming-conscious of a state occasioned in the subject by an impression, and is hence always of a merely subjective and strictly individual nature, whereas the moral law is per se necessarily objective and universal--an idea; an idea cannot be felt, but must be known, though indeed this knowledge may be primarily as yet indistinct. A direct feeling can be occasioned only by a sensuous impression; of spiritual things I can have a feeling properly so-called, only after they have become an object of my cognizing consciousness; every feeling presupposes either a sensuous impression or an idea, a conception. To consider feeling, in the sphere of the religiously-moral, as the fundamental antecedent condition before all knowledge, is simply to confound an, as yet indistinct, anticipatory consciousness with feeling proper, and poorly serves to the attainment of scientific clearness. Still less can we speak of a moral impulse; in the strict sense of the word, as the primitive antecedent; an impulse that does not rest on a moral consciousness belongs not to the sphere of the moral but to that of the merely natural, and in the exact proportion that we attribute power to some such pretended impulse, we violate the freedom of the will. If an unconscious impulse toward the good is the primitive antecedent in man, then is a choice of the evil utterly impossible. If, however, we should assume, as the primitive condition, that there were in man contradictory impulses, the one toward the good, the other toward the evil, still we would not, by this anarchical duality, safeguard the freedom of the will, if we did not assume as above these mutually conflicting impulses, also a higher moral consciousness,--whereby in fact the hypothesis itself would be destroyed. __________________________________________________________________

SECTION LXXVIII.

The revelation of the divine will to the moral subject, as given in the rational self-consciousness, is the conscience. This is not an originally ready power, but, as given at first only in germ, it must be developed,--stands in need of culture, primarily by God himself, and, in all after the first generation. by the already morally-matured spirit of men; and with its further moral development it constantly becomes more definite, more clear and more rich in contents. Now, as sin separates man from God and from the knowledge of Him, and also damagingly affects the moral training received from others, it is clear that the conscience has its full purity and power only in a sinless state.--As relating to the moral life-manifestations, the conscience appears as a morally-judging power, and as such it is either in harmony with the particular manner of action--in which case it awakens a joyous feeling of approval,--or it is in antagonism therewith, and in this case it awakens a painful feeling of disapproval; and either feeling prompts to a corresponding course of action. As the conscience is a revelation of the moral law as the divine will, hence it never exists without a God-consciousness,--it is itself, in fact, one of the phases of this consciousness, and is per se of a religious character, and is inexplicable from the mere world-consciousness. In its germ it is a primitive and not a derived power, and in this sense it is already presupposed on the entrance of the positive divine revelation. The actual acceptance of this revelation is of itself already a moral act which presupposes the conscience; but the latter is excited to activity and to full development only by the positive revelation. Conscience is essentially an integral part of man's God-likeness,--is, like rationality in general, a divine life-power imparted to the creature.

The conscience is in its essence, not different from the God-consciousness, but is only the bearing of the God-consciousness upon the moral; as relating to the good, it relates also to God, for none is good but God alone [Matt. xix, 17]; and God is the criterion of all good, for the good is the God-answering; a conscience which is not a God-consciousness is a perverted, an unanchored one. As the conscience is an inner revelation of God to man, we place its discussion in this section, although it is an essential element of the moral subject.--The manners of conceiving of the conscience differ very widely; it is, in turn, regarded either as a cognizing consciousness, or as a feeling, or as an instinctive impulse; and consequently it is sought for in all the different spheres of the soul-life; it is indeed true that the conscience cannot be real without embracing in itself all three of these spheres; and hence the word may be used in all three significations. In the expression: "Conscience says to me," or "it approves this and rejects that," it is conceived of as a cognizing, judging consciousness; but we also speak of a joyous, or a chastising conscience; and again we say: "conscience compels me to this act or deters me from it." The question, however, is: which of the three phases is the primitive, the fundamental one? which constitutes the essence of the conscience? According to what we have previously said as to the relation of feeling and willing to the cognizing consciousness, it follows very plainly that the essence of the conscience is to be found in that which its name directly expresses in various languages, namely, a being-certain, hence a certain knowing, a cognizing consciousness; in the New Testament the term suneidesis--(from sunoida, conscious sum, strictly: "I am a fellow-knower," and in a higher sense: "I know with God," in whom all knowledge centers),--an associate knowing with God, in virtue of his indwelling in rational creatures, is used of the conscience, both in so far as it leads to the good (agathe suneidesis, or kale or kathara), and in so far as, by reproving, it punishes evil [John viii, 9]; and the same word is used also directly in the sense of religious consciousness, presenting the conscience as a consciousness of the divine will [1 Peter ii, 19; Rom. xiii, 5; Heb. ix, 9]. The conscience, as differing from the enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit [Rom. ix, 1], is a power inherent in the essence of man per se, see Rom. ii, 14, 15; in this passage the logismoi are not the conscience, but the reflections that spring from the conscience, which itself is the "work of the law written in the hearts," that is, the consciousness of the contents, of the requirements of the moral law; Paul is not speaking here of the true and perfect conscience, but of the natural conscience of sinful man; the essential features of the true conscience, however, still lurk in the disordered one; and this essential character appears here evidently as a consciousness of the moral. In the Old Testament the conscience is designated by the word heart, lvv [Job xxvii, 6].

The conscience is not a mere simple knowing, it is an utterance of the practical reason, a direct judging of moral thoughts and actions, an approving or condemning witness as to the moral conduct of man [2 Cor. i, 12; v, 11; Rom. xiv, 22; Acts xxiii, 1; xxiv, 16; 2 Tim. i, 3; 1 Peter iii, 16; Heb. xiii, 18]. Such a judging presupposes the consciousness of a moral law, according to which the decisions are made; and this consciousness is the inner essence of conscience itself. The conscience is a judging power, for the reason that it is per se a consciousness of the law as the divine will; it utters itself discriminating and deciding (krinon) because it is mindful of the eternal ground of the holy,--because it is the inner essence of the divine image as coming to self-consciousness; this latter is the essence of the conscience, the judging is its active manifestation.--The conscience can be awakened, cultivated, and refined by human instruction, but not generated; it is a perpetual witnessing of God as to himself and his holy will in the rational spirit of man, and for this simple reason it is not within the control of man, but is a power above him; it may be silenced temporarily, and led astray in its particular utterance as a discriminating power, but it can never be eradicated nor definitively perverted. It is not the person, strictly speaking, who has the conscience, but it is the conscience that has the person; it dwells indeed in the individual personality, but it is not itself of subjective character, since it is of divine quality; it does not express my personal peculiarity, but the holy will of God in regard to me. Conscience is the fact of the divine morality in man antecedent to all human morality; it is the germ proper of man's God-likeness,--the God-likeness itself as bearing relation to free conduct, in so far as this consciousness constitutes a part of the essence of rationality. Without this divine germ of the moral in man, morality would be impossible--as impossible as is seeing without eyesight, no matter how much light there might be, or instruction without previously existing rationality as a basis. A convicting by argumentation is possible only when there is antecedently existing in the subject some certain knowledge wherewith the new truth shall agree. What axioms are in mathematics, that is the conscience in the moral sphere. He who does not recognize the axioms, and hence has, as it were, no mathematical conscience, is beyond the reach of instruction. He alone can become rational and moral, and live so, who is so already in the original structure of his being; and this deepest ground of moral rationality is in fact the conscience. He in whom the witness of the holy God does not witness for the holy, cannot be moral; but such an abandoned one there cannot be in the entire creation of God, for to none has he "left himself without witness." A man may become ungodly, may be unconscientious, and yet not be free from the power of conscience; he may deprive himself of his eyes, but not of his reason, and consequently not of his conscience. For this simple reason, every sin is a fall of man from his own proper nature, an unfaithfulness toward himself. Conscience rests on the. discrimination of the personal creature and its will from the personal God and his will; it finds its universal expression in the words of the Lord: "Not my will but thine be done." Whoever supposes himself to act from necessity, or merely according to his own individual will, for him the idea of the conscience is obscured; the irreligious are necessarily unconscientious. It is for the simple reason that it is not the individual ego, but the divine, that speaks in the conscience, that there can be a reproving, an evil, conscience, in which the difference of this twofold ego appears in an irreducible antithesis. But this voice of the divine ego does not first come to the consciousness of the individual ego, from without; rather does every external revelation presuppose already this inner one; there must echo out from within man something kindred to the outer revelation, in order to its being recognized and accepted as divine. Even as Adam at the first sight of, the woman recognized at once that she was flesh of his flesh, so recognizes man immediately on the utterance of the divine will by special revelation that this is spirit of that spirit which dwells and speaks within him,--not, however, as his individual ego, but as distinct from it, and as having uncontested right to rule over it.

The first manifestation of conscience in the Scriptures appears in the words wherein Eve opposes the temptation: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: ye shall not eat of it." Here Eve distinguishes the command, as the divine will, from her own will; which latter, however, she afterward carries out; but this adversely judging conscience presupposes a previous first activity of the same, namely, the recognition of the divine command as obligating. The command itself spoke in fact, primarily, only to the understanding; the recognition of it as divine, as a legitimate determining authority for the individual will, the receiving of it into the heart, and the willingness to conform the individual volitions to it,--all this is not a matter of the cognizing understanding, nor in general of the individual spirit as such, but of that divine element in man which responds to the divine command--the conscience; and in the very first utterance of this power, it shows itself primarily, indeed as a consciousness, but then straightway also as a feeling of love as toward the congenial, the right, and as a willingness arising from this consciousness and this love.

