conduct of a man by positive enactment, as with a soldier on parade:
what is not there commanded, is forbidden. But these instances do not
derogate from our general proposition, which is proved in this way.
The office of law is not to loose, but to bind. It declares, not what
the subject may do, but what he must or must not. It does not bring
liberty, but restriction. Therefore, if any one wishes to assert a
restriction, he must go to a law to prove it. If he can find none,
liberty remains. The law is laid on liberty. Liberty is not the
outcome of law, but prior to it. Liberty is in possession. The burden
of proof rests with those who would abridge liberty and impose an
obligation. It is an axiom of law itself, a natural, not an arbitrary
axiom, that _better is the condition of the possessor_: which amounts
in this matter to another statement, also axiomatic, _that a law binds
not till it is promulgated_. But a law of which I have serious
outstanding doubts whether it exists at all, or, if existent, whether
it reaches my case, is for this occasion a law not duly promulgated to
me. Therefore it binds me not, and my liberty remains.

4. It remains to consider what constitutes a _serious outstanding
doubt_. The word _outstanding_ has been already explained. It means
that we have sought for certain information, and cannot procure it.
Now what is a _serious_ doubt? It is a doubt founded on a _positive_
opinion against the existence of the law, or its applicability to the
case in point, an opinion fraught with probability, _solid,
comparative, practical probability_. The doubt must not be mere
negative doubt, or ignorance that cannot tell why it doubts; not a
vague suspicion, or sentimental impression that defies all
intellectual analysis; not a mere subjective inability to make up
one's mind, but some counter-reason that admits of positive statement,
as we say, _in black and white_. It is true that many minds cannot
define their grounds of doubt, even when these are real. Such minds
are unfit to apply the doctrine of Probabilism to themselves, but must
seek its application from others. The opinion against the law, when
explicitly drawn out, must be found to possess a _solid_ probability.
It may be either an intrinsic argument from reason and the nature of
the case, or an extrinsic argument from the word of some authority:
but the reason or the authority must be grave. The opinion is thus
said to be _intrinsically_ or _extrinsically_ probable. The
probability must also be _comparative_. There is many an argument, in
itself a very good one, that perishes when we come to consider the
crushing weight of evidence on the other side. An opinion is
_comparatively_ probable, when after hearing all the reasons and all
the authorities on the other side, the said opinion still remains _not
unlikely_, which is all that we mean to say of an opinion here, when
we call it _probable_. In ordinary English, the word _probable_ means
_more likely than otherwise_, which is not the signification of the
Latin _opinio probabilis_. Lastly, the probability must be
_practical_: it must take account of all the circumstances of the
case. Practical probability is opposed to _speculative_, which leaves
out of count certain circumstances, which are pretty sure to be
present, and to make all the difference in the issue. Thus it is
speculatively probable that a Catholic might without sin remain years
without confession, never having any grievous sins to confess,
grievous sin alone being necessary matter for that sacrament. There is
no downright cogent reason why a man might not do so. And yet, if he
neglected such ordinary means of grace as confession of venial sin,
having it within reach, month after month, no one, considering "the
sin which surrounds us," would expect that man to go without grievous
scathe. In mechanics, there are many machines that work prettily
enough in speculation and on paper, where the inventors do not
consider the difficulties of imperfect material, careless handling,
climate, and other influences, that render the invention of no
practical avail.

5. The safest use of Probabilism is in the field of property
transactions and of positive law. There is greatest risk of using it
amiss in remaining in a false religion. All turns upon the varying
amount of trouble involved in _moral diligence_ of enquiry, according
as the matter at issue is a point of mere observance or of vital
interest.

6. The point on which the probability turns must be the lawfulness or
unlawfulness of the action, not any other issue, as that of the
physical consequences. Before rolling boulder-stones down a hill to
amuse myself, it is not enough to have formed a probable opinion that
there is no one coming up. That would be Probabilism misapplied. The
correct enquiry is: Does any intrinsic reason or extrinsic authority
make the opinion probable, that it is lawful for mere amusement to
roll down rocks with any belief short of certainty that no one will be
crushed thereby? The probability, thus turned on to the lawfulness of
the action, breaks down altogether. This explanation, borne in mind,
will save much misapprehension.

CHAPTER IX.

OF THE SANCTION OF THE NATURAL LAW.

SECTION I.--_Of a Twofold Sanction, Natural and Divine_.

1. The sanction of a law is the punishment for breaking it. The
punishment for final, persistent breach of the natural law is failure
to attain the perfect state and last end of the human soul, which is
happiness. If existence be prolonged under this failure, it must be in
the contrary state of misery. This failure and misery is at once a
_natural result_ and a _divine infliction_. It is the natural result
of repeated flagrant acts of moral evil, whereby a man has made his
nature hideous, corrupted and overthrown it. (c. vi., s. i., nn. 4, 5,
p. 111.) For an end is gained by taking the means, and lost by neglect
of the means thereto. Now, as we have seen, happiness is an
intellectual act, the perfection of an intellectual or rational nature
(c. ii., s. ii., p. 6); and the means to it are living rationally: for
a reasonable being, to do well and fare well, must live by that
reason, which is the _form_ of his being. (c. vi., s. i., n. 4, p.
111.) Whoever therefore goes about contradicting the reason that is
within him (c. v., s. iii., n. 3, p. 74) is not in the way to attain
to happiness. Happiness the end of man, the creature of all others the
most complex, is not to be stumbled upon by chance. You may make two
stones lean upright one against the other by chance, but otherwise
than by a methodical application of means to the end you could not
support the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

2. Man's is a progressive nature (c. vi., s. i., nn. 2,3, p. 109),
himself being the director of his own progress. Other progressive
natures may be spoilt by their requirements being denied, and contrary
things done to them. Man has his requirements. It depends mainly on
himself whether he acts up to them or against them. If he acts against
them, he so far spoils himself; and once he is thoroughly spoilt by
his own doing, the final perfection of humanity is gone from him for
ever. It is the natural result.

3. I have spoken (n. 1) of _repeated flagrant acts_: not that I would
ignore the evil _set_ of the will that results from one gross and
deliberate evil deed (see c. ix., s. ii., n. 6, p. 168): but because
the case is clearer where the acts have been multiplied. However we
must not omit to observe, that it is not any _vice_, or evil habit,
that formally unfits a man for his final happiness, but an actual evil
_set_ of the will, coming of actual sin unrepented of, which _set_ is
more decided, when that uncancelled sin is the last of many such, and
the outcome of a habit. But supposing an habitual sinner to have
repented, and his repentance to have been ratified by God, and that he
dies, not actually in sin, but before the habit of sin has been
eradicated (c. v., s. ii., n. 1, p. 69),--we may say of him, that his
"foot is set in the right way," that is, his will is actually right,
and the obstacle to happiness is removed. The evil habit in him is not
an actual adhesion of his will to evil, but a proneness to relapse
into that state. It is only remotely and potentially evil. It is a
seed of evil, which however will not germinate in the good and
blissful surroundings to which the soul has been transplanted, but
remain for ever sterile, or rather, will speedily decay.

4. If we leave God out of morality, and take account only of the
_philosophical_ aspect of sin (c. vi., s. ii., n. 6, p. 119), we have
nothing further to say of the sanction than this, which has been said:
"Act against nature, and you will end by ruining your nature, and fail
of your final perfection and happiness." But now God comes in, the
giver of the law of nature; and the failure, already a natural result,
must henceforth be viewed also as a Divine chastisement. There is no
law without a sanction. There is no law, the giver of which can allow
it to be broken with impunity. A legislator who dispensed with all
sanction, would rightly be taken by young and old not to be in earnest
in his command. If then God must give a law to man whom He has created
(c. vi., s. ii., n. 9, p. 120), He must attach a sanction to that law;
and if the law is according to the exigency of human nature (c. vi.,
s. ii., n. 11, p. 122), so will the sanction also be the natural
outcome of that exigency set at naught and that law broken.

5. Our position gains by the consideration, that the object, in the
contemplation of which man's soul is to be finally and perfectly
blessed in the natural order, is the Creator seen through the veils of
His works. (c.ii., s.iv., p. 21.) This mediate vision of God, albeit it
is to be the work of a future existence, needs practice and
preparation in this life. God will not be discerned by the man who has
not been accustomed to look for Him. He will not be seen by the swine,
who with head to earth has eaten his fill of sensual pleasures, and
has cared for nothing better. He will not be seen by the covetous man
and the oppressor, who never identified His image hidden away under
the labour-stained dress of the poor. He will not be seen by the man,
who never looked up into His face in prayer here below. He will not be
seen by the earth-laden spirit, that cared nothing at all for God,
that hated the mention of His name, that proclaimed Him, or at least
wished Him, not to be at all.

6. It will be said that this argumentation supposes the habits of
vice, contracted on earth, to remain in the soul after departure: but
there is no proof of that: nay of some vices--those that have more to
do with the body, as drunkenness--the habits cannot possibly remain,
seeing that the appetite wherein they were resident has perished with
the body. First, as regards the instance cited, I reply that we may
consider drunkenness in two ways, on the one hand as a turning to the
creature, on the other as a turning away from reason and the Creator.
The craving for liquor cannot remain in the soul after death exactly
as it was before, though it probably continues in some analogous form,
as a thirst for wild and irregular excitement: but the loathing and
horror of the ways of reason and of God, engendered by frequent
voluntary intoxication, still continues in the soul. And from this
observation we draw the general answer, that whereas in every sin,
whether sensual or spiritual, the most important part is played by the
will, and the will is a spiritual, not an organic faculty, a faculty
which is a main element of the soul whether in or out of the
body,--therefore the evil bent and inclination of the will, which sin
involves, must remain even in the departed spirit. Lastly, we may ask:
To what purpose is our free-will given us, if all souls, good and bad
alike, users and abusers of the liberty they had on earth, enter into
their long home all of one uniform and spotless hue?

7. Thus then it comes to be, by order of nature and good consequence,
that the man who has abandoned God, goes without God; and he who has
shunned his last end and final good, arrives not unto it; and he who
would not go, when invited, to the feast, eats not of the same: and
whoso has withdrawn from God, from him God withdraws. "A curse he
loved, and it shall come upon him; and he would not have a blessing,
and it shall be far from him. He put on the curse like a garment, and
it has gone in like water into his entrails, and like oil into his
bones,--like a garment which covereth him, and like a girdle wherewith
he is girded continually." (Psalm cviii. 18, 19.)

8. Conversely, we might argue the final happiness which attaches to
the observance of the law of nature. (c. ii., s. v., p. 26.)

_Readings._--St. Thos., _Cont. Gent._, iii., cc. 140, 141, 143, 145.

SECTION II.--_Of the Finality of the aforesaid Sanction_.

