The Moral Order

35. What it is. The moral order consists in the essential relations by which man is referred to God, to himself, and to other creatures. These relations demand of man several and diverse operations, by which, according to the will of God, he must strive toward his end. For this reason the moral order also consists in the operations by which man tends to his end. Finally, there is added the order of means to the end, by which God helps man so that he may come to his end. Therefore the moral order, considered completely, comprises the ultimate end, God, in whose possession man obtains perfect happiness; the relations by which man is referred to God, to himself, and to others; the operations which are consonant with the essential relations of man; and finally the means which, by divine institution, serve for obtaining the end. Therefore the moral order instituted by God is the way by which we tend to the end, and the means by whose observance we attain our end; whence St. Augustine teaches: "Order is that which, if you hold it in life, will lead you to God."¹

a. Since order in general is the relation of one thing to another, in order to constitute the moral order one must first consider the relations by which man is referred to another. Now there are three relations of this kind founded in human nature itself: the religious relation, the individual relation, and the social relation. For man is referred to God, his first principle and ultimate end; he is referred to himself, since he is furnished with several and diverse inclinations and powers, which by their nature are so arranged that the lower are referred to the higher and, conversely, the higher to the lower; finally man is referred to other creatures, whether rational or irrational. For man, as part of the universe, is on the one hand ordered by his nature to forming society with other men, and on the other hand is furnished with the right of using material things insofar as this is required for attaining his end. It is clear that the moral order by its nature is a final order, since the whole nature of man with all its relations is ordered to God, the ultimate end: the religious relation immediately, but the individual and social relation mediately. From this, namely, is understood the dignity and excellence of rational nature, which alone has an immediate relation to God; on the contrary, irrational creatures are referred immediately to man and mediately through man to God.²

b. Since man by nature is referred to God as creature to Creator, as servant to Lord, order requires that man acknowledge his Creator and Lord, revere Him, serve Him, and love Him. Since the body is related to the soul as instrument to the principal agent, order requires that the lower powers be subjected to and serve the higher, and that the higher direct the lower. Therefore St. Gregory the Great calls reason the mistress of a large household.³ Finally, since man is referred to other men as to companions and fellow-servants, participants of the same nature and destined to the same end, order requires that he love others as himself and observe justice in social life.

¹ De ordine l. 1, c. 9, n. 27.

² Cf. St. Thomas II-II, q. 2, a. 3.

³ Moralia in Job l. 1, c. 30, n. 42.

36. The natural and supernatural order. Order depends upon the end for the obtaining of which it was instituted, and must be consonant with it as to nature. Since there is a twofold ultimate end, there is also a twofold moral order: the natural, which is founded in human nature and corresponds to its capacity, powers, and demand; and the supernatural, which is instituted by the free will of God and transcends the capacity, powers, and demand of human nature. It is established that in the present order of providence man, through sanctifying grace, is constituted an adoptive son of God and heir of eternal and supernatural happiness: "When the fullness of time came, God sent His Son, that we might receive the adoption of sons."¹ "As many as received Him, He gave them power to become sons of God."²

a. Therefore in this order man is referred to God as son to father; the body, which is a member of Christ and temple of the Holy Spirit,³ is referred to the soul as a sacred instrument to a sacred principal cause; and man is referred to other men as a brother of Christ and heir of eternal life to brothers in Christ and heirs of the same divine life. These relations are indeed altogether different from the relations which constitute the natural order. The supernatural order demands other and nobler operations, all of which Christ comprehended in the two precepts concerning the charity of God and neighbor.⁴ By observing these, man obtains the supernatural beatitude of eternal life. Finally, the means of this order also are supernatural (n. 33).

b. The natural order is instituted by the very fact of creation. But it pleased the supremely good God in creation itself to elevate man above nature to a higher order, plainly supernatural. The supernatural order is instituted by the very fact of adoption, or of the elevation of human nature to the state of adoptive sonship.

¹ Gal. 4:4-5.

² John 1:12.

³ 1 Cor. 6:15, 19.

⁴ Matt. 22:37 ff.