The cognizing activity of the conscience relates primarily and directly only to the God-pleasing, and not also to the God-repugnant; for the former is real, but not the latter, and all true and real cognition relates to something real. Hence the second phase of conscience, that where men's "eyes are opened" and they "know the good and the evil," does not belong to the primative and pure conscience, but is a manifestation of the conscience as already in antagonism to the moral actuality of man. As primarily relating to the Godlike, and hence as attended by a feeling of approbation, the conscience has originally nothing to do with fear of punishment, but is on the contrary an expression of peace with God; fear presupposes already a disturbed harmony and a knowledge of good and evil; hence in the Scriptures we find conscience expressly distinguished from fear. [Rom. xiii, 5.]

According to Rothe, conscience is the divine activity in its passive form, that is, it is the soul's self-activity as being determined by the body, or, in general, by material nature, and, in the final instance, by the divine self-activity, or, in general, by God himself,--that is, it is instinctive impulse as religious. In his opinion conscience lies not on the side of the self-consciousness, but on that of the self-activity, and relates not to conceptions and to the understanding, but to volitions and to actions. Conscience has essentially an individual character,--is of subjective, not of objective, nature; hence it is not correct to speak of a tribunal of conscience. "The conscience of another has not the least binding force for me, but only my own; when an appeal is made to conscience, there all further discussion is cut off, there all objective arguments become powerless; whatever is a matter of conscience to me is to me a sanctum sanctorum which none dare violate"--not even for objective reasons; nor does my conscience bind any one else. Conscience is essentially a religious instinct-impulse; and as being an activity of God in man under the form of an instinctive impulse, and hence also a sensuously perceptible one, it is attended by sensuously-somatic phases of feeling. Now every instinct-impulse is either positive or negative, hence conscience is either approbative or disapprobative; as disapprobative it is religious aversion,--an instinctive impulse toward the counterworking of the sin (hence stings of conscience); as approbative it is the religious appetite. Rothe takes occasion here to complain seriously of the hitherto prevalent confusion of phraseology on this subject,--namely, in view of the fact that conscience is treated of, sometimes as a propension, sometimes as a moral feeling, sometimes as a religious feeling, sometimes as such and such an instinct-impulse, or as such and such a sense; in this, however, he is manifestly unjustifiable; it is to no good purpose to quarrel with language which is, in fact, often profounder and truer than the boldest theoretical systems: No one has a right arbitrarily to define ideas contrarily to the general consciousness, and then to find fault with language because it does not harmonize with the definitions. In the present case we find language perfectly justifiable in making so wide a use of the term conscience, inasmuch as all the above phases are in fact embraced in it, though indeed not in equal degrees. The strange notion that conscience rests on a determination of the personal soul by the material body, so that by implication a rational spirit without a material body would not have any conscience, we pass over in silence, and make only the following observations. Should we admit that conscience relates to volition and action, it does not follow from this that it is not per se, and primarily, a consciousness; thought in fact may influence volition; and the necessary presupposition of every volition is a thought; but an unconscious instinct-impulse is neither religious nor moral, but irrational. The fact is, conscience lies most strictly on the side of the self-consciousness; otherwise an evil conscience could not contain a self-accusation. That the conscience is of subjective nature is only in so far correct as it constitutes an integral element of rational personality; but it is entirely incorrect in Rothe to reduce it to a mere individually-subjective phenomenon, and entirely to deprive it of objective character. If conscience is to be at all of a rational character, it must have a general, and hence also an objective significancy. That which is merely subjective has not the least moral significancy, rather is it the opposite of the moral; what is holy for me must be also holy per se and before God, and what is holy before God must be holy for all moral creatures. My conscience is true only in so far as it is an expression of the moral idea; but the moral idea is not of a merely subjective nature. For every Christian, it is a matter of conscience to follow Christ; this holds good in general as well as in particular, and not simply for me as such and such a particular person. The more the conscience bears a merely subjective character, the more defective it is; in a normal condition of humanity all moral consciences would necessarily be essentially concordant, inasmuch as there is only one God and only one divine will, and inasmuch as conscience is the expression of this will. Rothe comes himself into violent contradiction with his assertions, in that he makes conscience to be determined by a divine activity; for this divine activity must be objective to the subject; and, as of a holy character, it certainly does not determine each individual to a different decision: and a little farther on Rothe himself takes this position: that the conscience as an activity of God in man, has a direct and unconditional authority, and from which man cannot in any manner escape; that arguments avail nothing as against conscience,--that perfectly convincing arguments may be urged and yet the conscience remain unmoved; that consequently conscience is also infallible, that it never deceives and is incapable of being bribed; and that though we may blind ourselves as to its decision, yet it is itself not to be deceived. These positions, so utterly extreme and so contrary to all experience, are manifestly irreconcilable with his previous position, namely, that conscience, being entirely devoid of objective character, is a mere subjective phenomenon; for in the notion of an authority in conscience, and especially of an unconditional one, it is manifestly implied that the subject is subordinate thereto. [9] --According to Schenkel (Dogmatik, 1858, I, 135 sqq.) the conscience is a special faculty of the human soul, or rather that one of its organs which has to do with religious functions, whereas the reason and the will do not relate directly to God but to the world; this conscience, in which the God-consciousness is primarily and immediately given, is at the same time also the ethical central-organ. What is to be gained by this freak of fancy it is difficult to determine. When men thus arbitrarily, and contrary to prevalent usage, limit the notion of the reason and the will, it is of course an easy matter to discover new faculties of the soul and new organs of the same; but whether anything important is gained thereby, and whether the supposed epoch-making new discovery will meet with much favor, we may seriously doubt.--Trendelenburg shows much more circumspection and acumen in considering conscience as the reaction and pro-action of the total God-centered man against the man as partial, especially against the self-seeking part of himself (Naturrecht, 1860, § 39).

II.--THE ESSENCE OF THE MORAL LAW AS THE DIVINE WILL.

SECTION LXXIX.

The essence of the moral law as the divine will cannot be deduced from the nature of man alone, but essentially only from the idea of God as ruling righteously in his creation.--(a) As morality rests on freedom, and as freedom consists in the fact that a man chooses, by a personal independent volition, a particular mode of action among several possible ones, hence every moral action is at the same time the leaving undone of a possible contrary action. The moral law is therefore per se always twofold; it is command and prohibition at the same time, and consequently there is in fact no essential difference whether the law appears in the one or in the other form; and as the moral life of man is a continuous one, hence he must at every moment of time be fulfilling a divine law; a mere non-doing would be a negation of the moral. It is in consequence of the freedom of choice, and not in consequence of sinfulness, that the divine law bears the form of a "should."

Every presentation of the moral law from the stand-point of man alone, that is, purely from the nature of man, without deriving it from God, is anti-religious, and can never include the whole truth of the moral idea. And in precise proportion as we conceive more highly of the moral nature of man from that stand-point, we render unavoidable his Pantheistic exaltation into the highest realization of God himself--the putting of man in the place of the personal God. We cannot possibly understand the moral law save as the divine purpose in regard to free creatures, and we can base it on the nature of man only in so far as we recognize in and through this nature the divine creative will, the fulfillment of which lies in the realized moral perfection of man.

The fact that any particular action is morally good, necessarily implies as possible a contrary, or non-good one; and the commanding of the former is per se a prohibiting of the latter; every command directly implies the prohibition of the contrary form of action. Now it might seem as if the converse did not hold good, namely, that a prohibition does not imply at the same time also a command; the laws: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, seems to require simply a non-doing. This, however, would be possible only on condition that a mere non-doing were in general a moral possibility. But as life is strictly continuous in all of its stages, and as even a momentary real cessation of life is death, hence least of all can the highest form of life, the moral life, be a non-living, a simple non-doing, without thereby turning into the contrary, namely, into spiritual and moral death. As the human spirit, even in the deepest sleep as conditioned by the weariness of the body, is never idle, but keeps up an activity in remembered or unremembered dreaming, so also the highest form of spirit life, the moral life, is never interrupted by a pure inactivity. Hence a prohibition that should include in itself no contents of a positive character, no command, could not be of a moral nature. The moral non-doing of a morally prohibited action is in and of itself necessarily the doing of the contrary. Hence, Luther, in his elucidation of the Commandments, is strictly right in never leaving them in the form of a simple "thou shalt not;" but in uniformly deducing from them a very positive "thou shalt." The law: "thou shalt not kill," though in form a simple prohibition, nevertheless directly implies the enjoining of all that man, in his intercourse with others, ought to do as contrasting with the disposition that leads to murder; we should not only not kill our neighbor, but we should help and succor him in all his bodily perils;--a mere non-doing in the face of such perils would be a direct violation of the law. If man is not to commit adultery, then must he, in the conjugal relation, not only not do any thing that stimulates and nurtures an adulterous disposition, but he must do the contrary thereof; that is, he must live purely and chastely in words and acts, and love and honor his own consort.

Nevertheless it is not indifferent as to which of the two forms the moral law assumes; the difference, however, lies not in the essence, but in the practical educative adaptation. As the essence, the end, of the moral life is not negative but has positive contents, the true and perfect form of the law is in fact that of the express command; "thou shalt" is higher than "thou shalt not." But for man while as yet undeveloped to moral maturity, the form of prohibition is the more obvious and simple, since, on the one hand, it brings his moral liberty of choice more clearly to his consciousness, and, with the exclusion of the immoral, opens to him the whole field of the discretionary, and since, on the other, it establishes protecting limits for the field within which he is to train himself up to moral maturity, to a consciousness of the good. With the child, education always begins in the prohibiting of what conflicts with its well-being; God's first law to man was a free throwing-open of the field of the discretionary in connection with a limiting prohibition [Gen. ii, 16, 17], whereas the real command appears primarily only in the general form of a blessing, as expressive of the goal of moral effort, the good [Gen. i, 28]. While the Mosaic Commandments bear predominately the character of prohibition, Christ sums up the moral contents of the divine law in the form of a positive command: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself;" and at the same time Christ declares that this command embraces the whole ancient law. Hence, while the essence of the divine law continues ever the same, the revelation of it gradually advances from the predominantly prohibitory form to that of the positive command.