1. By a _final_, as distinguished from an _eternal_ state, is here
meant the last state of existence in a creature, whether that state go
on for ever, in which case it is _final_ and _eternal_, or whether it
terminate in the cessation of that creature's being, which is a case
of a state _final_, but not _eternal_. Whether the unhappy souls of
men, who have incurred the last sentence of the natural law, shall
exist for eternity, is not a question for philosophy to decide with
certainty. The philosopher rules everything _a priori_, showing what
must be, if something else is. Of the action of God in the world, he
can only foretell that amount which is thus hypothetically necessary.
Some divine action there is, of which the _congruity_ only, not the
_necessity_, is apparent to human eyes: there the philosopher can tell
with _probability_, but not with _certainty_, what God will do. Other
actions of God are wholly beyond our estimate of the reasons of them:
we call them simply and entirely free. In that sphere philosophy has
no information to render of her own; she must wait to hear from
revelation what God has done, or means to do. Philosophers have given
_reasons of congruence_, as they call them, for the reprobate sinner
not being annihilated, and therefore for his _final_ punishment being
_eternal_. Those reasons go to evince the probability of eternal
punishment, a probability which is deepened into certainty by
revelation. We shall not enter into them here, but shall be content to
argue that a term is set to the career of the transgressor, arrived at
which he must leave hope behind of ever winning his way to happiness,
or ever leading any other existence than one of misery.

2. The previous question has shown that some punishment must attend
upon violation of the natural law. Suppose a trangressor has suffered
accordingly for a certain time after death, what shall be done with
him in the end? If he does not continue to suffer as long as he
continues to be, then one of three things: he must either pass into
happiness, or into a new state of probation, or his very punishment
must be a probation, wherein if he behaves well, he shall be rewarded
with happiness at last, or if ill, he shall continue in misery until
he amend. All this speculation, be it understood, lies apart from
revelation. If then the sufferer passed out of this world,
substantially and in the main a good man, it is not unreasonable that,
after a period of expiatory suffering for minor delinquencies, he
should reach that happiness which is the just reward of his
substantial righteousness. But what of him who closed his career in
wickedness exceeding great? Mere suffering will never make of him a
good man, or a fit subject for happiness. But the suffering may be
probationary, and he may amend himself under the trial. Against that
hypothesis philosophers have brought _a priori_ arguments to show that
the period of probation must end with the separation of the soul from
the body. But waiving all such arguments, let us suppose that there
might be probation after probation even in the world to come. But some
human souls would continue obstinately and unrepentingly set in
wickedness, age after age, and probation after probation: for the
possible malice of the will is vastly great. What is to become of such
obstinate characters? It seems against the idea of probation, that
periods of trial should succeed one another in an endless series. It
would be a reasonable rule in a university, that an undergraduate who
had been plucked twenty-five times, should become ineligible for his
degree. Coming after so many failures, neither would the degree be any
ornament to him, nor he to the university. A soul cannot look for
seasons without end of possible grace and pardon to shine upon it. The
series of probations must end somewhere. And then? We are come round
to where we began. When all the probation is over, the soul is found
either in conformity with the natural law, which means ultimate
happiness, or at variance with the law, and becomes miserable with a
misery that shall never terminate, unless the soul itself ceases to
be.

3. It may be asked, how much conformity to the natural law is
requisite and sufficient, to exempt a person at the end of his trial
from a final doom of misery, or to ensure his lasting happiness? The
question resolves itself into three:--how do sins differ in point of
gravity? is grave sin ever forgiven? is the final award to be given
upon the person's whole life, a balance being struck between his good
and evil deeds, or is it to be simply upon his moral state at the last
moment of his career of trial?

4. It was a paradox of the Stoics, that all offences are equal, the
treading down of your neighbour's cabbage as heinous a crime as
sacrilege. (Horace, _Satires_, i., 3, 115-119.) But it is obvious that
there is a vast difference, as well _objectively_ in the matter of the
offence, _e.g_., in the instance just quoted from Horace, as also
_subjectively_ in the degree of knowledge, advertence, and will,
wherewith the offender threw himself into the sin. Thus offences come
to be distinguished as _grave_ and _light_: the latter being such as
with a human master would involve a reprimand, the former, instant
dismissal. Final misery is not incurred except by grave offending.

5. The second question, whether grave sin is ever forgiven, cannot be
answered by philosophy. Of course the sinner may see by the light of
reason his folly and his error, and thereby conceive some sort of
sorrow for it, and retract, and to some extent withdraw his will from
it on natural grounds. This amendment of sin on its moral and
philosophical side may deserve and earn pardon at human hands. But the
offence against God remains to be reckoned for with God. Now God is
not bound to forgive without receiving satisfaction; and He never can
receive due satisfaction from man for the contempt that a deliberate,
grave, and flagrant violation of the moral law puts upon the Infinite
Majesty of the Lawgiver. The first thing that revelation has to teach
us is whether, and on what terms, God is ready to pardon grievous sin.

6. The balance between deeds good and evil is not struck merely at the
instant of death. It is being struck continually; and man's final
destiny turns on how that balance stands at the close of his time of
probation. So long as he keeps the substance of the moral law, the
balance is in his favour. But one downright wilful and grievous
transgression outweighs with God all his former good deeds. It is a
defiance of the Deity, a greater insult than all his previous life was
a service and homage. It is as though a loyal regiment had mutinied,
or a hitherto decent and orderly citizen were taken red-handed in
murder. If however God deigns to draw the offender to repentance, and
to pardon him, the balance is restored. Thus everything finally
depends on man being free from guilt of grievous transgression at the
instant of death, or at the end of his period of probation, whenever
and wherever that end may come.

_Reading_.--Lessius, _De perfectionibus divinis_, 1.xiii., c. xxvi.,
nn. 183, seq.

SECTION III.--_Of Punishment Retrospective and Retributive_.

1. The doctrine of the last section might stand even in the mind of
one who held that all punishment is probational, and destined for the
amendment of him who undergoes it, to humble him, to awaken his sense
of guilt, and to make him fear to transgress again. On this theory of
punishment, the man who in his last probational suffering refuses to
amend, must be let drop out of existence as incorrigible, and so
clearly his final state is one of misery. The theory is not
inconsistent with _final_ punishment, but with _eternal_ punishment,
unless indeed we can suppose a creature for all eternity to refuse,
and that under stress of torment, a standing invitation to repentance.
It is however a peculiar theory, and opposite to the common tradition
of mankind, which has ever been to put gross offenders to death, not
as incorrigible, not simply as refuse to be got rid of, but that their
fate may be a _deterrent_ to others. Punishment, in this view, is
_medicinal_ to the individual, and _deterrent_ to the community.
Eternal punishment has been defended on the score of its _deterrent_
force. Both these functions of punishment, the _medicinal_ and the
_deterrent_ function, are prospective. But there is asserted a third
function, which is retrospective: punishment is said to be
_retributive_. It is on this ground that the justification of eternal
punishment mainly rests. We are however here concerned, not with that
eternity, but in an endeavour to give a full and adequate view of
punishment in all its functions.

2. If punishment is never _retributive_, the human race in all
countries and ages has been the sport of a strange illusion. Everyone
knows what _vengeance_ means. It is a desire to punish some one, or to
see him punished, not prospectively and with an eye to the future, for
his improvement, or as a warning to others, but retrospectively and
looking to the past, that he may suffer for what he has done. Is then
the idea of vengeance nothing but an unclean phantom? Is there no such
thing as vengeance to a right-minded man? Then is there an evil
element, an element _essentially_ and _positively_ evil, in human
nature. No one will deny that the idea, and to some extent the desire,
of vengeance, of retaliation, of retrospective infliction of suffering
in retribution for evil done, of what we learn to call in the nursery
_tit for tat_, is natural to mankind. It is found in all men. We all
respond to the sentiment:

  Mighty Fates, by Heaven's decree accomplish,
  According as right passes from this side to that.
  For hateful speech let speech of hate be paid back:
  Justice exacting her due cries this aloud:
  For murderous blow dealt let the murderer pay
  By stroke of murder felt.
  Do and it shall be done unto thee:
  Old is this saying and old and old again.

[Footnote 16: Æschylus, _Choephori_, 316, seq. These lines embody the
idea on which the dramas of the Shakespeare of Greece are principally
founded. But when was a work of the highest art based upon an idea
unsound, irrational and vicious?]

Nor must we be led away by Mill (_Utilitarianism_, c.v.) into
confounding retaliation, or vengeance, with self-defence. Self-defence
is a natural idea also, but not the same as retaliation. We defend
ourselves against a mad dog, we do not retaliate on him. Hence we must
not argue that, because self-defence is prospective, therefore so is
vengeance.

3. A thing is _essentially_ evil, when there is no possible use of it
which is not an abuse. Not far different is the conception of a thing
_positively_ evil, evil, that is, not by reason of any deficiency, or
by what it is not, but evil by what it is in itself. Such an
essential, positive evil in human nature would vengeance be, a natural
thing for which there was no natural use, unless punishment may in
some measure be retributive. We cannot admit such a flaw in nature.
All healthy philosophy goes on the principle, that what is natural is
so far forth good. Otherwise we lapse into Manicheism, pessimism,
scepticism, abysses beyond the reach of argument. Vengeance
undoubtedly prompts to many crimes, but so does the passion of love.
Both are natural impulses. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to set
down one third of human transgressions to love, and another third to
revenge: yet it is the abuse in each case, not the use, that leads to
sin. If the matrimonial union were wicked and detestable, as the
Manicheans taught, then would the passion of love be an abomination
connatural to man. Such another enormity would be the affection of
vengeance, if punishment could never rightly be retributive.

4. Aristotle, _Rhetoric_, I., x., 17, distinguishes two functions of
punishment thus: "Chastisement is for the benefit of him that suffers
it, but vengeance is for him that wreaks it, that he may have
satisfaction." Add to this the warning given to the commonwealth by
the example that is made of the offender, and we have the three
functions of punishment, _medicinal_, _deterrent_, and _retributive_.
As it is _medicinal_, it serves the _offender_: as it is _deterrent_,
it serves the _commonwealth_: as it is _retributive_, it serves the
_offended party_, being a reparation offered to him. Now, who is the
offended party in any evil deed? So far as it is a sin against
justice, an infringement of any man's right, he is the offended party.
He is offended, however, not simply and precisely by your violation of
the moral law, but by your having, in violation of that law, taken
away something that belonged to him. Consequently, when you make
restitution and give him back what you took away, with compensation
for the temporal deprival of it, he is satisfied, and the offence
against him is repaired. If you have maliciously burnt his house down,
you bring him the price of the house and furniture, together with
further payment for the fright and for the inconvenience of being, for
the present, houseless. You may do all that, and yet the moral guilt
of the conflagration may remain upon your soul. But that is no affair
of his: he is not the custodian of the moral law: he is not offended
by your sin, formally viewed as sin: nor has he any function of
punishing you, taking vengeance upon you, or exacting from you
retribution for that. But what if his wife and children have perished,
and you meant them so to perish, in the fire? Your debt of restitution
still lies in the matter which you took away. Of course it is a debt
that cannot be paid. You cannot give back his "pretty chickens and
their dam" whole and alive again. Still your inability to pay one debt
does not make you liable to that creditor for another debt, which is
part of a wholly different account. He is not offended by, nor are you
answerable to him for, your sin in this case any more than in the
former.