IS man a moral or a merely physical agent? Are all man's thoughts, words, and actions determined by merely physical and necessary laws like those of electricity or steam? If man is a merely physical agent, then morality is only a department of physics, and, without doubt, it will be an important department of physics. It is important for us to know the laws which govern the action of gravitation, or of electricity, or of steam, but it is still more important for us to know the laws which govern the action of men. If man is nothing but matter and force, by patient study we shall be able to predict his every thought, word, and action with as much certainty as we can predict the action of a steam-engine or of a motor-car. Such knowledge would be invaluable for governments, employers, and parents. It would not be less valuable for the private citizen, the employed, and for children still under parental sway.

But is man a merely physical agent, a mere natural machine? Is man's action determined solely by the antecedents and conditions of action, so that if we knew them all we could predict infallibly what that action would be? Or is there something in man which clearly distinguishes his action from that of merely physical causes?

Man certainly is not an ordinary machine. He has the wonderful gift of knowledge. He knows what will happen if he fastens down the safety-valve of a steam-engine, and what is likely to be the consequence if he directs his motor-car against a stone wall. He has a further wonderful power if the common sense of mankind is a safe witness to truth. Just as he has the power of knowing and planning different courses of action, so he has the complementary power of choosing among different courses of action. He can fasten down the safety-valve of the steam-engine, if he chooses to do so, and he can drive his motor-car against a stone wall if he likes. In the department of morals man can know the difference between good and evil, and he can choose the good and avoid the evil. That is what I mean by a moral agent. To be a moral agent man must know the difference between good and evil, and he must have the power of choosing freely between them. Both elements are necessary. A child who has not come to the age of reason lacks knowledge, and so, if he does wrong, we do not blame him, though we may correct him, for he can be improved by correction. If a monomaniac does wrong we do not blame him, because we know that he has lost the power of self-control. But if a grown up man of sound mind does wrong, we blame him, and sometimes punish him, and we say he deserves it.

The practical reason of the normal man himself not only tells him what is right or wrong, but when he has done right it approves his conduct; when he has done wrong it condemns him. In other words, the normal man has a conscience, and conscience is keenly sensible of right conduct, and of wrong conduct. If wrong was done through ignorance or mistake conscience is not disturbed, it says: I am not responsible, I could not help it. But if a man, knowingly and willfully, does wrong, then his conscience condemns him, even when nobody else knows of his wrong-doing. He knows that he is responsible for the wrong, that he is the cause of it, and that he need not have done it, and should not have done it.

All this shows that man is something quite different from an ordinary and necessary physical agent, and so we give him a special name and call him a moral agent. As a moral agent man is endowed with knowledge of what is morally right and wrong, and he is endowed with freedom to choose between them.

The chief Protestant reformers vehemently denied that after Adam's fall man had the power of free choice between good and evil.

In his treatise, "The Bondage of the Will," Luther asserted that "in his actings toward God, in things pertaining to salvation or damnation, man has no free will, but is the captive, the subject, and the servant, either of the will of God, or of the will of Satan." Again, "if we believe that God foreknows and predestinates everything... it follows that there can be no such thing as free will in man or angel, or any creature."¹

¹ Quoted by E. H. Browne, The Thirty-nine Articles. Art. 10.

If this be so, Erasmus had asked in his book against Luther, who will strive to correct his life? "Nobody," answered Luther, in the same work, "The Bondage of the Will." "Nor can anybody do so. However, the elect and good are corrected by the Holy Spirit. The rest will perish uncorrected. If you say that the door is opened to wickedness by this teaching, I answer: So be it. Nevertheless, by this same teaching the door is opened to justice and the entrance to heaven is gained."

Calvin is, at least, equally emphatic. "The mind of man," he says, "is so wholly alienated from God, that it can conceive, desire, and effect nothing but what is impious, perverted, foul, impure, and flagitious; the heart is so steeped in the venom of sin that it can breathe forth nothing but fetid corruption."¹ The Anglican reformers were above all anxious to keep as many as possible within the limits of the national Church and they were studiously moderate in their teaching on this important point of doctrine. Article 10, On Free Will, is worded thus:

¹ Institut. Lib. ii., c. v. 19.

"The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works to faith and calling upon God; wherefore, we have no power to do good works, pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will and working with us when we have that good will."