As both forms of the divine law present a duty to the free will of man, they both bear the expression of a command, a "should." This is the form assumed by nearly all laws, from the first one given to Adam to the perfect laws of Christ. Since the time of Schleiermacher, however, many take offense at this "should," and strive to banish it, at least, from the pure moral law. In Schleiermacher's Philosophical Ethics, this rejection of the "should" is entirely consequential; for here the moral is quite as necessarily-determined a phenomenon of the universe as is the natural, and for freedom of will there is no place whatever; consequently ethics has no other task than simply to describe that which takes place from necessity, but not to present laws under the form of requirements, of duty. Rothe follows this view only up to a certain point; he rejects the form of the "should" only for sinless man, as indeed also one cannot apply the idea of "should" to God; only for sinful man can the moral appear as a duty (Eth. I, Auf., § 817). As relating to God this is doubtless correct, inasmuch as God's freedom is not human liberty of choice, and as it absolutely excludes the possibility of sinning, and since God is absolutely his own law. But as relating to free creatures, even though they be as yet perfectly sinless, it is erroneous,--at least unless we are to regard the moral perfection of the same as a cessation of all freedom of choice and likewise of all moral duty. As long as man does not cease to propose to himself moral ends, and freely to aim to reach them, so long will duty as yet continue. This form of the law would be unsuitable for perfect man only when it should be conceived of as something uncongenial to man, as some sort of oppressive yoke, which, however, is by no means the case. The as yet unrealized state of a freely-to-be-attained goal always implies a "should." It is only from some such misconception as if the "should" implied something foreign and burdensome to man, that we can explain why even Harless limits the application of this word to the fallen state (Christl. Ethik, 6 Auf., p. 80 sqq.). There is, however, no shadow of censure in the form "thou shouldst;" in fact, there is for the free will no other form of law conceivable than that of the "should." Without a distinguishing of the divine will from that of the subject, no real conscious morality is possible; and simply this distinguishing and nothing more--not an antagonism of estrangement--is contained in the idea of the "should." It is in this idea in fact that morality and piety find their unity, the moral being conceived as the divine will [Deut. x, 12; Micah vi, 8]. The child that does the good for the reason that it knows that it is the will of its parents that it should do so, stands morally higher than the one that does it without a consciousness of its duty; the former, but not the latter, is able to offer resistance to temptation; for temptation is overcome only by the thought of the divine will, or of duty. A command does not presuppose a contrary inclination, but only the possibility of sin, that is, it presupposes freedom of will. In denying to man while as yet in a sinless state all consciousness of the divine law, and supposing him to act simply from a direct impulse of love, we not only contradict the express declaration of the Scriptures as to a revelation of the divine will to primitive man, but we also render the fall into sin an impossibility.

SECTION LXXX.

(b) Whatever is morally good is God's will, and is hence also moral law; and this law has, as God's will, an unconditional claim,--presents itself always as a requirement from which there is no escape, and cannot possibly be construed into a mere counsel the non-fulfillment of which would not be a sin, and the voluntary fulfillment of which would constitute a supererogatory merit. The moral goal of every human being is moral perfection, and all that conducts thereto is for every such being an absolute duty, that is, it is God's will and law concerning him. No one can do more good than is required of him; for the human will cannot be better than the divine, and God's law is not less good than God's will. That which in the Scriptures has the appearance of real moral counsel is simply a conditional law, the fulfillment of which becomes a duty to the individual only under certain, not universally-existing, circumstances; but wherever it does become a duty, there it is so absolutely, and hence its non-fulfillment is a violation of duty; and wherever it does not become a duty there its fulfillment has no merit.

Here, for the first time, we meet an antagonism of moral views between the different Christian churches; and it is a far-reaching one; and from this point on, in our attempt to construct a system of Christian ethics, and not simply of the ethical views of this or that church, we must seek for the essence of Christianity, not merely in those generalities which are common to all particular churches, but, wherever two views are in irreconcilable antagonism, we must necessarily decide for that one which is of a really Christian character, and cannot regard both as equally legitimate. And although. the question in this connection is nearly always, as to counsels to redeemed Christians, still it properly belongs in this place, since in fact unfallen man would be, even much more than the redeemed, in a condition to obtain a higher merit than is strictly required.

On a superficial examination it might seem that by the dogma as to the evangelical counsels (consilia as distinguished from praecepta) the moral requirements were advanced higher than the generally-sufficient degrees of morality; the fact is, however, the very opposite. The notion that there is some good which is not also a duty, can only be obtained by lowering the moral requirement from that of the highest possible moral perfection to an inferior requirement; and a supererogatory merit becomes possible only where the idea of the good embraces more than the moral requirement. The Protestant church, however, holds fast the view that all real good is absolutely a duty, and hence that man is obligated to do all the good within his power,--that he should unconditionally strive for the highest possible perfection. The Protestant view as to the moral requirement stands therefore higher than the opposing view. The Protestant church rejects the notion of moral counsels, and of the meritoriousness of their fulfillment, for the reason that it regards their contents as not absolutely good, as not per se moral, but as only good under certain not universally-existing circumstances, but as absolutely commanded when those circumstances do exist. That which is good in a particular conjuncture is, when that case arises, an absolute duty, and not a mere discretionary and non-obligating counsel. The saying of Christ [Luke xvii, 10]: "When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say: we are unprofitable servants,"--which is not designed to disparage the worth of true morality, but simply to lead man to humility by reminding him of his sinful state, and of his redemption by grace alone,--is, however, applied by the theologians of the Romish church to the doctrine of the evangelical counsels, in that they say that man should in fact not remain a mere unprofitable servant, but should be a child of God, as indeed also Christ was not an unprofitable servant; and even some Protestant exegetes try to escape this inference simply by referring the works here in question not to Christian morality, but merely to the Mosaic law. We regard both the inference, and this mode of escaping it as inadmissible. It is indeed true, man should not be simply an unprofitable servant but a child of God; but from this very fact it follows that that which morally conditions this filial relation to God, must also be a positive moral requirement and duty, and not a mere counsel, which we may leave unfulfilled and yet not fail in doing all that is actually required of us; man is in fact absolutely bound to become a child of God. Now as a limitation of these words of Christ to the Mosaic law is not justified by the context, seeing that just previously (verses 5, 6) the question had been as to the power of faith, hence their true scope is, we think, as follows: man, even though redeemed but not yet free from sin, is unable by his dutiful works to acquire merit before God in such a sense as that he could claim of God the blessedness of the children of God as a reward due, and which God would be required by his justice to grant, but on the contrary he can regard this blessedness only as a gracious gift conferred upon him in virtue of his faith in the compassionate love of God in Christ. To the works owed, it is not other non-owed and hence supererogatory works that are compared, but faith, which, though indeed also a moral requirement, yet differs essentially from works properly so called (comp. verse 19; "thy faith hath made the whole"). Christ's utterance, therefore, teaches clearly the very opposite of sanctification by works as prevailing in the Romish church.

The Romish church finds further support for its supererogatory good works,--which consist essentially in intensified self-denial, that is, in voluntary celibacy, poverty, obedience to man-devised rules, solitary life, etc.,--in those texts of the New Testament which seem to present celibacy and voluntary poverty as a higher morality not to be expected of all Christians. To the rich young man, who, as he himself affirmed, had kept all the commandments, Christ says [Matt. xix, 21]: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast,--and give to the poor, and then thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me." Now, it is argued, the moral law does not in fact require of all men the giving up of their possessions, and yet this young man had fulfilled all the commands which Christ mentions to him; hence this giving-up was over and above these commands. This is a very unfortunate inference, for surely a morality which does not lead to the perfection of man, can hardly be pure and required by God; and in the case of this young man the giving-up of his riches was the condition of his perfection, and hence, as we hold, an unconditional requirement, in case he really desired to attain to the highest good. The young man in declining the requirement failed, as Christ says, to have part in the kingdom of heaven; all his presumed fulfillment of the law was insufficient. Now this is in plain antagonism to the Romish doctrine, according to which the fulfillment of the law, even without obedience to the counsels, is amply sufficient to a participation in the kingdom of heaven, whereas the supererogatory works simply serve to a more speedy attainment thereof, or to a higher degree of blessedness. Hence those who refuse to admit that certain particular actions become a duty only under particular and not universally-existing relations, but that when these do exist, then they become in fact a positive requirement, would have no other alternative left, than to regard the requirement made of the rich young man as a general duty for all Christians. We can distinguish universally-valid commands from conditional ones, not, however, moral commands from mere counsels. Also the conditional commands are, when the particular conjuncture arrives, of absolute obligation, and not to fulfill them is disobedience to God's command; whereas, in the Romish view, the non-fulfillment of the counsels does not incur the least moral blame.--When Paul says of himself [1 Cor. ix, 12-18] that he has denied himself many things to which he had a right, that he has labored without charge, etc., the Romanists here find a supererogatory work to which the Apostle was not obligated. Paul, however, declares expressly that he so acted in order "not to abuse his power [liberty] in the Gospel." Now if the taking advantage of his discretionary power, under these particular circumstances, would have been a misuse of his liberty, then the course of action adopted by the apostle was evidently simply his duty, and by no means a supererogatory work.--But the greatest emphasis is placed on the utterances of Christ and of St. Paul as to abstaining from marriage: "All cannot receive this saying, but they to whom it is given" [Matt. xix, 11]. Now, that those who do not receive the saying can be believing Christians who attain to the kingdom of God, although not to that higher stage of salvation which is conditioned on supererogatory works as Romanists understand it, is not only not said, but, to the contrary, it is said that the self-chastening in question is done "for the kingdom of heaven's sake," and hence plainly in the sense that the same is a condition of attaining to the kingdom of heaven. But the opera supererogationis of which one is found here, are not regarded as a condition to participation in the kingdom of heaven. When Paul [1 Cor. vii] commends to Christians to abstain from marriage, this is certainly not offered as a universally-applying command, but manifestly as a mere counsel (comp. verse 12), not, however, in such a sense as that individuals may disregard it at perfect pleasure and without moral detriment. On the contrary, the apostle expressly gives the ground of his advice: "I suppose that this is good (kalon) for the present distress;" "such (as marry) shall have trouble in the flesh; but I spare you." From this it follows that where such a "present distress" does not exist, or where there is full moral power and readiness to endure the worldly trials, there the advisableness of celibacy no longer applies. In general the principle is valid: "If thou marry thou hast not sinned" (verse 28); but in every definite case the duty becomes definite also. Where there is such a pressure of "distress," and where higher duties are to be fulfilled, and there is not sufficient power to bear the worldly trials without danger to faithfulness, there to marry is not only not a mere non-sinning, and abstaining from marriage a good counsel, but the former is a positive sin, and the latter a duty. And wherever any one, in view of these particular circumstances does remain unmarried, he does not thereby acquire a higher, a supererogatory desert, but he simply fulfills his duty. Such a supererogatory desert is moreover directly excluded by the fact that the apostle proposed by freedom from marriage to preserve the Christians, in that time of distress, from temporal "trouble;" now he who renounces an otherwise legitimate privilege in order to be spared from worldly trouble, cannot possible lay claim to a special higher desert and to a special recompense for the same. In fact, we can readily conceive of cases to the contrary, where the greater desert would consist precisely in the assumption of these trials by marrying, and where therefore to marry would be a duty.