5. We may do an _injury_ to an individual, commit a _crime_ against
the State, and _sin_ against God. The injury to the individual is
repaired by restitution, not by punishment, and therefore not by
vengeance, which is a function of punishment. There is no such thing
as vengeance for a private wrong, and therefore we have the precept to
forgive our enemies, and not to avenge ourselves, in which phrase the
emphasis falls on the word _ourselves_. The clear idea and strong
desire of vengeance, which nature affords, shows that there is such a
thing as vengeance to be taken by some one: it does not warrant every
form of vengeance, or allow it to be taken by each man for himself. It
consecrates the principle of retribution, not every application of the
principle. It is a point of _synderesis_, not of particular conduct.
The reader should recall what was said of the vengeance of Hannibal at
Himera. (c. viii., s. ii., p. 144.)

6. It belongs to the State to punish _political sin_, or crime, and to
God to punish _theological sin_, which is sin properly so called, a
breach of the Eternal Law. The man who has burnt his neighbour's house
down, though he has compensated the individual owner, may yet be
punished by the State. The owner, acting in his capacity as citizen,
even when he has been compensated as an individual, may still hand him
over to the State for punishment. The arson was a violation, not only
of _commutative_, but of _legal_ justice (c. v., s. ix., nn. 3, 6, pp.
103, 106), a disturbance of the public peace and social order, an
outrage upon the majesty of the law. For this he may be punished by
the State, which is the guardian of all these things, and which has
jurisdiction over him to make laws for him, and to enforce their
sanction against him. Civil punishment, besides being deterrent, is
retributive for the breach of social order. It is the vengeance of the
commonwealth upon the disturber of the public peace. Whether the State
can punish on pure grounds of retribution, away from all hope or need
of deterring possible imitators of the crime, is a question irrelevant
to our present enquiry. Probably a negative answer should be returned.

7. We come now to the punishment of sin by God, the Living
Reasonableness, the Head of the Commonwealth of Creation, the
Legislator of the Eternal Law, the Fountain of all Jurisdiction, Him
in whose hands rests the plenitude of the power to punish. An evil
deed may be no wrong to any individual man, no crime against the
State, but it must ever be an offence against God. It is a departure
from the order of man's progress as a reasonable being (c. v., s.
iii., n. 3, p. 74: c. vi., s. i., nn. 1-5, p. 109), which is founded
on the nature of God Himself (c. vi., s. i., n. 7, p. 113), of which
order God is the official guardian (c. vi., s. ii., nn. 8-10, p. 119),
and which is enjoined by God's Eternal Law. (c. vii., n. 3, p. 129.)
This law extends to all creation, rational and irrational, animate and
inanimate. It bids every creature work according to his or its own
nature and circumstances. Given to irrational beings, the law is
simply irresistible and unfailing: such are the physical laws of
nature, so many various emanations of the one Eternal Law. Given to
rational creatures, the law may be resisted and broken: sin is the one
thing in the universe that does break it. (c. vii., nn. 5-7, p. 130.)
A man may act in disregard of the Eternal Law on one or other of its
physical sides, and so much the worse for him, though he has not
broken the law, but merely ignored its operation, as when one eats
what is unwholesome. Much more shall he suffer for having broken the
law, in the only possible way that it can be broken, by sin. This
peculiar violation draws after it a peculiar consequence of suffering,
penal and retributive. If a man gets typhoid fever in his house, we
sometimes say it is a _punishment_ on him for neglecting his drains,
even when the neglect was a mere piece of ignorance or inadvertence.
It is an evil consequence certainly,--the law, which he thought not
of, working itself out in the form of disease. But it is not properly
punishment: no natural law has been really broken: there has been no
guilt, and the suffering is not retributive and compensatory. It does
not go to restore the balance of the neglect. It is a lamentable
consequence, not a repayment. As, when man wrongs his fellow-man, he
makes with him an _involuntary contract_ (c. v., s. ix., n. 6, p.
106), to restore what he takes away: so in sinning against God, man
makes another involuntary contract, to pay back in suffering against
his will what he unduly takes in doing his own will against the will
of the Legislator. As St. Augustine says of Judas (Serm. 125, n. 5):
"He did what he liked, but he suffered what he liked not. In his doing
what he liked, his sin is found: in his suffering what he liked not,
God's ordinance is praised." Thus it is impossible for the Eternal
Law, which bears down all so irresistibly in irrational nature,
finally to fail of its effect even upon the most headstrong and
contumacious of rational creatures; but, as St. Thomas says (1a 2æ, q.
93, art. 6, in corp.), "The defect of doing is made up by suffering,
inasmuch as they suffer what the Eternal Law prescribes for them to
the extent to which they fail to do what accords with the Eternal
Law." And St. Anselm (_Cur Deus homo_, nn. 14, 15): "God cannot
possibly lose His honour: for either the sinner spontaneously pays
what he owes, or God exacts it of him against his will. Thus if a man
chooses to fly from under the will of God commanding, he falls under
the same will punishing." Punishment is called by Hegel, "the other
half of sin." Lastly, they are God's own spoken words (Deut. xxxii.
35): "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay."

_Readings_.--St. Thos., _Cont. Gent_., iii. 140, n. 5, Amplius; _ib_.,
iii., 144, nn. 8, Per hoc, and 9, Est autem.

For Plato's views on punishment see _Protag_. 324 A, B; _Gorgias_,
525; _Rep_. 380 B, 615; _Phaedo_, 113 E; _Laws_, 854 D; 862 D, E; 934
A; 957 E. Plato recognizes only the _medicinal_ and the _deterrent_
functions of punishment, and ignores the _retributive_. This is not to
be wondered at in one who wrote: "No one is wicked voluntarily; but it
is an evil habit of body and a faulty education that is the cause of
every case of wickedness" (_Timaeus_, 86 E; cf. _Laws_, 731 C, D),
which error receives a masterly confutation in Aristotle, _Ethics_,
III, v.

CHAPTER X.

OF UTILITARIANISM.

1. Though the name _utilitarian_ is an English growth of this century,
the philosophy so called probably takes its origin from the days when
man first began to speculate on moral matters. Bentham and the two
Mills, Austin, and George Grote, have repeated in England the
substance of what Protagoras and Epicurus taught in Greece, two
thousand years before. It is the system of Ethics to which all must
incline, who ignore the spiritual side of man's nature and his hopes
of a better world. It is a morality of the earth, earthy.

2. Utilitarianism has not been formulated like the Athanasian Creed.
It is impossible to state it and combat it in a form to which all
Utilitarians will subscribe. Indeed, it is an amiable weakness of
theirs, when confronted with the grosser consequences that flow from
their theories, to run off to some explanation, true enough, but quite
out of keeping with the primary tenets of their school. We will take
what may be called a "mean reading" of the indications which various
Utilitarian thinkers afford of their mind and philosophy. These
authorities, then, teach two main heads of doctrine:--

(1) That the last end and final good of man lies in this world, and
consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of mankind,
happiness being taken to mean pleasure as well of the senses as of the
understanding, such pleasure as can be had in this world, along with
immunity from pain. (Mill's _Utilitarianism_, 2nd Ed., pp. 9, seq.)

(2) That human acts are _right_ or _wrong_, according as they are
_useful_ or _hurtful_, that is, according as their consequences make
for or against the above-mentioned end of social happiness.

3. Consequences, as Utilitarians very properly point out, are either
_general_ or _particular_. They add that, in pronouncing an action to
be good or evil according to its consequences, they mean the general
and not the particular consequences. In other words, they bid us
consider, not the immediate results of _this action_, but what would
be the result to society, if _this sort of action_ were generally
allowed. This point is well put by Paley (_Moral Philosophy_, bk. ii.,
c. vii.: all three chapters, vi., vii., viii., should be read, as the
best explanation of the Principle of General Consequences):

"You cannot permit one action and forbid another, without showing a
difference between them. Consequently the same sort of actions must be
generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where, therefore, the
general permission of them would be pernicious, it becomes necessary
to lay down and support the rule which generally forbids them.... The
assassin knocked the rich villain on the head, because he thought him
better out of the way than in it. If you allow this excuse in the
present instance, you must allow it to all who act in the same manner,
and from the same motive; that is, you must allow every man to kill
any one he meets, whom he thinks noxious or useless: ... a disposition
of affairs which would soon fill the world with misery and confusion,
and ere long put an end to human society."

My contention is, not with the Principle of General Consequences,
which has a certain value in Ethics, and is used by many writers other
than Utilitarian, but with the two stated above, n. 2, which are
called the Greatest Happiness Principle and the Principle of Utility.

4. Against the Greatest Happiness Principle I have these complaints:

(1) Utilitarians from Paley to John Stuart Mill aver that their
teaching is no bar to any man hoping for and striving after the
happiness of the world to come. They say that such happiness cannot be
better attained than by making it your principal aim to improve all
temporal goods and dissipate all temporal evil. Their maxim in fact
is: "Take care of the things of earth, and the things of heaven will
take care of themselves." Whereas it was the very contrary teaching of
Him, whom moderns, who see in Him no higher character, still love to
call the greatest of moral teachers: "That which fell among thorns are
they who have heard, and going their way, are choked with the cares
and riches and pleasures of this life, and yield no fruit." (St. Luke
viii. 14.)

(2) It will be said that these thorns grow of selfishness, and that
these cares are the cares of individual interest, whereas the
Utilitarian's delight and glory is to live, not for himself, but for
the commonwealth. But how can a man, who takes pleasure to be his
highest good and happiness, live otherwise than for himself? Here we
come upon the unobserved fault and flaw, which entirely vitiates the
Utilitarian structure. It is an union of two opposite and incompatible
elements. An old poet has said:

  Vinegar and oil in one same vessel pour,
  They stand apart, unfriendly, all the more.

(Aeschylus, _Agam_., 330, 331.)