Of course, there is no room for free will in the modern theories of the mechanical evolution of the universe. Man is and must be simply what the forces of nature and of society have made him. "It is almost beyond dispute," says Mr. Bertrand Russell, in his "Philosophical Essays," "that man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to a tyranny of outside forces." Church by Satan, let him be anathema."¹ Thomas H. Huxley opposed the doctrine of the freedom of the human will on the ground that it was contrary to the principle of causality. He says:

The Catholic Church has ever been the consistent and outspoken defender of human liberty. For freedom of the will lies at the root of all other human liberties and is the necessary condition of them. In the early ages of the Faith she defended the freedom of the human will against the Manicheans and Priscillianists, and she was not remiss in defending the same truth against the errors of Luther and Calvin. The Fathers of the Council of Trent pronounced the following anathema against them:

“If any one says that the free will of man is lost or extinguished after Adam's sin, or that the substance is about a title only, and, indeed, a title without substance, and, in fine, a figment introduced into the "Whoever accepts the universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy denies the existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is improperly called the free-will doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself — which is, to say the least of it, difficult to imagine."² called the will, which is free. Just as when we see an external object the power of vision has to be stimulated into action by a ray of light coming from the object to the retina of the eye, so before an act of volition our will-power has to be stimulated into action by a thought. The will cannot act without the antecedent thought, but the doctrine of free will asserts that ordinarily, at least, the will is not determined to any definite action by the thought. The will can accept the thought or reject it or simply remain passive, and in that wonderful power the essence of free will resides.

Of course, the doctrine of free will does not imply that volition is ever self-caused, and it is not contrary to the law of causality. An act of volition is called free because it is the effect of a power of the human soul

¹ Sess. vi. c. 5.

² "Essay on Science and Morals." The Catholic doctrine of free will is not opposed to the principle of causality nor is it opposed to the true doctrine on divine grace.

Luther maintained that after man's fall the grace of God is absolutely necessary to enable man to think or do anything that is good. For man's nature was thoroughly corrupted by the fall. Henceforth, sin was of his very nature, he cannot help committing it, he commits it with every breath that he draws. The involuntary movements of appetite and concupiscence are sins: does not the Apostle say so?

Natural benevolence is mere hypocrisy; for by nature man hates and must hate his neighbor. “By nature I cannot utter a friendly word or make a friendly sign, and if I do it is only hypocrisy; the heart, at least, remains full of venom."

So deep rooted is this natural corruption of man that it remains even in the just. When God gives His grace to man, and thereby makes him just, He only turns His eyes away from man's natural foulness and gives him His favor on account of the merits of Christ which He imputes to him.¹

Man's will takes no part in the process of justification. "It is like a beast of burden; if God mounts it, it goes where God drives it; if the devil, it goes where the devil drives it. It cannot choose its rider, but the riders quarrel among themselves as to which shall get into the saddle."¹ Some recent writers have seen in such doctrines as these the cause of that amazing moral insensibility of the German mind which displayed itself during the great war.

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical Portrait," pp. 127, 128.

Very different from this is the teaching of the Catholic Church. She teaches that by the fall man was, indeed, deprived of sanctifying grace and of certain preternatural gifts by which man's lower appetite was restrained and kept within the bounds of reason so that he was not troubled even by its involuntary rebellion. Still man's nature was not entirely corrupted by original sin. It was still capable of good. We can, indeed, do nothing without God's help — in Him we live, move, and have our being. But the Catholic Church distinguishes two sorts of divine help. There is the divine help of the natural order, by which God preserves, sustains, and cooperates with His creature in all his actions. This divine concursus is necessary for man, it is required by his nature, which is essentially and always dependent on its Creator. But besides this natural help and cooperation of God, which is never wanting as long as God sustains His creature, there is the supernatural help of God's grace. This supernatural help is given freely and gratuitously to man to enable him to attain the supernatural end of the intuitive vision of God to which God has freely and gratuitously called him. Without God's supernatural grace man can do no good action of the supernatural order. He cannot take a single step toward his supernatural end. The Catholic Church further concedes that the grace of God is necessary to enable man to persevere and to keep God's commandments for any long period of time. Man's weakness in the face of continual temptation is too great to permit of his avoiding sin for very long without the special help of God's grace. But still by his natural resources and with the natural help which God gives him, even fallen man can do ethically good actions and avoid sin for a time.

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical Portrait," p. 190.