According to the Romish doctrine there is a difference between God's holy will and his moral law; the former has not an unconditional validity, but is, in relation to man in the sphere of higher moral perfection, simply a wish the fulfillment of which would indeed be pleasing to God, but with the non-fulfillment of which He will nevertheless be satisfied. Bellarmin says, apropos to Matt. xxii, 36: "He who loves God with his whole heart, is not bound to do all that God counsels, but only what He commands,"--an assertion that must appear to an evangelical conscience as a reversal of the moral consciousness. Hirscher, in his earlier writings, defended this doctrine thus: "Love is a command given to all without exception, whereas a specific degree of love is not commanded; rather is love, when once really existing, left to its own nature; it in fact presses forward of its own prompting, and it is inconsistent with its inner nature that the rude hand of a command should impose upon it that which it will always freely bring forth from its own heart; hence love is in general an absolute duty, not, however, a specific higher degree of love; the absence of the higher degree does not involve also an absence of righteousness in general, but only a certain higher range of the moral affections; so was it with the rich young man in the Gospel." Now, all this is manifest sophistry. It is true the degree of love cannot, for every particular case, be stated in a particular legal formula, still, however, this degree is an absolute duty; it simply depends on the spiritual and moral culture of the individual, but is in no case left to individual caprice. Whoever loves God or Christ, or father, mother, or consort less than his moral culture enables him to do, simply commits sin; and he who loves with all the capacity of his soul does not do any thing supererogatory, but simply his bounden duty; and it is nearer the truth to say that all will have to accuse themselves of loving too little, than that any single soul may boast of loving God more than with the "whole heart and soul and strength." (In the fifth edition of his Moral, II, p. 328 sqq., Hirscher so tones down the above teaching that only a mere shadow of it remains.) The Romish doctrine, in making perfection dependent on the fulfillment of the counsels, implies thereby that God's will, as expressed in the moral law, is not that man should be perfect, but it is on the contrary rather an individual courage transcending the mere will of God, that leads him out beyond the moral goal set for him by God himself. [10]

SECTION LXXXI.

(c) While, on the one hand, there is no form of action which could be to the subject, in any given moment, morally indifferent, that is, neither in harmony nor in disharmony with the divine will, neither good nor evil, still, on the other hand, no definitely-framed form of law embraces within itself the total contents of the moral life-sphere; for as every law has only contents of a general character, while the moral activity itself is always of an individual character, so that the moral actions of different men that fall under the same moral law offer a great diversity, hence the moral law does not sustain to the actions that answer to it precisely the same relation as an idea to its direct realization and manifestation; the particular moral action is not the simple, pure expression and copy of the moral law itself, but it always contains something which does not arise from the law, but from the individual peculiarity. The law as appropriated by the person is fulfilled only in such a manner as expresses also the peculiarity of the person. Every moral action contains therefore two elements: a general ideal one, the moral law, and a particular and inure real one, the personal element,--which latter, as the expression of the personally peculiar character, has also its perfect legitimacy. God's moral will is not that men should be mere impersonal, absolutely similar expressions of the moral law, but that the latter should come to its realization only as appropriated by the particular personality. This personally peculiar element that inheres in every actual moral action cannot be embraced in any general legal formula, inasmuch as in its nature it is in fact not general, but a pure expression of individual personality. Every real moral activity is therefore the product of a twofold freedom: of that which subordinates the individual personality to the law, and of that which does not merge the personality into a mere abstract idea, but preserves it in its legitimate peculiarity, and which is to a certain extent a law unto itself.

By this notion of the right of personality Christian Ethics differs from all non-Christian systems, not excepting those of the Greeks, notwithstanding that the latter lay such great stress on the freedom of the person; and this feature is of wide-reaching significance. The decided rejection of the notion that there may be morally-indifferent actions and conditions, and the emphasizing the rights of personal individuality, are very essential to a true understanding of the moral. By insisting disproportionately on the former, we leave too little room for the peculiarity of the moral personality, and make it necessary that for every particular action there should be also a special law; this leads inevitably to a legal bondage hostile alike to all vital individuality, and to the essence of personal freedom. This is the stand-point of Chinese and of Talmudic ethics, and to a certain extent, of the casuistics of some Romish moralists. On the other hand, if we insist too exclusively on the peculiarity of the person, we incur the danger of trespassing on the unconditional validity of the law, to the profit of the fortuitous caprice of the subject,--somewhat as recently in the period of the so-called "geniuses" and of the genius-less freethinkers who followed them, all morality was made to consist in the uncurbed development of the fortuitous peculiarity of the individual, to which peculiarity every thing was freely allowed provided only that it was "genial." The only true course is, in harmony with the general Christian consciousness, to hold fast to both of these elements.

At each and every particular point of time, the moral activity and the moral state are either good or evil, either in harmony with the moral idea or not so. Although in the same action there may be different phases which have morally different characters, and which place good and evil in close proximity, still these contrary elements never coalesce into a moral neutrum, into a morally-indefinite fluctuating between good and evil--a moral indifference. An individual may indeed be morally undecided, neither cold nor warm; this indecision, however, is not of a morally-indifferent character, but is itself evil. There may be different degrees of good or evil, but not an action that is neither good nor evil. This will become self-evident if we fix our mind on the fundamental idea of good and evil as that which answers to, or does not answer to, the divine will; between these two a third is absolutely inconceivable, just as in mathematics there is no medium between a correct and a false result, or in a clearly presented legal case no medium between yes and no. The bride who cannot answer "yes" to the question as to her willingness to the marriage, says thereby, in fact, "no;" and whoever does not at any given moment say "yes" to God's never neutral will, simply rejects it. The essentially self-contradictory assumption of a morally-indifferent middle-sphere between good and evil, is in itself anti-moral; and every immoral person is only too ready to transfer all his immorality, in so far as he cannot explain it into good, into this pretended sphere of the morally indifferent.

And yet this so widely prevalent tendency to assume that there is a morally-indifferent sphere of action, is based on an actual, though falsely interpreted, presentiment of the true relations in the case. The fact is, every feature in correct moral action is not directly and specifically determined by the moral law, but a very essential phase of such action, has another source than the general law; nor is the truly moral man simply a mere expression of the moral law, but, as differing from other equally moral men, he is entitled as a person to have and retain his special peculiarity. This phase of the moral life appears at once, and very clearly, in that which lies at the basis of all moral society--wedlock-love. Love, and, more specifically, conjugal love, is a moral command; but the fact that this love fixes itself exclusively and continuously upon precisely this particular person, is a personally-peculiar shaping of the moral law; no law can prescribe what particular person shall be the object of my conjugal love; and the personal element is here so manifestly legitimate that the eliminating of it--the indulging in love, not to a particular personally-chosen person, but to the other sex in general--results in "free" love, the very quintessence of immorality and vulgarity. Wherever moral theories ignore the rights of personality, there the tendency is very strong to base marriage, not on personal choice, but on the choice of the State, as in ancient Peru. Now, what is true of conjugal love is true also, though not always in such striking consequences, of all moral activity. When two equally moral persons do the same thing, fulfill the same law, it is, after all, not the same action; nor indeed should it be; what is right and good in one person may, in that particular form, be even wrong in another, notwithstanding that the moral law is the same for all. Paul employs his moral activity in a different manner from that of Peter and James; in fact, in the living communion of Christians there is presented not only a great diversity of spiritual "gifts," but also of personally-moral idiosyncrasies; even in the purely spiritual sphere there are manifold gifts, but only one Lord. The normal difference of moral life-tendency as seen in the sons of Adam, and which must have occasioned as great a difference in the fulfilling of the moral commands as it did in the manner of offering worship, presents a type of the manifold moral diversities into which the moral law is shaped by peculiarities of personality.