Utilitarianism consists of a still more unfriendly and unwholesome
mixture of two elements, both of them bad, and unable to stand
together, Hedonism and Altruism. Hedonism is the doctrine that the
main object and end of life is pleasure: which is the position laid
down in so many words by Mill (1. c.), that "actions are right in
proportion as they tend to promote happiness;" and "by happiness is
intended pleasure and the absence of pain." If Hedonism were sound
doctrine, the Pleasant and the Good would be identical, and the most
pleasant pleasure would ever be the best pleasure. That would take
away all distinction of _kind_ or _quality_ among pleasures, and
differentiate them only by intensity and duration. This was Paley's
doctrine, a fundamental point of Hedonism, and therefore also of the
Utilitarian philosophy. John Mill, very honourably to himself, but
very fatally to the system that he was writing to defend, parted
company with Paley. We have argued against Paley (c. iv., s. iii., nn.
3-5, p. 55), that there is a _better_ and a _worse_ in pleasures,
quite distinct from the _more_ or _less_ pleasurable, even if that
_more_ be taken _in the long run_ in this world.

Again it may be considered that pleasure, even the best and highest,
is a sort of efflorescence from activity, and is for activity, not
activity for it; and better is the activity, whatever it be, than the
pleasure which comes thereof; wherefore no pleasure, as pleasure, can
be the highest good and happiness of man.

Hedonism then is an error. But errors may be opposed to one another as
well as to the truth. Hedonism is opposed to Altruism in this way. A
man may take pleasure in seeing other people enjoy themselves. Nothing
is more common, except the pleasure taken in enjoying one's own self.
But if a man only feeds the hungry that he may have the satisfaction
of seeing them eat, is it the hungry or himself that he finally seeks
to gratify? Clearly, himself. That is the behaviour of the Hedonist,
he acts for his own pleasure even in his benevolence. The Altruist, on
the contrary, professes never to act for self, but for society. So
that society flourish, he is ready to be crushed and ruined, not in
the matter of his pleasure only, but even in that of his own good.
Selfishness, by which he means all manner of regard to self, is, upon
his conscience, the unforgiven sin. But Hedonism is selfishness in the
grossest form, being the mere pursuit in all things of pleasurable
feeling--feeling being always particular and limited to self, in
contradistinction to good, which is universal and diffuses itself all
round. The Hedonist seeks his own pleasure, where the Altruist forbids
him to take thought, let alone for his gratification, but even for his
good. Thus an Hedonist cannot be Altruist to boot; and, trying to
combine the two characters, the Utilitarian is committed to a
self-contradiction.

If he relinquishes Hedonism, and holds to Altruism, pure and simple,
his position is not much improved. Altruism overlooks the fact, that
man, as compared with other men, is a _person_, the centre of his own
acts, not a _thing_, to be entirely referred to others. He is in
relation with others, as child, father, husband, master, citizen; but
these relations do not take up the whole man. There is a residue
within,--an inner being and life, which is not referable to any
creature outside himself, but only to the Creator. For this inner
being, man is responsible to God alone. The good of this, the "inner
man of the heart," is each individual's proper and primary care.
Altruism, and Utilitarianism with it, ignore the interior life of the
soul, and substitute human society, that is, ultimately, the
democratic State, in place of God.

(3) Another confusion that the Greatest Happiness Principle involves,
is the mistaking the political for the ethical end of life. The
political end, which it is the statesman's business to aim at, and the
citizen's duty to subserve, is "the natural happiness of the
commonwealth, and of individuals as members of the commonwealth, that
they may live in it in peace and justice, and with a sufficiency of
goods for the preservation and comfort of bodily life, and with that
amount of moral rectitude which is necessary for this outward peace
and preservation of the commonwealth, and the perpetuity of the human
race." (Suarez, _De Legibus_, III., xi., 7.) This is all the good that
the Utilitarian contemplates. He is satisfied to make a good
_citizen_, a good _husband_, a good _father_, for the transactions of
this life. He has no concern to make a good _man_ up to the ethical
standard, which supposes the observance of the whole natural law,
duties to God, and duties within himself, as well as duties to human
society, and by this observance the compassing of the everlasting
happiness of the man's own individual soul.

Against the Principle of Utility I find these charges:

(1) It takes the sign and indication of moral evil for the evil
itself, as if the physician should take the symptom for the disease.
It places the wickedness of an act in the physical misery and
suffering that are its consequences. This is, I say, a taking of the
indication for the thing indicated. An act is bad in itself and by
itself, as being a violation of the rational nature of the doer (c.
vi., s. i.), and being bad, it breeds bad consequences. But the
badness of the act is moral; the badness of the consequences,
physical. There is an evident intrinsic irrationality, and thereby
moral evil, in such sins as intemperance, peevishness, and vanity. But
let us take an instance of an act, apparently harmless in itself, and
evil solely because of the consequences. Supposing one insists upon
playing the piano for his own amusement, to the disturbance of an
invalid who is lying in a critical state in the next room. Do the mere
consequences make this otherwise innocent amusement evil? Yes, if you
consider the amusement in the abstract: but if you take it as _this
human act_, the act is inordinate and evil in itself, or as it is
elicited in the mind of the agent. The volition amounts to this: "I
prefer my amusement to my neighbour's recovery," which is an act
unseemly and unreasonable in the mind of a social being. Utilitarians
fall into the capital error of ignoring the intrinsic value of an act,
and estimating it wholly by extrinsic results, because they commonly
follow the phenomenalist philosophy, which breaks away from all such
ideas as _substance_ and _nature_, and regards nothing but sequences
and coexistences of phenomena. To a phenomenalist the precept, _Live
up to thy nature_, can have no meaning.

(2) Aristotle (_Ethics_, II., iv., 3) draws this distinction between
virtue and art, that "the products of art have their excellence in
themselves: it suffices therefore that they are of this or that
quality: but acts of virtue are not done virtuously according to the
quality of the thing done, but according to the state of mind of the
doer; first, according to his knowledge of what he was about; then,
according to his volition, as that was guided or not guided by the
proper motives of the virtue; thirdly, according to the steadiness and
fixedness of his will; whereas all these considerations are of no
account in a work of art, except the single one of the artist being
aware of what he was about." Elsewhere (_Ethics_, VI., iv., 2), he
says that virtue is distinguished from art as being _action_, not
_production_. The Principle of Utility confounds virtue with art, or
perhaps I should say, with manufactures. It judges conduct, as one
would shoemaking, by trial of the product, or net result. So far from
being solicitous, with Aristotle, that volition should be "guided by
the proper motives of the virtue" which there is question of
practising (c. v., s. viii., n. 4, p. 96: Ar. _Eth_., III., viii.),
Mill (_Utilitarianism_, p. 26) tells us that "utilitarian moralists
have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has
nothing to do with the morality of the action." By _motive_ he
understands what we have called _the end in view_. (c. iii., s. ii.,
n. 2, p. 31.) So that, if one man waits on the sick for the love of
God, and another in hope of a legacy, the morality of these two acts
is the same, just as it makes no difference to the usefulness of a
pair of boots, what motive it was that set the shoemaker to work.
True, Mill admits that the motive has "much to do with the worth of
the agent:" but that, he hastens to explain, is inasmuch as "it
indicates ... a bent of character from which useful, or from which
hurtful actions are likely to arise." Even so,--the shoemaker who
works to earn money for a carousal, is not likely to go on producing
useful articles so long as another, who labours to support his family.
Such is the moral difference that Mill places between the two men; one
instrument of production is longer available than the other.

(3) Another well established distinction is that between _harm_ and
_injury_, injury being wilful and unjust harm. The housemaid, who in
arranging the room has burned your manuscript of "sugared sonnets,"
has done you no injury, for she meant none, but how vast the _harm_ to
the author and to mankind! Harm is visible in the effects: but injury
only upon examination of the mind of the agent. Not so, however, the
Utilitarian thinks: harm being equal, he can make no difference
between a tyrant and a man-eating tiger. Thus George Grote says of a
certain murderous usurper of the kingdom of Macedon: "You discover
nothing while your eye is fixed on Archelaus himself.... But when you
turn to the persons whom he has killed, banished, or ruined--to the
mass of suffering that he has inflicted--and to the widespread
insecurity which such acts of iniquity spread through all societies
where they become known--there is no lack of argument which prompts a
reflecting spectator to brand him as [a most dangerous and destructive
animal, no] a disgraceful man." (Grote's _Plato_, ii., p. 108.) Why
Archelaus is described in terms of the tiger, and then branded as a
disgraceful man, we are at a loss to conceive, except in this way,
that the writer's philosophy forsook him at the end of the sentence,
and he reverted to the common sense of mankind. But he should have
either ended the sentence as suggested in the parenthesis, or have
been willing to call the man-eater of the Indian jungle, who has
"learned to make widows, and to lay waste their cities," _a
disgraceful tiger_; or lastly, he should have looked back, where he
declared it was vain to look, upon Archelaus himself, and discerned in
him that moral deformity, and contradiction of reason, whereof a brute
beast is incapable, but which is a disgrace and a stain upon humanity.

A later writer, who presses Utilitarianism into the service of
Socialism, is plainer-spoken than Grote, and says bluntly: "To be
honestly mistaken avails nothing. Thus Herbert Spencer--who is under
the delusion that we have come into this world each for the sake of
himself, and who opposes, as far as he can, the evolution of
society--is verily an immoral man.... Right is every conduct which
tends to the welfare of society; wrong, what obstructs that welfare."
(Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, pp. 226, 227.) Thus is
overlaid the difference between harm and injury, between physical and
moral evil: thus is the meaning of a _human act_ ignored: in this
abyss of chaos and confusion, which Utilitarianism has opened out,
Moral Philosophy finds her grave.

(4) The Principle of Utility sees in virtue a habit of self-sacrifice,
useful to the community, but not naturally pleasant, and therefore not
naturally good and desirable, to him that practises it, but made
pleasurable and good and desirable to him by practice. (Mill, pp.
53-57.) In this way virtue becomes naturally a very good thing for
every one else but its possessor, but to him it is a natural evil,
inasmuch as it deprives him of pleasure, which natural evil by habit
is gradually converted into a factitious and artificial good, the man
becoming accustomed to it, as the proverb says, "like eels to
skinning." This theory is the resuscitation of one current among the
Sophists at Athens, and described by Plato thus.--The natural good of
man is to afford himself every indulgence, even at the expense of his
neighbours. He follows his natural good accordingly: so do his
neighbours follow theirs, and try to gratify themselves at his
expense. Fights ensue, till mankind, worried and wearied with
fighting, make a compact, each to give up so much of his natural good
as interferes with that of his neighbour. Human society, formed on
this understanding, enforces the compact in the interest of society.
Thus the interest of society is opposed to the interest of the
individual, in this that it keeps him out of his best natural good,
which is to do as his appetite of pleasure bids him in all things,
though it compensates him with a second-class good, by preventing his
neighbours from pleasure-hunting at his expense. If then his
neighbours could be restrained, and he left free to gratify himself,
that would be perfect bliss. But only a despot here or there has
attained to it. The ordinary man must pay his tax of virtue to the
community, a loss to him, but a gain to all the rest: while he is
compensated by the losses which their virtue entails upon them.