This doctrine is truer, more consoling, and more helpful than that of the reformers. Historically, the doctrine of man's absolute and utter corruption has not tended to maintain a high standard of moral conduct.

CATHOLICS are sometimes puzzled when they read contemptuous allusions to "legalism" made by non-Catholic writers on ethics. They feel that an attack is being made on the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, but they are often unaware of what the attack implies. After all there is a moral law, a right and wrong in morality, as there is in arithmetic. As arithmetic has its laws so has morality. If it is important to keep the laws of arithmetic, much more important is it to keep the laws of morality. If there are moral laws there is a moral lawgiver, and why should the precepts and commands of the moral lawgiver be sneered at, and those who think that they should be obeyed treated with contempt?

To show more clearly the question at issue between Catholics and non-Catholics, I will quote a recent and very moderate writer on ethics. Mr. J. MacCunn, in 1903, published a little book entitled "The Making of Character," in the Cambridge series for schools and training colleges. In that book occurs the following passage:

"These difficulties bring us to a parting of the ways. Once the ineffectual generality of precepts has made itself felt, two courses lie open. One is to see in this fact a final proof that a morality of precept is unequal to the demands of life, and to turn from it to a morality that centers its hopes in the training of individual judgment. The second is to refuse to give up the morality of precept without a struggle, and to set resolutely to work to make it adequate to those facts of concrete moral experience by which the morality of code is tested and found wanting. It is the adoption of the second course that leads to the third phase of the morality of precept, that supreme effort to make moral dogmas adequate to life, which gives rise to casuistry."¹ serve days and months and times and years." But we are free "with the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free. Stand fast and be not held again under the yoke of bondage. Behold I, Paul, tell you that if you be circumcised Christ shall profit you nothing.... You are made void of Christ, you who are justified in the law, you are fallen from grace. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh by charity."¹ position between the law and the Gospel, an opposition which, as he proudly boasts, he was the first to discover. "The Gospel does not preach what we must do or omit, but bids us open our hands to receive gifts, and says: Behold, dear man, this is what God has done for thee, for thy sake He has made His Son assume human nature. This believe and accept, and thou shalt be saved. The Gospel only shows us the gifts of God, not what we have to give to God, or to do for Him, as is the wont of the law." "Law is what we have to do, the Gospel what God is willing to give. The former we cannot fulfill, the latter we receive and apprehend by faith." "The Gospel is good tidings, it is not a sermon on works of ours. He who says that the Gospel demands works, necessary for salvation, is a liar." "That the law should have been abolished, so that it can no longer condemn those that believe, was just as necessary, as that it should have been given." "The law and the Gospel are two quite contrary things, which cannot be in harmony with each other by the side of each other." "He who knows how to distinguish between the law and the Gospel may thank God and consider himself a theologian." "When the conscience is terror-stricken on account of the law, and struggles with the judgment of God, do not consult reason or the law, act exactly as if thou hadst never heard of the law of God. Answer: There is a time to live and a time to die; there is a time to hear the law and a time to despise the law. Let the law be off and let the Gospel come." "If you do not ignore the law, if you are not sure in your heart that there is no law, that there is no wrath of God, but only grace and mercy through Christ, you cannot be saved." "If you do not send away Moses with his law, and in those tremblings and terrors lay hold of Christ, who has suffered for your sins, it is all over with your salvation." "The decalogue has no right to accuse and to terrify the conscience, in which Christ reigns through grace, for through Christ those laws have become antiquated." thing." "Christ's work consists in this: to fulfill the law for us, not to give laws to us, and to redeem us. The devil makes of Christ a mere Moses."¹ Lord.¹ This is what Luther says about them. "For instance, the commandment — Thou shalt have no bad desires — proves that we are all sinners, and no man can be without bad desires, let him do whatever he likes. From this he learns to distrust himself and to look elsewhere for help to be freed from bad desires, and to fulfill through some one else the law which he himself is incapable of fulfilling. As soon as man begins to learn and to feel from the laws of God his own incapacity he becomes thoroughly humble and annihilated in his own eyes."² if he wishes he cannot lose his salvation on account of the greatest sins, unless he refuses to believe. Apart from unbelief, no sins can damn him. If faith returns to the promises made by God to the baptized Christian, or if it does not depart from them in an instant, all sins are blotted out by it or rather by the divine veracity; for if you confess God and abandon yourself to His promises with confidence He cannot deny Himself."¹ These extracts from Luther's works show quite plainly what was his attitude toward the moral law. A recent German writer, Loofs, says very truly that "in the opposition between the law and the Gospel lies the chief difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic conception of Christianity." The Lutheran doctrine tended to divorce morality from religion and make it a matter belonging exclusively to the conscience of the individual. The tendency was increased by the influence of the Kantian philosophy, which sneered at the heteronomy of Catholic morality and proclaimed the autonomy of the human reason in the sphere of morals. Good men see and lament the moral chaos of the modern world. Outside the Catholic Church there are few practical principles of conduct on which even Christians are agreed. As against the morality of commandments and codes, Mr. MacCunn insists on the cultivation of a sound moral judgment. A sound moral judgment, he says, has three elements. It involves character, deliberation, and knowledge. There must be knowledge of means and ends, good ends. But what are good ends, and what are we to do when there is a conflict between them, as not unfrequently happens? We may not have recourse to casuistry, but, says Mr. MacCunn, "there is little safety if there be not in the mind a well-compacted and habitually-cherished ideal with which each isolated end that claims adoption may be confronted."¹ But where are we to get such an ideal? Alas, as we advance from youth to age we learn to reject many ideals that we once entertained. There are many disillusionments in life. But cannot we start life with a good ideal, with the true ideal which every man should place before himself all through life? "They are found," says Mr. MacCunn, "in those conceptions of the supreme End of life, which philosophy has been giving to the world since the days of Socrates. They are diverse as the philosophies that have devised them: duty, perfection, greatest happiness, greatest blessedness, self-realization and the rest."¹ tained in the law of Moses. The ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Law have ceased to bind, as St. Paul taught the Romans and the Galatians; the moral precepts of the decalogue were expressly reaffirmed by Christ. Love is indeed the great commandment which sums up the law and the prophets, but love manifests itself in obedience — If you love Me keep My commandments—If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments. And if any doubt were possible as to which commandments He meant, we know from His own divine lips that He meant those of the decalogue—“Thou shalt do no murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness. Honor thy father and thy mother. And: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."¹