The virtualization of the personal element is not to be understood as a something conflicting with the divine law; on the contrary, it is in fact the divine will that the peculiarity of the personality be preserved. If, at first thought. it should seem questionable to place along-side of the universally-valid law another essentially variable element, lest thereby the unconditional validity of the law be infringed upon and negatived, let it be observed, in the first place, that the personal peculiarity finds in the moral law both its limits and its moral criterion, so that consequently it can never come into antagonism with the same, but that, nevertheless, there is, within the scope of the personal spiritual life, a field into which the law, because of its general character, does not dictatingly enter. So long as the moral consciousness is not yet truly mature, there is, indeed, in the personal element of the moral, a peril for the moral life, inasmuch as the law cannot give specific directions for every special case. Hence in the Old Testament God complemented his earlier legislation by special revelations of his will through priestly and prophetic inspiration; now, however, since the Spirit of God is poured out upon all men, there is no longer any need of this extraordinary revelation of the divine will in individual cases, for now the human personality, having come into possession of the truth, has also become "free indeed,"--is so imbued with the divine law that, in loving and acting as prompted by its divinely purified heart, it fulfills the divine law in the very fact of developing its personality; and, in fulfilling the law, it preserves also at the same time its personal peculiarity,--as, for example, in a happy marriage there is no longer any antagonism between the fulfilling of the will of the one party by the other, and the acting-out by each of his own personal peculiarity, but, on the contrary, in each of the two elements the other is already implied. And the moral unripeness of individual persons, that necessarily still exists even in a normal condition of humanity, is complemented to full moral safety by the spirit of the moral community,--as in fact this thought is vitally embodied in every true Christian church-communion.

SECTION LXXXII.

The sphere of the personally-peculiar element is that of the discretionary or the allowed. That particular action which is neither commanded nor forbidden in general by any moral law is an allowed action; this circumstance does not, however, by any means make it of a morally-indifferent character; on the contrary, the morally-allowed belongs per se to the morally-good in so far as the development of personal individuality is per se legitimate and good. The idea of the allowed relates therefore less to the moral activity per se and in general, than rather to the peculiar manner in which an end that is per se good, that is, correspondent to the moral law, is realized in particular, by virtue of the personal peculiarity of the actor; and the same moral law may be fulfilled in many ways, the moral quality of which, however, is conditioned in each particular case by the said peculiarity. There is nothing that is allowed under all circumstances; and all that is allowed, and all so-called indifferents (adiaphora) are in each particular case either good or evil, but never morally neutral, notwithstanding that such actions may be per se, that is, generally considered, morally undetermined, and neither commanded nor forbidden. The moral quality lies not so much in the action objectively considered, as in the disposition from which it springs and by which it is attended.--The sphere of the allowed is different for every stage of the moral development and for each particular circle of life. The farther the moral development of the person has progressed, that is, the more the moral law has become identified with his personality, so much. the higher will also be the rights of his personal individuality, so much the higher the morally-personal freedom, and consequently so much the wider also the sphere of the allowed; to the pure all things are pure. Free movement within the sphere of the allowed is therefore essential to a truly moral life, and conditions the all-sided development thereof; this movement is per se good, and it is in itself a good, the significance and compass of which increase with the moral development of the subject. Herein lies the contrast of the Christian freedom of the Gospel to the bondage of the law.

This is one of the most important and, at the same time, most difficult points in ethical science, and both for the same reason, namely, from the necessity of giving play to personal freedom, and of doing this without infringing on the unconditionally-valid moral law; and in exact proportion as a system of ethics embraces the idea of personal freedom, will it also be able to embrace the idea of the allowed. As in express laws--commands and prohibitions--God manifests himself as holy, so in the concession of the allowed he shows himself as loving. As in the fulfilling of the command and in the observing of the prohibition, man becomes conscious of his moral freedom, so, within the sphere of the allowed, this freedom becomes to him an enjoyment. Now, as freedom of will is not a mere antecedent condition of all morality, but also itself a moral good, and as every good is per se an enjoyment, hence free-created beings have also a moral claim upon the legitimate enjoyment of freedom,--not simply of freedom as subject to definite commands, but also of freedom as entitled to free choice in various directions,--that is, they have discretionary power to free activity; this constitutes in fact the divinely conceded sphere of the allowed, wherein mainly the personally-peculiar element of the moral comes to virtualization.

The very first moral direction, or rather blessing, that was given to man, contains implicitly the notion of the allowed or discretionary: "Replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea," etc. This is really not so much a command as a blessing,--it proposes a moral goal, a good. But in this good that is to be sought after, namely, dominion over nature, there is at the same time implied a command to realize this supremacy of the rational spirit through moral activity. But within this command there lies also a discretionary field. The particular manner how man is to realize this dominion, is not expressed in the command, but is left to his free personal self-determination--in so far as he does not thereby come into collision with other moral commands. Thus, man may use animals for his own purposes, may domesticate them, train them, force them to help him. and use them for his nourishment; but as to what choice of them he shall make, and as to what kind of service he shall exact of them, this is left to his discretion,--here he may act freely, here he has the full enjoyment of his freedom. For unfallen man there was no need of narrower limits; but when depravity gained the upper hand these limits were drawn closer, and the Mosaic law gives very specific and narrower bounds within which man, as no longer morally stable, was to exercise his freedom upon nature.--The first definite command of God presents at once, along-side of the expressed command, also the allowed: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat;" whatever he may choose of the other trees is per se good; the choice he shall make is not prescribed; simply a boundary is set, beyond which begins evil. Now, we cannot say that this choosing within the given limits is of a morally-indifferent character; rather is such choice, as the realization of a good, itself morally good; and this goodness, consists in the simple fact that every choice is good, and that the choice of the one is not better and not worse than the choice of the other. To infer from this that the single objects of the choice are morally indifferent, would be to overlook the fact that the moral element does not lie in the object, but in the choosing person, and that the latter exercises his morality precisely in the fact of freely choosing in accordance with the peculiarity of his personality; not to choose at all would be to despise the divine gift, and hence immoral.

In the state of innocence the sphere of the allowed was, notwithstanding the indispensable educative limitation, wider than it was subsequently in the state of sin, not, however, because men were then morally more contracted, but because they were morally purer. In consequence of redemption from the power of sin, the now sanctified personality becomes also freer, and the sphere of the allowed is enlarged; herein lies one of the most essential differences between Old Testament and New Testament ethics. The moral itself receives, in contrast to the specifically and particularizingly prescribing ancient law, a more general form, and the whole law and the prophets are summed up in one short command: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." The sanctified personality acts within the limits of the law with more freedom; the boundaries of the allowed, as established for the state of sin, are thrown more into the back-ground; the laws as to the Sabbath and as to meats and other similar prescriptions, are thrown into a freer form by the personality as made free in Christ. Instead of the limiting laws regulating the use of "meats," and other material objects in general, and which were framed with reference to the sinful impurity of man, Christ gives the broad principle: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man" [Matt. xv, 11]; and Paul expresses this in a still more general form: "Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving" [1 Tim. iv, 4]; and elsewhere [Titus i, 15] he states the thought in its highest exaltation: "Unto the pure all things are pure;" that is, the higher the morality rises, so much the wider becomes also the sphere of the allowed, and hence of freedom; and upon him who is morally perfect, who is inwardly fully identified with the divine will, there is no longer imposed any degree whatever of outwardly-legal limitation to the employment of his freedom; for whatever he can love, that God loves also, and his sanctified personality cannot choose any thing that would be offensive to God,--and such a person is again invested with his original full right of dominion over nature, with his full right of free choice; and whatever he does of free choice, that he does to the glory of God [1 Cor. x, 31].

The words of Paul [1 Cor. vii, 28] may serve as a further illustration of the notion of the allowed: "If thou marry, thou hast not sinned;" whereas on this very occasion the apostle dissuaded from marriage. The Christian has a right to marriage; whether, however, under circumstances that would otherwise morally admit of it, he put into execution this right, does not depend on any particular legal prescription, but on his own untrammeled personal choice. Paul had discretionary "power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles" [1 Cor. ix, 5]; but he did not do so; all have the "power to eat and to drink" [verse 4], but our choice is, within particular limits, left free. Ananias was at liberty to keep his field or not [Acts v, 4]; what he did was of his own election; it was not a moral law, but solely his personal choice that determined his conduct. [Comp. 1 Cor. vi, 12; x, 23; Rom. xiv, 1 sqq.; xv, 1 sqq.; Matt. xii, 3, 4.]

The sphere of the allowed is the more special theater of personal freedom, as distinguished from mere moral freedom. In obedience to the commanding law I am indeed free, but this freedom is nevertheless a controlled one; it is true, I can will and act otherwise than the law wills, but I dare not; and if I in fact do so, then I violate the law, then I am an enemy of God; I have the liberty but not the right so to act. Commanded duty has consequently, notwithstanding the liberty on which it rests, always still a certain constraint in it; and though in the mere literal fulfillment of the law, man becomes conscious of his freedom, yet he does not come to a proper and full enjoyment thereof. If God's law actually entered, prescribing and prohibiting, into all the details of individual action, without, by some concessions, allowing play-ground for discretionary action, then, though man would indeed have the privilege of freely obeying or disobeying at each particular moment, nevertheless he would feel the law as a burden upon him; and Paul was very apt in expression when he spoke of the preparatory law of the Old Covenant as a chastening-master. For the simple reason that the essence of man is freedom or self-determination, it is natural for him to aspire to become also fully conscious of this freedom,--to put it into exercise in so far as consistent with his moral obedience,--and hence he needs a free field wherein he may act with real freedom, without having his actions in every respect prescribed to him, without being strictly bound by the law,--where, in a word, he may say: I may choose this, but I do not need to choose it; and whether I choose this or that depends entirely on my personal self-determination, and that too without detriment to my moral duty.