Such was the old Athenian theory, which John Mill, the Principle of
Utility in his hand, completes by saying that by-and-bye, and little
by little (as the prisoner of Chillon came to love his dungeon), the
hampered individual comes to love, and to find an artificial happiness
in, those restrictions of his liberty, which are called Virtue.

It was against this theory that Plato wrote his _Republic_, and, to
compare a little thing to a great, the whole account of moral good
being in consonance with nature, and of moral obligation rising out of
the nature of the individual man, as has been set forth in this brief
Text-book, may serve for a refutation of the perverse doctrine of
Utilitarianism.

_Readings_.--Plato, _Republic_, pp. 338 E, 339 A, 343 C, D, E, 344 A,
B, C, 358 E, 359 A, B, 580 B, C.

PART III. NATURAL LAW.

We assume in Natural Law the preceding treatise on Ethics, and also
the principal truths of Natural Theology.

CHAPTER I.

OF DUTIES OF GOD.

SECTION I.--_Of the Worship of God_.

1. _Worship_ is divided into _prayer_ and _praise_. To pray, and
present our petitions to the Most High, is a privilege; a privilege,
however, which we are bound to use at times, as the necessary means
for overcoming temptations and inclinations to evil. We praise and
adore God for His sovereign excellence, which excellence,
nevertheless, would found in us no positive duty if we stood free of
all dependence upon God. In such an hypothesis we should lie simply
under the negative duty of not thinking of God, speaking of Him, or
acting towards Him otherwise than with all reverence. So we should
behave to the Great Stranger, with civility, with admiration even and
awe, but not with cordiality, not with loyalty, not with homage, not
with love. Very different are our relations and our duties to God our
Lord, "in whom we live, move, and have our being." There is nothing in
us or about us, no positive perfection of ours whatsoever, that is not
His gift, and a gift that He is not giving continually, else it would
be lost to us. We are therefore bound in His regard, not merely to
abstention but to act. And first, for inward acts, we must habitually
feel, and at notable intervals we must actually elicit, sentiments of
adoration and praise, of thanksgiving, of submission, of loyalty and
love, as creatures to their Creator, and as vassals to their very good
Lord, for He is our Creator and Lord in the natural order, not to say
anything here of the supernatural filiation, by which, as the Church
says, "we dare" to call God "Our Father."

2. We must also express these sentiments by outward act. All the signs
of reverence, which man pays to his human superior, must be paid to
God "with advantages": bowing passes into prostration, uncovering the
head into kneeling, kissing the hand into offering of incense: not
that these particular developments are necessary, but some such
development must take place. We shall not be content to think
reverential thoughts, but we shall say, or even sing, great things of
God's greatness and our indebtedness and duty: such a vocal exercise
is psalmody. We shall represent in symbolic action our dependence on
the Lord of life and death, and also our sinfulness, for which He
might justly strike us dead: such a representation is sacrifice.

3. All this we must do, first, for the sake of our own souls, minds
and hearts, to quicken the inward sentiment of adoration and praise.
"Worship, mostly of the silent sort," worship, that finds no
expression in word or gesture,--worship away from pealing organs and
chants of praise, or the simpler music of the human voice, where no
hands are uplifted, nor tongues loosened, nor posture of reverence
assumed, becomes with most mortals a vague, aimless reverie, a course
of distraction, dreaminess, and vacancy of mind, no more worth than
the meditations of the Lancashire stone-breaker, who was asked what he
thought of during his work,--"Mostly nowt."

4. Again, what the body is to the soul, that is exterior devotion to
interior. From the soul interior devotion springs, and through the
body it manifests itself. Exterior devotion, without the inward spirit
that quickens it, is worship unprofitable and dead: it tends at once
to corruption, like the body when the soul has left it. Interior
devotion, on the other hand, can exist, though not with its full
complement, without the exterior. So that it is only in the union of
the two together that perfect worship is given to God by men as men.
Upon which St. Thomas has this naïve remark, that "they who blame
bodily observances being paid to God, evidently fail to remember that
they themselves are men."

Thus we pay tithe to God for soul and body, by acts of religion
interior and exterior. But man is, under God, the lord of this earth
and of the fulness thereof. He must pay tithe for that too by devoting
some portion of it to the direct service of God, to whom it all
primarily belongs. For "mine is the gold and mine the silver." (Aggeus
ii. 9.) Such are the words that God spoke through His prophet to
incite His people to restore his sanctuary.

6. It is therefore not true to say that the sole reason of outward
worship is to move the worshipper to interior devotion. It is not true
that St. Peter's at Rome, and Cologne Cathedral, and the Duomo of
Milan, with all their wealth and elaborate ceremonial, exist and are
kept up solely because, things of earth as we are, we cannot be
depended upon to praise God lovingly within the white-washed walls of
a conventicle, or according to the simple ritual of the Society of
Friends. We would not, even if we could, pray habitually among such
surroundings, where we could afford to better them. We have before us
the principle of St. Thomas (1a 2æ, q. 24, art. 3, in corp.):

"Since man's good consists in reason as in its root, the more actions
proper to man are performed under the direction of reason, the more
perfect will man's good be. Hence no one doubts that it belongs to the
perfection of moral good, that the actions of our bodily members
should be directed by the law of reason, ... as also that the passions
of the soul should be regulated by reason."

This means, not merely that if the bodily members or the passions stir
at all, it is a good and desirable thing for them to be ruled by
reason; but further that it is a positive addition to human perfection
that they should stir and be active, provided reason guide them.
(_Ethics_, c. iv., s. i., n. 6, p. 45.)

It certainly is an action proper to man to express in gesture, in
voice, in concert and company with his fellow-men, and by employment
of whatever is best and fairest and brightest under his command in the
material creation, his inward affections of loyalty, of homage and
devotion, of awe and reverence, of gratitude and love to his Creator.

Good as these affections are in the heart of the worshipper, they
receive an external complement of goodness and perfection by being
blazoned forth in vocal utterance, singing, bending of knees,--by the
erection and embellishment of temples, and offerings of gold, silver,
precious stones, and incense,--and by men thronging those temples in
multitudes for social worship,--provided always that the inward
devotion of the heart be there, to put a soul into these outward
demonstrations and offerings.

7. Concerning these religious observances interior and exterior, it is
as idle to pretend that they are _useful_ to Almighty God as it is
irrelevant to object that they are _useless_ to Him. Of course they
are useless to Him. All creation is useless to God. A Being who can
never receive any profit, increment, or gain, dwells not within the
region of utilities. Theologians indeed distinguish between intrinsic
and extrinsic glory, that is, between the glory which God gives
Himself by His own contemplation of His own essence, and the glory
which His creatures give Him. They say that God is thus capable of
extrinsic increment, to which increment the praise and worship of His
creatures is useful. But, after all, they are fain to avow that the
whole of this extrinsic increment and glory is no real gain to God,
giving Him nothing but what He had before in an infinitely more
excellent mode and manner from and of Himself. Thus it appears that
the extrinsic glory of God, to which the worship paid Him by man
contributes, is valued, not because it is properly _useful to Him_,
but because He is most properly and highly _worthy of it_. "Thou art
worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honour and power: because
thou hast created all things, and for thy will they were, and have
been created." (Apoc. iv. II.) And being worthy of this glory, He
wills to have it, and does most strictly exact it, for which reason He
is called in the Scripture _a jealous God_. So those who reflect some
sparkle of God's Majesty, and under some aspect represent His person
upon the earth, as do princes, lay and ecclesiastical, have many
observances of honour and respect paid to them, which are not _useful_
as supplying a _need_--for who needs a salute of twenty-one guns?
nevertheless their dignity is _worthy_ of them, and they require them
accordingly.

8. What man feels strongly, he expresses in word and action. What all
men feel strongly, they express by meeting together for the purpose.
So that, if strong religious feeling is an element in every good and
reasonable man's character, it is bound to find expression, and that a
social expression. Men must worship together according to some
external form and ritual. God may reveal what He wills that ritual to
be. In fact He did give such a revelation and prescription to the
Jews. To Christians He has spoken in His Son, and still speaks in His
Church. Any other than the one sacrifice that He has instituted, or
any other public religious ritual than is approved by the religious
authority which He has established, is to Him of itself, and apart
from the invincibly erroneous devotion of them that pay it, an
abomination: for He has "not chosen it." Still we cannot say that, in
every possible state of things, God is bound to reveal the ritual that
He desires, or is bound Himself to designate the authority that shall
fix the ritual which alone He will accept and allow of. If the will of
God is not thus expressed, a ritual must still be drawn up. In a
matter that excites the mind, as religion does, and where a large
field is open for hallucination and eccentricity, it will not do to
have individuals parading methods of worship of their own invention.
Here the Greek maxim comes in, [Greek: tima tho daimonion katha tha
patria], "honour the Deity after the fashion of thy country."
Religious authorities must be set up, in the same way that the civil
power is set up. These authorities will determine, not the object, but
the outward manner of worship. Every great nation, or important member
of the human family, would come probably to have its own
characteristic rite; and within each rite there would be local
varieties.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., _Contra Gentiles_, iii., 119; 2a 2æ, q. 81,
art. 4, in corp.; _ib_., q. 81, art. 7 _ib_., q. 84, art. 2: _ib_., q.
85, art. 1, in corp., ad 1, 3; _ib_., q. 91.

SECTION II.--_Of Superstitious Practices_.

1. Superstition is the abuse of religion. It is superstition, either
to worship false gods, or to worship the true God with unauthorized
rites, or to have dealings with wicked spirits, whether those spirits
have once animated human bodies or not. Of the first head, the only
avowed instance within our civilization is the Positivist worship of
the _Great Being_, that is, of the collective Worthies of Humanity, if
indeed it amounts to worship. The second head might have been
meditated by Archbishop Cranmer with advantage, when he was drawing up
the Edwardine Ordinal. Under the third head comes Spiritualism, which
we shall here not discuss in detail, but merely indicate certain
principles upon which it must be judged.

2. "There is nothing superstitious or unlawful in simply applying
natural agencies to the production of certain effects, of which they
are supposed to be naturally capable.... We must consider whether
there is a fair appearance of the cause being able to produce the
effect naturally. If there is, the experiment will not be unlawful:
for it is lawful to use natural causes in order to their proper
effects." (2a 2æ, q. 96, art. 2, in corp., ad 1.) But this we must
understand under two provisos. First, that the "fair appearance"
spoken of be not opposed by a considerable force of evidence, whether
of authority or of reason, tending the other way: for in this matter,
which is not a mere matter of legality, it is not permissible to run
risks of becoming familiar with God's enemies. Secondly, that the
cause, though natural, be not morally prejudicial. Not even a natural
cause, brandy for instance, may be used to all its effects. Thus for
the mesmeric sleep, though that should be proved to be purely natural,
yet the weakening of the will thence ensuing, and the almost
irresistible dominion acquired by the operator over his patient,
render it imperative that such a remedy should not be applied without
grave necessity, and under an operator of assured moral character.