There, certainly, is the parting of the ways. The one is the Protestant attitude toward all codes of morality, including the decalogue, the other is the Catholic attitude. Which is right?

To understand the Protestant attitude we must go back to Luther and his Commentaries on St. Paul. After St. Paul had converted the Galatians to the faith of Christ, some false teachers, who were Jews, came to them and tried to persuade them to join circumcision and the observance of the ceremonies of the Mosaic law with the faith of Christ. In his Epistle to the Galatians St. Paul tells them that such a course is wrong.

"But now after that you have known God, or rather are known by God, how turn you again to the weak and needy elements which you desire to serve again? You ob-

¹ Loc. cit., p. 152.

Luther professed a special predilection for the Epistle to the Galatians. He said he took it to him for his spouse, as he had done Catharine von Bora. There and in the Epistle to the Romans he saw the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the uncompromising condemnation of the law and legalism. It will be well to quote him at some length on this latter point.

According to Luther there is a direct op-

¹ Gal. iv. v.

Luther had a positive hatred for Moses and for his law. "If you are prudent," he says, "send that stammering and stuttering Moses with his law far away from you, and be not influenced by his terrific threats. Look upon him with suspicion, as upon a heretic, excommunicated, damned, worse than the Pope and the devil."

"I will not have Moses and his law, for he is the enemy of the Lord Christ. We must put away the thoughts and disputes about the law, whenever the conscience becomes terrified and feels God's anger against sin. Instead of that it will be better to sing, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to be merry in spite of the devil." "No greater insult can be offered to Christ than to suppose that He has come to give commandments, to make a sort of Moses of Him." "Only the mad and blind Papists do such a By the law in these passages Luther did not mean merely the ceremonial and judicial precepts of the Old Dispensation; he meant especially the moral precepts of the natural law contained in the ten commandments. Those moral precepts were the only portion of the Mosaic law which the Catholic Church taught had been ratified and promulgated anew by Jesus Christ. The violation of them alone could cause the terrible stings of conscience for which Luther was so anxious to find a remedy. Moreover, he in express terms repudiated the decalogue, the ten commandments in their entirety. Bad desires, if willfully consented to, are certainly sins against the natural law, and against the express teaching of Christ, Our The impossibility of observing the moral law, and the consequent necessity of committing sin, gives its supreme importance to Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone. In his work on the "Babylonian Captivity," he writes:

¹ J. Verres, "Luther: An Historical. Portrait," p. 130 ff.