The sphere of the allowed stands in the same relation to that of the express law as play to earnest activity. Play also is an element essential to the full development of youthful moral life. With the child, play is of high moral significancy, as it is thereby that it learns to comprehend, to exercise, and to enjoy its full personal freedom. In learning and working the child is also free; but however good and zealous of work it may be, it is nevertheless conscious at the same time of being controlled by an objective law to which it must adapt itself; the other and equally legitimate phase of its life, that of personal freedom and self-determination, is revealed to it in its purest form only in play; and the child, even the morally-good one, finds so great a delight in play, for the simple reason that it thereby comes to the enjoyment of its personal freedom; and the essence of its enjoyment lies in the simple fact that in its playful activity and feats it is free lord of its own volitions and movements; and those children become spiritually dull whose plays are strictly watched over by tutorial intermeddling. Playing is freedom, however, only in form, and is without definite contents; hence it is essentially only a transition-occupation appropriate to the age of childhood. The sphere of the allowed in general, is the wider and positive-grown extension of that play. Here belongs recreation after labor, as in contrast to the positive fulfilling of the law; recreation is per se morally good and its essence consists in freedom; that I select precisely this path for a promenade, or busy myself thus or thus, is neither prescribed to me by any law, nor is that which I do not select forbidden. It is entirely erroneous to say that man must be totally swallowed up in his calling, that he has a definite duty to fulfill at every moment; this would be a moral slavery. The sphere of personal liberty has also its own good right, and for the plain reason that man is not merely an obligated member of the whole, but also a free individuality. Recreation per se is therefore by no means of a morally indifferent character, but the particular mode of its realization is discretionary, and the moral law is not, at this point, of a detailed particularizing character, but it simply hovers protectingly on the outskirts, and wards against abuses,--even as a prudent educator simply exercises a protecting oversight over the child's play, but does not prescribe the details. Man is indeed moral at every moment of his existence, and should at each moment be and act morally right. but every thing that he does is nevertheless not a direct expression of some moral formula, on the contrary there is a share therein that belongs, and rightly too, to personal free choice,--just as, in regard to his clothing, a sensible man, though in the main following the prevalent mode, will nevertheless reserve the privilege of deviating therefrom whenever it better suits his personal individuality.--Even as a fish in the water, though indeed swimming according to the natural laws of gravitation and motion, yet, within the scope of these laws, disports itself at pleasure, and exhibits precisely in this free motion the traits which distinguish it from the unfree plant, so also does man, within the limits and conditions of the moral law, comport himself freely on the field of the allowed, and in so doing manifests the characteristics of the free child of God as in contrast to servitude under a chastening law.

Schleiermacher (Werke III, 2, 418 sqq.) denies the admissibility of the notion of actions that are merely allowed. We have, in his opinion, no time for that which claims to be, not duty, but simply allowed, not morally necessary, but only morally possible; every performance of such an action implies a definite willingness to act otherwise than from moral motives,--which is immoral; the idea of the allowed belongs not to ethics but to civil law. This we concede in so far as Schleiermacher speaks of such actions as are held to be neither in conformity nor in disconformity to duty, that is morally indifferent, but this is by no means the true idea of the allowed. However, we do not admit the existence of such a class of actions; but in morally-good actions there is a phase which is not determined by the law itself, and which constitutes the allowed.--Rothe (Ethik, 1 Auf. § 819) finds the idea of the allowed in the fact that particular forms of action cannot be referred with certainty to a particular legal formula, so that consequently their moral worth cannot be estimated thereby beyond a doubt. The reason of this may lie in the incompleteness of the law; hence the allowed has a larger scope in the minority-period and with children; but as the law becomes more definite and perfect, the sphere of the allowed grows narrower; the more fully man is as vet without positive law, so much the more numerous are the actions that are allowed to him; but there arrives a turning-point in the development where the relation again changes, and for the reason that, then. the law begins to retire into the background and to become progressively simpler, so that the sphere of the allowed becomes again more extensive. With this view of Rothe we cannot coincide. According to it the sphere of the allowed rests only on a lack of the law, and it would. be more properly termed the sphere of the morally doubtful. Adam, however, to whom the allowed was at once presented in connection with the commanded and the prohibited, could not possibly be in doubt as to what would be moral for him; and the divine word placed before him with perfect definiteness the sphere within which he was allowed entire freedom of action. And it is utterly erroneous to say that in childhood the sphere of the allowed is wider than in maturer years. The fact that many a thing is allowed to the child which does not become it in later years, is not a proof that it has a wider liberty, but only that at this period the allowed lies in a different circle, and one that answers to the childish understanding; on the contrary, the fact undoubtedly is, that to the child more things by far are not allowed which are allowed to the man, than conversely; and every wider stage of development brings to the youth a consciousness of an increased freedom of self-determination, although, on the other hand, it is true that the more earnest demands that are made by the growing positiveness of the life-work, exclude much of the earlier childish liberty. But that there comes again afterward a turning-point when a contrary relation begins, cannot be substantiated, and moreover it conflicts directly with the idea of a constantly progressive development toward moral maturity.--With a similar tendency, Stahl (Rechts-philos. II, 1, 112) transfers the allowed beyond the sphere of the ethical proper, as being in its fulfillment morally indifferent, and into the sphere of satisfaction, that is, of earthly enjoyment; hence he infers consistently enough, that the sphere of the merely allowed must constantly decrease as morality advances, and that satisfaction is ultimately to be sought only in that which is at the same time a fulfilling of the moral law,--as, for example, in the exercise of benevolence, etc. Christian Friedrich Schmid arrives at the same conclusion (Sittenl., p. 450 sqq.). According to this view the sphere of the allowed would amount in fact but to a sphere of the non-allowed, and would be simply a temporary concession to moral immaturity and weakness. This seems to us incorrect. For a truly rational man, there can be no other satisfaction than a moral one; whatever he does and receives, he does and receives in faith and love and with thanksgiving, and in virtue of this thankfulness every truly allowable enjoyment becomes invested with a moral character. Stahl appeals to the fact that, with the progress of moral development, many a thing that is otherwise allowed must be renounced; but this is only in appearance a greater limitation; for though it is true that mature man no longer allows himself many of the pleasures of his unripe youth, yet he has in their stead other and wider fields of the allowed which are denied to youth. The greater freedom of the Christian as compared with the law-observer of the Old Testament, is perfectly evident. It is true, many things were allowed to the Jew, which, because of the higher morality introduced, are no longer allowed to the Christian, such as the putting away of wives, and retaliation [Matt. v, 31 sqq.], so that it might seem as if the sphere of the allowed, and hence of personal freedom, were really more narrowly limited in Christianity than in Judaism. However, when we reflect upon the above-cited declarations of Paul as to the contrast of Christian freedom to the yoke of the law, the matter will doubtless appear in reality very differently. Many things were not indeed morally allowed to the Jews, but only tolerated in them, because of their hardness of heart; the whole significancy of the moral law was not yet exacted of them, just as in children many a thing is tolerated and overlooked because of their more limited moral knowledge, which in riper persons would be regarded as improper and blameworthy, without implying, however, that that which is tolerated is actually admitted as allowable. The fact is, that as the moral consciousness grows in clearness, the compass of duties grows wider also, so that many a thing that was not previously a moral requirement now becomes really such. This does not, however, render the sphere of the allowed narrower, but in fact wider, inasmuch as every duty admits also of a variety of ways of fulfillment, and consequently also a diversity of ways of virtualizing our personal peculiarities. Thus, the fact that consorts may no longer discard each other, though at first sight a seeming limitation of the sphere of the allowed, yet really greatly exalts the moral personality of both parties; they have by far a higher right in each other,--may require more of each other, may more strongly emphasize the right of their moral personality, may each allow to the other, and to himself toward the other, more than would be proper were marriage merely an easily-dissolved contract,--even as the son of the house is freer and may allow himself more liberty than the servant, and for the simple reason that the former is more indissolubly united with the house than the latter;--the closer and firmer the bond, so much the greater mutual trust and confidence, so much wider also the sphere of the allowed.

Writers often admit two different species of the allowed: the one is allowed because of the meagerness of the moral knowledge, as with the child; the other, conversely, because of the advanced state of the moral maturity. This difference, however, is by no means a real one; and, when expressed in this form, the idea of the allowed has no longer any unity, but involves a direct antagonism. Rather do both of these forms of the allowed fall under the one notion of the rights of the personal peculiarity. Many things are, for the peculiar nature of the child, morally good, which are not so for a riper person, and for the simple reason that the unsuspecting child, in doing that which would be improper in those of riper years, "thinketh no evil," and because the sentiment holds good also of unconscious innocence, that "to the pure all things are pure." And the case is essentially the same with him who is morally matured; simply the form is different. When man has come, through moral growth, into a state of conscious innocence, then also to him, as being pure, many a thing is pure which would be impure to the sinful.

SECTION LXXXIII.