3. St. Thomas continues in the place last quoted: "Wherefore, if there
is no fair appearance of the causes employed being able to produce
such effects, it needs must be that they are not employed to the
causation of these effects as causes, but only as signs, and thus they
come under the category of preconcerted signals arranged with evil
spirits."

The modern Spiritualist is only too forward to avow his understanding
with the unseen powers; but he will have it that the spirits that he
deals with are good and harmless. We must prove the spirits by the
general effects of their communications--whether they be in accordance
with the known laws of morality, and the assured teachings of
religion, natural and revealed. Also we must consider, from what we
know from approved sources concerning God, and His holy angels, and
the spirits of the just, either already made perfect, or still
suffering for a time, whether they are likely to respond to such signs
as Spiritualists commonly employ. Also we must not ignore, what
revelation tells us, of an "enemy," a "father of lies," who "changes
himself into an angel of light," and who is ever ready, so far as it
is permitted him, to eke out curiosity, folly, and credulity, such as
he found in Eve.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 93; _ib_., q. 95, art. 4, in corp.

SECTION III.--_Of the duty of knowing God_.

1. Religious worship is bound to its object, and cannot possibly be
fixed in the hearts of men and the institutions of society, if the
object be doubtful and fluctuating. False religion has often been set
off with elaborate and gorgeous ceremonial, which has been kept up
even after the performers had come to see in all that light and lustre
a mere vain and unsubstantial show. Such were the rites of Roman
polytheism, as enacted by augurs and pontiffs, the colleagues of
Cicero and Cæsar. But though that worship was maintained, and even
augmented, for political purposes, without a creed, yet never could it
have arisen without some creed, however mistaken, earnestly held of
old. A firm interior conviction is the starting-point of all outward
worship. But if the modern living worshipper is without creed and
conviction; if he be a scoffer at heart, or at least a doubter; what a
hollow, horrid skeleton thing is his religion,--all the more horrid,
the grander its dress! That is not worship, but mummery.

2. If then to worship God is a duty, as we have proved, it is a duty
likewise to know God. This supposes that God is knowable, a fact which
it does not lie within the province of this work to prove. To an
unknown God, all the worship we could render would be to build Him an
altar, without priest, prayer, or sacrifice, and so leave Him in His
solitude. God is knowable by the _manifestation_ of His works (Rom. i.
19); and where He is pleased to speak, by the _revelation_ of His
word. Apart from revelation--and, under a certain order of Providence,
God might have left us without revelation--we should study our Creator
as He is made manifest in the world around us, in the existence of
perishable things, in the order of the universe, in the region of
things eternally possible and knowable, in moral truths, in the mental
life and conscience of man. Philosophy would be our guide in the
search after God. Men with less leisure or ability for speculation
would acquiesce in the pronouncements of philosophers on things
divine; and, in the hypothesis which we are contemplating, Providence
would doubtless arrange for the better agreement and harmony of
philosophers among themselves. Their trumpet would not send forth so
uncertain a blast, were that the instrument, in the counsels of God,
whereby the whole duty of religion was to be regulated. As it is, we
know better than philosophy could teach us: for God hath spoken in His
Son.

_Readings_.--_C. Gent_., i., 4; 1a 2æ, q. 91, art. 4, in corp.

CHAPTER II.

OF THE DUTY OF PRESERVING LIFE.

SECTION I.--_Of Killing, Direct and Indirect_.

1. In a hilly country, two or three steps sometimes measure all the
interval between the basins of two rivers, whose mouths are miles
apart. In the crisis of an illness the merest trifle will turn the
scale between death and recovery. In a nice point of law and intricate
procedure, the lawyer is aware that scarcely more than the thickness
of the paper on which he writes lies between the case going for his
client or for the opposite party. To rail at these fine technicalities
argues a lay mind, unprofessional and undiscerning. _Hair-splitting_,
so far as it is a term of real reproach, means splitting the wrong
hairs. The expert in any profession knows what things to divide and
distinguish finely, and what things to take in the gross. Moral
Science in many respects gives its demonstrations, and can give them,
only "in the way of rough drawing," as Aristotle says. ([Greek:
pachulos kai tupo], _Ethics_, I., iii., 4.) But there are lines of
division exceeding fine and nice in natural morality no less than in
positive law. The student must not take scandal at the fine lines and
subtle distinctions that we shall be obliged to draw in marking off
lawful from unlawful action touching human life.

2. _It is never lawful directly to kill an innocent man_. Understand
_innocent_ in the social and political sense, of a man who has not, by
any _human act_ (_Ethics_, c. i., n. 2, p. 1) of his own, done any
harm to society so grievous as to compare with loss of life. To kill,
or work any other effect, _directly_, is to bring about that death, or
other effect, willing the same, _either as an end desirable in
itself_, as when a man slays his enemy, whose death of its own sheer
sake is to him a satisfaction and a joy, or _as a means to an end_, as
Richard III. murdered his nephews to open his own way to the throne.
We must then in no case compass the death of the innocent, either
_intending_ it as an _end_, or _choosing_ it as a _means_. The
assertion is proved by these considerations. To kill a man is to
destroy the human nature within him: for, though the soul survives, he
is man no more when he is dead. Now to destroy a thing is to
subordinate that thing entirely to your self and your own purposes:
for that individual thing can never serve any other purpose, once it
is destroyed. The man that is killed is then subordinated to the
slayer, wholly given up, and as we say, _sacrificed_, to the aims and
purposes of him who slays him. But that ought not to be, for man is a
_person_. Body and soul in him make one person, one personal nature,
which _human personality_ is destroyed in death. Now it is the
property of a person to be what we may call _autocentric_, referring
its own operations to itself as to a centre. Every _person_--and every
intelligent nature is a person [Footnote 17]--exists and acts
primarily for himself. A _thing_ is marked off from a _person_ by the
aptitude of being another's and for another. We may venture to
designate it by the term _heterocentric_. A person therefore may
destroy a thing, entirely consume and use it up for his own benefit.
But he may not treat a person as a thing, and destroy that, either for
any end of pleasure that he finds in destroying it, or in view of any
gain or good, whereunto that destruction serves him as a means.

[Footnote 17: The exception apparent in the Incarnation is not
relevant here.]

3. In the above argumentation account has not been taken of God, to
whom for His sovereign dominion all created personalities stand in the
light of _things_, and may be destroyed at His pleasure. But account
has been taken of the State, to which the individual is subordinate as
a citizen, but not as a man and a person. It is permitted no more to
the State than to the individual ever to destroy the innocent
_directly_.

4. An effect is brought about _indirectly_, when it is neither
_intended_ as an _end_ for its own sake, nor _chosen_ as a _means_
making towards an end, but attaches as a circumstance concomitant
either to the end intended or to the means chosen. The case of a
circumstance so attaching to the means chosen is the only case that we
need consider here in speaking of _indirect_, _concomitant_, or
_incidental_ effects. The study of these incidents is of vast
importance to the moralist. Most cases of practical difficulty to
decide between right and wrong, arise out of them. They are best
illustrated in the manner of killing. That one matter, well worked
out, becomes a pattern for other matters in which they occur.
(_Ethics_, c. iii., s. ii., p. 31.)

5. A man is killed _indirectly_, or _incidentally_, when he perishes
in consequence of certain means employed towards a certain end,
without his death being willed by the employer of those means, or in
any way serving that agent to the furtherance of the end that he has
in view. If a visitor to a quarry were standing on a piece of rock,
which a quarryman had occasion to blast, and the man fired the train
regardless of the visitor, the latter would be _incidentally_ killed.
Now incidental killing, even of the innocent, is not under all
circumstances unlawful. Where the end in view is in the highest degree
important, the means may be taken thereto, provided always that such
an issue as the shedding of innocent blood be not itself the means
discerned and elected as furthering the end: for no end however urgent
can justify the employment of any evil means. (_Ethics_, c. iii., s.
ii., nn. 3, 13, pp. 32, 36.) Suppose in the instance just given the
quarryman saw that, unless that piece of rock where the visitor stood
were blown up instantly, a catastrophe would happen elsewhere, which
would be the death of many men, and there were no time to warn the
visitor to clear off, who could blame him if he applied the explosive?
The means of averting the catastrophe would be, not that visitor's
death, but the blowing up of the rock. The presence or absence of the
visitor, his death or escape, is all one to the end intended: it has
no bearing thereon at all.

6. We must then distinguish between _means_ and _circumstances_. The
means help to the end, the circumstances of the means do not. When the
end is of extreme urgency, circumstances may be disregarded: the means
become morally divested of them. So I have seen an island in a river,
a nucleus of rock with an environment of alluvial soil. While the
stream was flowing placidly in its usual course, the island remained
intact, both rock and earth. But when the water came rushing in a
flood, which was as though the island itself had gone speeding up the
river, the loose matter at its sides was carried away, and only the
central rock remained. The ordinary flow of the river past the island,
or the gentle motion of the island up-stream, keeping all its bulk,
represents a man acting for an end to which reason attaches no great
importance. He must then take a diligent review of all the
circumstances that have any close connection with his action, to see
if there is any that it would be wrong for him to will directly. And
if there is, he must abstain from willing it even indirectly: that is,
he must abstain from doing the action, which cannot be done without
that objectionable circumstance attending it. On the other hand, the
floating island being towed rapidly up-stream, with its loose sides
falling away, portrays the condition of one acting for a purpose of
imperative urgency: he considers the means to that end, and if they
are good, he concentrates his will upon them and uses them,
disregarding, or even deploring, but nowise willing or being
responsible for, the evil concomitants which go with those means, but
do not make for his end. Thus it is, that a circumstance which in
ordinary cases goes to make the adoption of certain means reasonable
or unreasonable, comes, in a case of great urgency, to weigh for
nothing in the balance of reason, owing to the extreme and crying
reasonableness of the end in view. Nor is this the end justifying the
means, for that unhappy circumstance is never a means to the end.
(_Ethics_, c. iii., s. ii., n. 8, p. 34.)

7. To illustrate by a diagram:

   C
 (   )
   U
   A-----------------------------------E(   )V
]

A, the _agent_, a bead on a wire, can move only on the line AE, that
alone being the line of means to the end.

EV, _reasonableness of end in view_, attracting A.

UC, the amount of moral evil which the _untoward circumstance_ would
involve, if it were willed directly. This UC repels A, tending to jam
it on the line AE, which is absolutely rigid.