"You see how rich the Christian is, even

WHEN a doctor is called to a sick man the first thing that he tries to do is to find out what is the matter. A good doctor is distinguished from a bad one in that he diagnoses the disease correctly and applies a suitable remedy. If the doctor mistakes a case of broken ribs for pneumonia he is not likely to do the patient much good.

The world has been confessedly sick for some years past, and the quacks have been busy with the patient. One said the poor patient was suffering from capitalism and applied doses of Socialism. Unfortunately, the patient grew steadily worse. Another said that the world was ill because nationalities were oppressed by alien governments. Give the oppressed nationalities freedom, the power of self-determination and parliaments, and the world would be at peace, prosperous, and happy. But that was no remedy for the disease. The self-determined nations seem to be more preoccupied than ever with self-defence or self-aggrandizement at the expense of their neighbours. A third doctor turned his attention to the perpetual strife between employers and employed. It was to be settled by Conciliation Boards, on which both sides were represented. But somehow the Conciliation Boards failed to conciliate. A fourth doctor said the world was too old-fashioned, too rigid, too straitlaced. Give women, the young, and everybody more liberty, let everybody go his own way, everybody would be pleased with that, and would be contented and happy. And so the experiment was tried, but the results are hardly satisfactory. More skilled doctors have not been wanting.

In 1917 an enquiry was held all over the country to try to find out the causes of the prevalent unrest. The doctors who conducted the enquiry gave it as their opinion that the gravest symptom of all was want of trust. They found suspicion everywhere. The men did not trust the masters; the masters did not trust the men; nobody trusted the State; the workers did not even trust their own trade-union leaders. A similar verdict was given by the Headmasters’ Conference at the beginning of the year 1924. The Conference recorded its dismay at the diminishing respect paid to the sanctity of industrial, political, and international agreements. Peace and concord among men rests largely on mutual confidence and trust. There cannot be confidence and trust where parties break their engagements as soon as they find it to their interest to do so. And that is at least one of the chief causes of modern unrest. The cause is lack of morals: we must get back to morality.

Few thinking men will quarrel with this conclusion. Practically all men agree that there is nothing wrong with the world; what is wrong are the people in it, and their ways. If these could be mended we should have a new and a better world, so—Back to Morality is our maxim.

But we have not yet solved all the difficulties. We have to admit with sorrow that the modern world is not agreed on even the fundamental principles of sound morality. Here, too, there are profound differences of opinion among the doctors. One large class proclaims that the human will is autonomous, independent, a law unto itself. Neither priest, nor prophet, nor God himself has any right to trespass on the sacred enclosure of the human conscience. A morality which is subject to an external authority is the negation of morality and the rankest immorality. Another teaches that anyone of mature age has a right to do as he pleases provided that he does not interfere with the equal liberty of others. Another preaches the old theory that impulse is a better guide in conduct than reason, so follow your instincts. No wonder that the new morality is of various sorts, and that there are several different ways of palliating divorce, birth control, suicide, and even murder, not to mention smaller matters like pilferage and theft. Honesty, fair dealing, justice, fidelity to one’s word are old-fashioned, and hardly suitable to modern requirements.

And yet it is quite plain to anyone who thinks that here we have a quite sufficient explanation of the unrest of the modern world. The world has lost touch with morality because it has forgotten what morality is. We must recover the true idea of morality from the teaching of Jesus Christ. To anyone who will go to the right sources that teaching is quite clear and satisfactory. The rules of Christian conduct are in accordance with the nature of things and the nature of man. They come from the same source. They have stood the test of long experience, but they are not true merely on that account. They are true because they are commands of an all-wise, all-holy, and infinitely good God, given to his creature not arbitrarily or from whim, but because it is right that a rational creature should conduct himself as they prescribe. That is the true morality. We shall not find rest till we get back to that.