In so far as the moral law is made into a moral possession of the person, that is, a constituent element of his personally-moral nature, it becomes to him a moral principle, a life-rule or maxim; without moral principles there is no real morality. As in this union with the personal peculiarity the moral law itself enters into this peculiarity, hence though it is in fact the same always and for all men, still the life-rules that grow out of this law, among different persons and nations and under different conditions in life, must evidently also be relatively different. The correct shaping of the moral law into life-rules correspondent to the peculiarity of persons and circumstances, constitutes the principal work of practical wisdom.--A disregarding of the rights of the personal peculiarity in the moral life, and the exclusive application of general and definitely-expressed laws as direct rules of life, result in a servitude to a legal yoke (rigorism) which is incapable of producing any truly personal morality, and has no justification save as a temporary disciplinary process in a state of depravity.

The law is not of man, but solely of God; life-rules each person makes for himself, not, however, independently of the law, but as based on it, though peculiarly modified by his moral personality. The life-rule or maxim is the law as incarnated, as having become subjective; in it man has appropriated the law as a personal possession,--has merged it into his flesh and blood. My life-rule, even in so far as it is perfectly correct, is valid in this definite form only for me, and it may legitimately enough be widely different at different life-stages and under different circumstances. The manifoldness of life-rules contributes to the esthetic richness of the collective life of the race; in them the moral idea, though essentially one, yet shapes itself into a variegated diversity, just as the light of day, though in itself essentially colorless, is reflected back from flowers in a thousand varying tints. It is true, the giving scope here for freedom of will involves also a possibility of immoral self-determination; and it is also true that sin, in consequence of its essential deceptiveness, seeks almost always to hide itself under the cloak of pretendedly legitimate life-rules, and thereby attains to its seductive power, and that the free personal shaping of the moral law into life-rules is possible without danger, only as proceeding from pure and sanctified human nature, so that consequently the severe discipline of the tutorial law appears as peculiarly appropriate for the divine training of mankind before the full realization of redemption; but wherever morality is to become perfect, that is, free, there the law itself must become an inner freely-appropriated one,--must be received into the personality as its essential possession, and not as a foreign element, but as one that has coalesced with its essence; and this essence is a personally-peculiar one. Even as natural nutriment does not nourish in its natural crudeness, but only in so far as it is received and really appropriated into the natural organism and into its peculiarity, so is it also with the moral law. From the possible danger of subordinating the unconditional validity of the divine law to individual caprice, there does not follow a condemnation of the personally-peculiar molding of the law, but only the requirement that morality be based not on merely unconscious or obscure feelings or impulses, but upon a positive clear consciousness of God's will and of one's own moral condition. The non-governing of one's self, the yielding of one's self to immediate natural impulses, the giving rein to the spiritual and sensuous proclivities that already exist irrespective of a knowledge of the divine will, is per se, even where sin does not yet exist as a power of evil, immoral. Moral life-wisdom is not an acquisition attained to in unserious play; and slavish submission to an all-specifying, rigorous law is easier than the free, moral developing of life-rules on the basis of the more general moral law. The less ripe the moral personality, so much the more dictating must be the objective character of the law, so much the more severe must be its discipline [Gal. iii, 24]; and the riper the moral nature of the person becomes, so much the more freely and independently may and should he shape the law into life-rules for himself.

It creates confusion to confound the moral law with personal life-rules; it inevitably leads either to legal bondage or to moral laxity. The Scriptures contain not only moral laws, but also life-rules for particular, not generally existing life-relations, and the regarding these latter as general moral commands or counsels has sometimes led Christian ethics into error. When the apostle recommends celibacy because of the "present distress" [1 Cor. vii,] he gives simply a life-rule for particular, expressly-stated circumstances; and, in order to prevent all misunderstanding, he says, in relation to the unmarried: "I have no commandment of the Lord" [verse 25]. By this, Paul does not mean that he establishes on his own authority a new command without reference to any divine law, but only that this specific life-rule is not itself a divine law, but rather simply a rule of conduct applying the divine law to particular circumstances. The law on which it is based, however, is not: "Thou shalt not marry," but: Care for the things that belong to the Lord, and not for the things that belong to the world [see verses 32, 34]. Monasticism made of this life-rule an objective law or counsel. The instructions of Christ to the apostles, when sent out to prepare the way for himself [Matt. x, 9 sqq.]: "Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses," etc., are not given as a moral rule to the moral man in general, but to the apostles for this specific mission. But the mendicant orders made of this also an objective law. When Christ required of the rich young man to sell all that he had and give it to the poor, it is perfectly evident that this was simply a specific injunction for this particular person, seeing that neither Christ nor the apostles required in all cases, or in any manner, the giving up of possessions, notwithstanding their strong emphasizing of the duty of charity [Acts v, 4; 1 Tim. vi, 17 sqq.; 2 Cor. viii, 1 sqq.]. The monastic vow of poverty is a perverted application of this injunction. To the same category belong the rules of propriety for women, as given in 1 Cor. xi, 5, 10 sqq., and in part evidently also the resolution of the Apostolic Council [Acts xv, 20, 29]. In all such rules either the assigned or the directly implied reference to particular, but not generally existing and permanent relations and circumstances, distinguishes them very readily from general moral laws, the characteristic of which is to be valid absolutely and always.

SECTION LXXXIV.

The moral law as (by virtue of the particular form into which it is thrown by the peculiarity of the moral person) requiring its realization in a particular case, is moral duty; duty is, therefore, the law as coming to actual application in moral action through the moral life-rules into which it has been shaped by appropriation into the moral person,--that is, it is the law as realizing itself under the form of life-rules, in other words, it is the law as shaping itself in and for a particular person under particular circumstances, and as becoming in him a determining and actuating power. I fulfill the law in that I do my duty. The duties that spring from the same law are different for different men and for different circumstances.--As, therefore, duty is the product of two elements, the moral law and the peculiarity of the person, and as the moral laws collectively, though existing under the form of a plurality, must yet of necessity constitute a concordant whole, hence, if we leave out of view the actuality of sin, a conflict of different duties with each other (collision of duties) is utterly impossible. The distinction of conditional and unconditional duties is not correct, and rests on a confounding of the notions of law and duty.

The moral person does not directly and strictly fulfill the law, but simply his duty. Even ordinary speech indicates the difference; we do not say, "my law," but always, "my duty." The law per se is general and above man; duty is always special and personal. No one person can do the duty of another; and what is duty for me, may be a violation of duty for another. The law alone is directly prescribed; to what particular form of action this law, as appropriated into my personality, determines or obligates me, is not directly expressed in the law, but is the result of a moral judgment in view of my special moral peculiarity and circumstances. We cannot, therefore, with propriety institute a contrast between conditional and unconditional duties. The condition is already implied in the relation of the fulfillment of the law to the fulfillment of duty; what I may not or cannot now do, is simply not my duty; at another time, however, this same form of action may become my duty. Any and every duty may, with as much propriety, be called conditional as unconditional; in its becoming a duty it is always conditional; whenever, however, it actually presents itself, there can no longer be any question of conditionality. Whoever is in a condition to rescue a person from imminent life-peril, has the unconditional duty of doing so; whoever cannot do so, has no duty whatever in the matter; between these two positions there is no third one possible. With like propriety we may say also that the law is at the same time conditional and unconditional, but in a converse relation; in its essence it is unconditional, in the manner of its fulfillment it is always conditional. The law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," is in its moral contents unconditional; every human being is an object of this love, but how this love is to be exercised, in what manner it is actually to manifest itself in actions, that is, to what definite duties it shall lead, this depends on manifold conditions not contained in the law itself; to one's husband or wife, or to parents, one owes a very different love from that due to friends, and the very same sacrificing love will manifest itself very differently toward the moral and toward the immoral.

When the law is presented in the general form of command or prohibition, the manners in which the manifold relations of life make it the duty of different persons to fulfill it are so different, that there may even arise an appearance of contradiction. The fact is, however, that for a real conflict (collision) of duties (a subject which has from of old been a favorite and much discussed one among moralists) there is in a normal state of humanity no possible place. Moral laws cannot come into conflict with each other, otherwise the idea of the moral, and the moral order of the universe itself, would be undermined; and there is just as little ground for a conflict between duties, seeing that their conditionment is in fact based in part on the personal peculiarity and special circumstances of the subjects. The personal peculiarity of a sinful man may indeed come into conflict with the moral law; but in so far as this is the case it forms no legitimate element in the construction of the notion of duty; rather will it become our duty in many respects to counteract this element. But all legitimate personal peculiarity is itself formed in harmony with the moral idea, and hence cannot come into conflict therewith. For an irreconcilable collision of duties there is, therefore, nowhere any manner of possibility.

The idea of duty is often otherwise understood than as here presented. Duty is frequently declared to be the divine law itself. Now if by this is meant, that which God requires of us in each particular case, and that too of each individual in particular, then it would be correct,--this, however, is not expressed by the term "law;" but if it means, that duty and the divine law are identical, then it is incorrect. More definite is the statement, that duty is the manner of action which conforms to or harmonizes with the law. The Kantian school explains duty as that which, according to the law, should take place, or which, by virtue of a law, is practically necessary, or which answers to an obligation,--obligation being understood as the necessity of an action in consequence of a moral law. All these statements are inadequate, inasmuch as the personal peculiarity is left out of the account, so that consequently no difference whatever is made between duty and law; and as to how obligation differs from duty we are utterly unable to see. Schleiermacher in his System (§ 112 sqq.) defines duty as "the form of conduct in which the activity of the reason is at the same time special, as directed upon the particular, and also general, as directed upon the totality," or, the law of the free self-determination of the individual in relation to the common moral life-task of the race, or, the formula for the guidance of rationality in single actions in the realizing of the highest good. That these, in the main, correct statements, are still too indefinite, is shown even by their numerousness. Similarly, but more definitely, Rothe explains duty as that definite form of action which is required by the moral law as under the form impressed upon it by the individual instance.