AE, remoteness, difficulty, and uncertainty of the end in view.

AU, remoteness of untoward circumstance from means chosen, which A is
just in the act of taking. Then, for lawful action, the reasonableness
required in the end in view is represented by the variation--

              UC . AE
  EV *varies* -------
                AU
]

We observe that when AU is zero, while UC . AE remains a finite
quantity (representing an appreciable evil), then EV becomes infinite:
that is to say, when the distance, difference, or distinction between
the evil circumstance and the means comes down to nothing at all, and
the evil thing actually is the very means taken, then an infinite
urgency of end in view would be requisite to justify the using of that
means: in other words, no end possible to man can ever justify an evil
means.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q.64, art. 6; Cardinal de Lugo, _De
Justitia et Jure_, disp. 10, n. 125.

SECTION II.--_Of Killing done Indirectly in Self-defence_.

1. On the question, whether it is lawful for one man to kill another
in self-defence, St. Thomas writes (2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 7):

"There is nothing to hinder one act having two effects, of which one
only is within the intention [and election] of the doer, while the
other is beside his intention [and election, that is, is neither
intended as an end nor elected as a means].... From the act therefore
of one defending himself a twofold effect may follow, one the
preservation of his own life, the other the killing of the aggressor.
Now such an act, in so far as the preservation of the doer's own life
is intended, has no taint of evil about it, seeing that it is natural
to everything to preserve itself in being as much as it can.
Nevertheless, an act coming of a good intention may be rendered
unlawful, if it be not in proportion to the end in view. And
therefore, if any one uses greater violence than is necessary for the
defence of his life, it will be unlawful. But if he repels the
violence in a moderate way, it will be a lawful defence: for according
to the Civil and Canon Laws it is allowable _to repel force by force
with the moderation of a blameless defence_. Nor is it necessary to
salvation for a man to omit the act of moderate defence in order to
avoid the killing of another; because man is more bound to take
thought for his own life than for the life of his neighbour. But
because to kill a man is not allowable except by act of public
authority for the common good, it is unlawful for a man to intend
[that is, elect and choose as a means] to kill another man in order to
defend himself, unless he be one who has public authority, who
intending [electing] to kill a man in order to his own defence, refers
this to the public good."

2. The right then of self-defence even to the shedding of blood
involves a mere exercise of indirect killing for a proportionably
grave cause. The cause in question is the defence of your own life, or
your friend's, or of some other good or possession that can weigh with
life, as the honour and inviolability of your person, or a large sum
of money. This must be in present danger of being taken away otherwise
than in due course of justice. The danger must be present, and even
imminent, not prospective. The right of self-defence even to the
grievous harming of the aggressor, endures only while the danger from
him is imminent, not when it is past, or the evil is already done. The
right supposes no moral obliquity, no formal injustice on the part of
the aggressor: he may be a madman making for you with a drawn sword.
Nay further, not even _material_ injustice--that is, the quality of an
act which would be _formally_ unjust, if only the agent knew what he
was about--is required. All that is requisite is that your life, or
something equivalent to life, be threatened, _not in due course of
law_.

3. The essential idea of self-defence is that of stopping a
trespasser, one who, however innocently, is going about to trench on
that good which you have a right to maintain and reserve to yourself.
It is then no act of authority that you perform, but the dealing of
one private person with another. Indeed, the party stopped is hardly
regarded as a person: no account is taken of his demerits: he is
regarded simply as an abridger and diminisher of what you have a right
to preserve intact. You stop a man as you stop a horse, only with more
regard to _the moderation of a blameless self-defence_, not using more
violence than is necessary here and now to preserve what you have to
preserve.

4. The stopping, unfortunately, has often to be done in a hurry: there
is no time to wait: for the next moment, unless you act promptly, it
will be all too late, or all to no purpose, to act at all. Being done
in a hurry, it has to be done in a rough-and-ready way, with such
instruments as are to hand: you cannot afford to be nice about the
means, carefully purifying them, and shaking off the dust of
objectionable circumstances. Now to stop a man in mid career all on a
sudden, to render him powerless where he was about to strike,
motionless in the direction whither he was about to go, and that in an
instant, is of common necessity a rude treatment, very dangerous to
him who experiences it, and under some conceivable circumstances
hopelessly fatal. Still the fatality--in plain words, the death of the
aggressor--is not _directly willed_. It is neither _intended_ as an
_end_, nor _chosen_ as a _means to an end_. It is not welcomed as an
end and desirable consummation: on the contrary, it is put up with
most reluctantly as coming from your act: for you, a private
individual, have no right to will and effect the death of any man,
however guilty, as will be proved hereafter. It is not chosen as a
means: for, formally as his death, it is no means to your end, which
was the averting of all present danger to your right. For that it was
enough to _stop_ the trespasser; and you chose the means as a
_stopping_ means, not as a _killing_ means. True, in stopping him you
killed him, but you did not kill him to stop him. You struck him to
stop him: that your blow was a mortal blow, was a circumstance which
you did not choose and could not help. All killing then in
self-defence is indirect.

5. By this explanation, resting on St. Thomas--in opposition to
Cardinal de Lugo (_De Just. et Jure_. 10, 149) and others, who allow
killing in self-defence to be the actual means chosen, and therefore
directly willed--we save four grand positions in Moral Science:

(a) The axiom, that _it is never lawful directly to take the life of
an innocent man_. For the person who perishes by occasion of your
defending yourself, may be innocent _formally_, and even _materially_
also.

(b) Likewise the axiom, that _it is never lawful for a private
individual to kill any one whatever_. We say, from a technical
standpoint, that he does not _kill_ but _arrests the onset of_ the
aggressor.

(c) We are in hearty accord with the positive law of all civilized
countries, which views with extreme suspicion all deaths said to be
done in self-defence, the law being jealous of the blood of its
citizens, and reserving the shedding thereof to itself. We teach that
only by process of law can a man ever be directly slain, his death
made a means of, and the person, who strikes him, really willing and
seeking, exactly speaking, to kill him.

(d) The initial error is revealed of a theory that we shall have to
combat at length hereafter, the theory of Hobbes and Locke, that the
power of the State is the mere agglomeration of the powers of the
individuals who compose it. It appears by our explanation that the
individual has no power strictly to take life in any case, or ever to
kill directly, as the State does when it executes a criminal.

As a fifth point gained, we may mention the efficacious argument
afforded, as will presently be shown, against the acceptance of a duel
under any conceivable circumstances, a thesis otherwise not easy to
establish by reason.

6. In view of the question of the origin of civil government, we must
carefully collect the differences between self-defence and punishment.
Death occasioned in self-defence is _indirect_: death inflicted as
punishment is _direct_. Punishment is an act of _authority_, of
_distributive justice_, which lies from ruler to subject (_Ethics_, c.
v., s. ix., n. 4, p. 104): self-defence is of equal against equal.
Punishment is _medicinal_ to him who suffers it, or _deterrent_ on
behalf of the community, or _retributive_ in the way of vengeance.
(_Ethics_, c. ix., s. iii., n. 4.) Self-defence is not on behalf of
the community, still less for the good of the aggressor, but for the
good of him who practises it and for the preservation of his right:
neither is it retributive and retrospective, as vengeance is, but
simply prospective and preventive of a harm immediately imminent.
Finally, the right to punish abides day and night: but the right of
self-defence holds only while instant aggression is threatened.

7. These two diverse ideas of _self-defence_ and _vengeance_ were
confounded by the Greeks under the one verb [Greek: amunesthai]. They
are confounded by Mill, _On Utility_, in the fifth chapter where he
speaks (p. 77) of the "instinct of self-defence," which nine lines
below he converts into "the natural feeling of retaliation or
vengeance." It is a common but a grave mistake, and the parent of much
bad philosophy.

_Reading_.--St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 7.

SECTION III.--_Of Suicide_.

1. By suicide we shall here understand the _direct compassing of one's
own death_, which is an act never lawful. There is no difficulty in
seeing the unlawfulness of suicide for ordinary cases. The world could
not go on, if men were to kill themselves upon every slight
disappointment. But neither are they likely so to do. It is the hard
cases, where men are apt to lay violent hands on themselves, that put
the moralist on his mettle to restrain them by reasons. Why should not
the solitary invalid destroy himself, he whose life has become a
hopeless torture, and whose death none would mourn? Why should not a
voluntary death be sought as an escape from temptation and from
imminent sin? Why should not the first victims of a dire contagion
acquiesce in being slaughtered like cattle? Or if it be deemed
perilous to commit the departure from life to each one's private whim
and fancy, why not have the thing licensed under certificate of three
clergymen and four doctors, who could testify that it is done on good
grounds?

2. To all these questions there is one good answer returned by Paley
on the principle of General Consequences. (_Ethics_, c. x., n. 3, p.
178.)

"The true question of this argument is no other than this: May every
man who chooses to destroy his life, innocently do so? Limit and
distinguish the subject as you can, it will come at last to this
question. For, shall we say that we are then at liberty to commit
suicide, when we find our continuance in life becomes useless to
mankind? Any one who pleases, may make himself useless; and melancholy
minds are prone to think themselves useless when they really are not
so.... In like manner, whatever other rule you assign, it will
ultimately bring us to an indiscriminate toleration of suicide, in all
cases in which there is danger of its being committed. It remains,
therefore, to enquire what would be the effect of such a toleration:
evidently, the loss of many lives to the community, of which some
might be useful or important; the affliction of many families, and the
consternation of all: for mankind must live in continual alarm for the
fate of their friends, when every disgust which is powerful enough to
tempt men to suicide, shall be deemed sufficient to justify it."
(_Moral Philosophy_, bk. iv., c. iii.)

A word in confirmation of Paley on the plan of the medico-clerical
certificate. There would be doctors, and I fear clergymen too, who
would get a name for giving these certificates easily: under their
hand many a patient might be smothered by his attendants with or
without his own consent. Many another wretch would consider, that if
the learned and reverend gentlemen empowered to license his departure
from life only felt what he had to endure, there would be no
difficulty about the certificate: so he would depart on presumed
leave. The whole effect would be to make men less tender of their own
lives, and by consequence of those of others, to the vast unsettling
of society.

3. An argument from general consequences, however, does not go down
into the depths of things. There is always something morally crooked
and inordinate in an action itself, the general consequences whereof
are bad. It remains to point out the moral crookedness, inordination,
and unreasonableness, that is intrinsic to the act of suicide, apart
from its consequences. We find the inordination in this, that suicide
is an act falling upon undue matter, being an act destructive of that
which the agent has power over only to preserve. It is natural to
every being, animate and inanimate, to the full extent of its entity
and power, to maintain itself, and to resist destruction as long as it
can. This is the struggle for existence, one of the primary laws of
nature. Man has intelligence and power over himself, that he may
conduct his own struggle well and wisely. He may struggle more or
less, as he sees expedient, looking to higher goods even than
self-preservation in this mortal life: but he may not take that power
of managing himself, which nature invests him with for his
preservation, and use it to his own destruction. Should he do so, he
perverts the natural order of his own being, and thereby sins.
(_Ethics_, c. vi., s. i., nn. 1-5, p. 109.)