SECTION LXXXV.

To duty on the part of the moral subject, corresponds right on the part of the law. My duty is to fulfill the right of the moral law, that is, the right of God to, or his claim upon, me. The substance of dutiful action is therefore justice or right, and the product of this action is the right, i. e., the realized claim. Hence dutiful action is per se right-doing. Duty and right call for each other,--are but two phases of the same thing; to every right there corresponds a duty, and conversely,--simply the subjects are different; every duty is the expression of a right; another's right in regard to me is for me a duty, and to the fulfillment of another's duty in regard to me I have a right; the two ideas are absolutely correlative and co-extensive. In virtue of duty I accomplish the moral, for the law has a right, a claim, upon me; in virtue of right the moral is accomplished upon me; in the fulfilling of duty I keep the law; in my accomplishing of the right the law keeps me. The fulfilling of my duty obtains for me a right to, or claim upon, the moral law in so far as this law is an element of universal order, namely, the right to be a real, living, and hence free, member of the moral whole,--in other words, a. moral claim on the just recompense of God. There is, morally, no other right of an individual than such as is conditioned by a corresponding fulfillment of duty on his part; rights without duties would be a reversing of moral world-order. God has an absolutely unlimited right because he is absolutely holy, and man, as related to God, is under absolute obligations. All right has therefore its basis in God's right and in God's love. Hence in the Scriptures the notion of duty is nearly always presented as an indebtedness,--as the right of God to man, as what man owes to God. God's righteousness has a right to righteousness in man, and hence righteousness is man's duty; those who fulfill their duty are therefore the righteous.

As duty is not merely of a subjective character, a mere utterance of the individual consciousness, but the law as appropriated by the person, so also, and equally emphatically, is right also not a mere subjective something with no better basis than a merely fortuitous power of the individual. Every right of the individual is a special expression of the right of the whole, and is valid only in so far as this individual is in moral harmony with the whole. Whoever by undutiful conduct dissolves his union with the moral whole, loses thereby, in like measure, his right to or claim upon the whole. Duty and right are both an expression of the moral; the former is the moral as subjective obligation, the latter is the moral as objective requirement; both manifest the essence of the moral as an essential law of collective being. The individual has duties and rights only as in vital union with the whole. I have duties and rights, not in virtue of being a mere individual, but in virtue of the fact that the totality of being bears a moral character. From this it follows at once, that there can be true duties and rights only where the morality of the whole is based, not merely on the morality of the individual persons,--which would be a mere arguing in a circle,--but where it is based on the holiness of the personality of God. I can keep and fulfill the law only when the law keeps and fulfills me; I can do my duty only when I therein recognize a right or claim of the moral whole, and hence of the holy God, upon me. An impersonal whole has no right to, nor claim upon, the personal spirit; from such a servitude Christianity has definitively emancipated human thought; nor has one man, as upon his fellow, any other right or claim than such as he derives from God; that is, he has it only by the grace of God; that man has per se a right upon his fellow, irrespective of God, is an un-Christian view; "Be not ye the servants of men" [1 Cor. vii, 23]; this is Christian right and Christian freedom.

In such a moral world-order where duty and right are absolutely correlative, where right extends as far as duty, and duty as far as right, every one receives strictly his own right--his due. The dutiful man has a right upon the moral whole,--a right to have his personality respected,--and it is thus that the moral law, the moral world-order, realizes itself on man; it upholds in a just and honorable position him who has upheld it. He who gives honor to God, to him God gives also his honor. Also he who violates duty receives his right; every punishment is the fulfilling of the right of God and of the collective universe upon the individual; the criminal has a right to the punishment; when the criminal comes to his right mind he demands himself his own punishment, and a child that is not totally perverted finds a moral tranquillization in suffering the punishment it deserves,--it even calls for it.

The notion that the fulfillment of moral duty acquires for man a claim upon the moral order of the world, and hence upon God, is emphatically rejected by Schwarz (Eth. I, p. 199), who even declares such a view as blasphemous; God alone, he holds, is the absolutely-entitled One; man has, as toward God, simply duties, but no rights; God only can have claims upon us, not we upon God. And he appeals for support to Rom. ix, 20; xi, 35 sqq.; Job ix, 12; Luke xvii, 10. The first two passages, however, relate to the impossibility of fathoming the eternal divine counsel, and declare any doubt as to God's holiness and righteousness as unjustifiable; moreover all of them relate exclusively to the condition of sinfulness, in which we of course concede, in harmony with Scripture, that all salvation rests exclusively on the undeserved and compassionate mercy of God. We are now speaking, however, of man as not yet under sin, of the moral life in its unclouded purity, and here the matter stands very differently. If God's righteousness is not a mere empty figure of speech, it must form the basis of a moral right; we cannot doubt that God rewards each according to his moral conduct; and when a truly moral creature receives from God a just reward [Rom. ii, 6, 7, 13], this is not a mere compassionating gift, but it is justice, and the creature has, in virtue of his righteousness, a claim upon such a reward. It is indeed a gracious gift of the Creator, that he has made the creature thus noble, that it is permitted to bear in itself God's own image; but that God regards and treats the creature that has become positively holy, in view of and in reference to that fact, is simply justice. As the sinner receives but his right when the divine punishment falls upon him, so also the sinless creature receives but his right when he is an object of the divine pleasure. To think otherwise on this point would be to overthrow our notion of a holy and just God. The Scriptures express very distinctly this thought of the right of the moral person upon God, even in circumstances where, because of sin, there can no longer be any question of a right strictly speaking,--so that, then, it is in fact a pure grace that God, notwithstanding this, yet concedes to man such rights. Of the justifying faith of Abraham, Paul says, "To him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt" [Rom. iv, 4]; if therefore man should really and truly fulfill the law of God, then his reward would fall to him in due course of justice. The inference of the apostle, as to the worth of faith for sinful man, would not have the least basis should we presume to regard this declaration of his as per se meaningless and impossible; and this holds good in the fullest sense of man as untouched by sin, as also it is true of the Son of man. The true and real fulfilling of the law has in fact eternal life as its just reward [Matt. xix, 17]; the only question is, as to whether in fact any person perfectly fulfills the law as Christ did. The doctrine of grace for the redeemed is not interfered with by that of a claim of the moral man upon God, but receives in fact thereby its proper foundation. In the idea of the Covenant which God made with the Patriarchs, and as to which he himself says: "I have made a covenant with my chosen, I have sworn to David my servant: Thy seed will I establish forever," etc., there is contained also the idea of a right upon God as graciously conceded even to sinful man, provided he should obey the voice of God and keep his commandments [Psa. lxxxix, 4; Exod. ii, 24; xix, 5; Deut. vii, 8, 9, 12; ix, 5]. That God should make such a covenant, is pure grace; but now that He, the truthful One, has made it, it follows that those who keep it acquire thereby a right to its fulfillment on the part of God; and hence the pious of the Old Covenant make appeal in their petitions to the promises of God [Gen. xxxii, 12; Exod. xxxii, 13; Deut. ix, 26 sqq.]. The great emphasis which the Scriptures place upon the thought of the covenant of God with man, which is, in fact, more than a promise, implies very clearly that here the moral character of God, as well as that of man, is essentially involved. We need only separate from the idea of a right all that the sinful heart has associated therewith, all that is presumptuous and self-seeking, and it will no longer have the least feature that could give offense to the most reverential mind. The Scriptures present the thought of duty as intimately connected with the idea of right; and this involves, in fact, the profoundest conception of the moral. Here, all dutiful living, on the part of man, is a right of God upon him (mspt), a paying of his debt to God,--it is hopheile,--and man is debtor to God and to the brethren [Rom. i, 14; viii, 12; Luke xvii, 10; comp. 1 Cor. vii, 22]; and God's laws are an expression of the rights of God [Lev. xviii, 4, 5; xix, 37; xxv, 18; Deut. vii, 12; xxxiii, 10; Psa. xix, 10; 1, 16; cv, 45; cxix, 5 sqq.; Isa. xxvi, 9; and others]. By virtue of his moral nature, of the likeness of God that was impressed upon him, man becomes in turn a debtor,--is under obligation to bring this nature into realization, to fulfill the claim or right of God upon him; and he who fulfills this right is consequently just or righteous; "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good (the moral law); and what doth the Lord require of thee (as duty) but to do justly (the right) and to love mercy?" [Micah vi, 8; comp. Deut. x, 12, 13]. Thus, as it appears, the Scriptures present rather the objective phase of the moral, the right of God and of the divine law upon man; whereas the moralists of recent times, especially since Kant, devote their attention rather to its subjective phase, as duty.

In the manner of viewing the relations between right and duty there often prevails some confusion; right is often confounded with discretionary power, whereas, in fact, the former is more than the latter, and contains an actual requirement; or, right is regarded as the mere possibility or liberty to act. Furthermore a great difference is frequently made between right and the right, the two being taken as capable of excluding each other, so that I may have a right and yet its execution be not right. This, in so far as the question is as to moral right, is manifestly absurd. It is true, according to civil law, I may have a so-called right in the exercising of which I shall do wrong; but of such civil right we are not here speaking; in the sphere of morality I can never have a right to what is wrong, and I can never exercise a right without doing the right. I have a right only in so far as the moral law takes me under the protection of the moral order of the universe; I have a right upon another in so far as he has a moral duty to fulfill toward me; I have right conduct in so far as I myself realize the moral law; and this I do in fact when I do not throw away my own moral right, but maintain it intact. Whenever I have a moral right, then is it also right to realize it.