4. It may be objected, that man is only bound to self-preservation so
long as life is a blessing; that, when the scale of death far
outweighs that of life in desirableness, it is cruelty to himself to
preserve his life any longer, and a kindness to himself to destroy it;
that in such a plight, accordingly, it is not unnatural for a man to
put himself, not so much out of life as out of misery. To this
argument it is sometimes answered that, whereas death is the greatest
of evils, it is foolish and wicked to resort to dying as a refuge
against any other calamity. But this answer proves too much. It would
show that it is never lawful even to wish for death: whereas under
many conditions, such as those now under consideration, death is a
consummation devoutly to be wished, and may be most piously desired,
as a gain and by comparison a good: as Ecclesiasticus says (xxx. 17):
"Better is death than a bitter life, and everlasting rest than
continual sickness." The truth seems to be, that there are many things
highly good and desirable in themselves, which become evil when
compassed in a particular way. The death of a great tyrant or
persecutor may be a blessing to the universe, but his death by the
hand of an assassin is an intolerable evil. So is death, as the
schoolmen say, _in facto esse_, and everlasting rest, better than a
bitter life, but not death _in fieri_, when that means dying by your
own hand. There the unnaturalness comes in and the irrationality. A
mother, watching the death agony of her son, may piously wish it over:
but it were an unmotherly act to lay her own hand on his mouth and
smother him. To lay violent hands on oneself is abidingly cruel and
unnatural, more so than if the suicide's own mother slew him.

5. But though a man may not use actual violence against his own
person, may he not perhaps cease to preserve himself, abstain from
food, as the Roman noble did, in the tortures of the gout, and by
abstaining end them? I answer, a man's taking food periodically is as
much part of his life as the coursing of the blood in his veins. It is
doing himself no less violence to refuse food ready to hand, when he
is starving, on purpose that he may starve, than to open a vein on
purpose to bleed to death. This, when the food is readily accessible:
the case is otherwise when it is not procurable except by
extraordinary means.

6. Another consideration. To destroy a thing is the exclusive right of
the owner and master of the same. If therefore man is his own master,
in the sense that no one else can claim dominion over him, may he not
accordingly destroy himself? The metaphysician will point out that
_master_ denotes a relation, that every relation has two terms, that
consequently a man cannot be his own master any more than he can be
his own father; and that, not owning himself, he may not destroy
himself. But, leaving this metaphysical argument for what it is worth,
we observe that man has a Master, Owner, Proprietor, and Sovereign
Lord, God Almighty. To take your own life is to usurp the dominion of
God. It is wronging the Lord of life and death. But none is wronged
against his will: God is willing that murderers should be hung, may He
not also be willing that men in misery should hang themselves? To this
query suffice it for the present to reply, that God governs us for our
good; and that capital punishment makes for the good of the community,
but never suicide. (c. viii., s. viii., n. 7, p. 349.)

7. It was the doctrine of Aristotle and the Greeks, that the citizen
belongs to the State, and that therefore suicide was robbing the State
and doing it a formal injury. But no modern State takes this view of
its subjects. No modern mind would place suicide in the same category
of crime with robbing the Exchequer.

8. The great deterrent against suicide, in cases where misery meets
with recklessness, is the thought,

  In that sleep of death what dreams may come!--

above all, the fear of being confronted with an angry God. Away from
belief in God's judgments and a future state, our arguments against
suicide may be good logic, but they make poor rhetoric for those who
need them most. Men are wonderfully imitative in killing themselves.
Once the practice is come in vogue, it becomes a rage, an epidemic.
Atheism and Materialism form the best _nidus_ for the contagion of
suicide. It is a shrewd remark of Madame de Stael: "Though there are
crimes of a darker hue than suicide, yet there is none other by which
man seems so entirely to renounce the protection of God."

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., III., vii., 13; _ib_., V., xi., nn. 1-3; St.
Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 5; St. Aug., _De Civitate Dei_, i., cc. 26,
27; Paley, _Mor_. _Phil_., bk. iv., c. iii.

SECTION IV.--_Of Duelling_.

1. A duel may be defined: A meeting of two parties by private
agreement to fight with weapons in themselves deadly. The meeting must
be _by agreement_: a chance meeting of Montagues and Capulets, where
the parties improvise a fight on the spot is not a duel. The agreement
must be _private_; anything arranged by public authority, as the
encounter of David with Goliath, that in the legend of the Horatii and
Curiatii, or the _wager of battle_ in the Middle Ages is not a duel.
It is enough that the weapons be _in themselves deadly_, as swords or
pistols, though there be an express stipulation not to kill: but a
pre-arranged encounter with fists, with foils with buttons on, or even
perhaps with crab-sticks, is not a duel.

2. The hard case in duelling is the case of him who receives the
challenge. Let us make the case as hard as possible. In a certain
army, every challenge sent to an officer is reported to a Court of
Honour. If the Court decide that it ought to be accepted, accept the
officer must, or lose his commission and all hope of military
distinction. In this army, say, there is an officer of high promise
who is believed to object to duels on conscientious grounds. An enemy
pretends to have been insulted, and challenges him, on purpose to see
him refuse and have to go down into the ranks, his career spoilt. The
Court of Honour rules that the duel must come off. Of this very case,
Reiffenstuel, a canonist of repute, about the year 1700, writes:

"The answer is, ... that they who in such cases are so necessitated
and constrained to offer, or accept, a duel, as that unless they
offered, or accepted it, they would be held cowardly, craven, mean,
and unfit to bear office in the army, and consequently would be
deprived of the office that they actually enjoy, and support
themselves and their family by, or would for ever forfeit all hope of
promotion, otherwise their due and desert,--these I say in such a case
are free from all fault and penalty, whether they offer or accept a
duel." (In lib. v. decret., tit. 14, nn. 30, 31.)

The author protests in his Preface that he wishes his opinions "all
and each to be subject to the judgment, censure, and correction of the
Holy Catholic Church." The opinion above quoted was condemned, word
for word as it was uttered, by Pope Benedict XIV. in 1752.

Now for Reiffenstuel's reason. "The reason," he says, "is, because in
such a case as is supposed the acceptance and offering of a duel is an
absolutely necessary, and thereby a just and lawful, defence of your
reputation, or goods of fortune, and, by equivalence, even of your
life, against an unjust aggressor, who we suppose does you an injury,
and thereby gives you no choice but to call him out, or calls you out,
and accordingly assails you in words, &c. Hence, as for the needful
defence of reputation, or of goods of fortune of great consequence, it
is lawful, with the moderation of a blameless defence, to kill an
unjust aggressor, so it will be also lawful to offer and accept a
duel, and therein slay the other party." Reiffenstuel here evidently
supposes that killing done in self-defence is _direct_. Those who
agree with him on that point, proceed to draw differences between
self-defence and accepting a challenge. Of course the two are not the
same. The true difficulty for them lies in making out how the reasons
which justify self-defence in their view of it, do not also justify
the acceptance of a duel: how, if I may make another man's death a
means to the preservation of my vital right, I may not as well make
another man's risk of death and my own, which is all that a duel
amounts to, also a _means_, none other being at hand, to the
preserving of my no less vital right. This grave objection does not
touch us. We have denied that killing in self-defence is direct. On
the lines of that denial we meet Reiffenstuel's argument simply as
follows.

3. In self-defence, the aggressor is slain _indirectly_. In a duel,
not indeed the death itself, or mutual slaughter of the combatants, is
_directly_ willed, but the risk of mutual slaughter is directly
willed. But we may not directly will the risk of that which we may not
directly do. And the combatants may not directly do themselves or one
another to death. Therefore they may not directly risk each his own
and his antagonist's life. But this risk is of the essence of a duel.
Therefore duelling is essentially unlawful.

4. Such is the clenched fist, so to speak, of our argument. Now to
open it out, and prove in detail the several members. In self-defence,
neither the death of the aggressor nor the risk of his death is
directly willed, whereas the risk of death is directly willed in a
duel, which difference entirely bars the argument from self-defence to
duelling. For a duel is a means of recovering and preserving honour,
which is effected by a display of fortitude, which again consists in
exposing yourself to the risk of being killed, and, as part of the
bargain, of killing the other man. The risk to life is of the essence
of a duel: it only attains its end--of establishing a man's character
for courage--by being dangerous to life. Fortitude essentially
consists in braving death. (_Ethics_, c. v., s. viii., n. 1, p. 94.)
Deadly weapons, chosen because they are deadly and involve a risk of
life in fighting with such arms, are the apt and express means for
showing readiness to brave death. If the weapons were not deadly,
there would be no point in the duel. As a matter of fact, where our
definition of duel is verified, and weapons in themselves deadly are
used, the encounter cannot be other than dangerous, especially between
foes and where the blood is up. In the French army, where the
regimental fencing-master stands by, sword in hand, ready to parry any
too dangerous thrust, serious results still have occurred. If any man
will have it that short smooth-bore pistols at forty paces in a fog
are not to be counted dangerous weapons, all we can say is that MM.
Gambetta and De Fourton, the one being nearly blind, and the other
having lost an eye, did not fight a duel. In a duel then the danger of
being killed and of killing is _directly_ willed; it is the precise
_means chosen_ to the end in view.

5. We have proved already that it is not lawful directly to procure
one's own death, nor the death of another innocent man. If any one
contends that his antagonist is not innocent, not even in a
_political_ sense (c. ii., s. i., n. 2, p. 203), we must here assume
against him, what we shall afterwards prove, that the guilty are not
to be _directly_ put to death except by public authority. But what we
may not directly bring about, we may not directly risk the occurrence
of. As I may not throw myself down a cliff, so neither may I walk
along the edge precisely for the chance of a fall. I may often walk
there _with_ the chance of falling, but not _because_ of the chance.
It will be said that the English love of fox-hunting and Alpine
climbing is largely owing to the element of danger present in those
amusements. But it is not the danger pure and simple, that is chosen
for amusement: it is the prospect of overcoming danger by skill. The
same may be said of Blondin on the tight-rope: it was his skill, not
his mere risk, that was admired. There are some risks that no skill
can obviate, as those of Alpine avalanches. We may face a mountain
slope where avalanches occur, but we must not hang about there because
of the avalanches, making our amusement or bravado of the chance of
being killed. That would be willing the risk of death _directly_, as
it is willed in duelling.

_Readings_.--Paley, _Mor. Phil._, bk. iii., p. 2, c. ix.; St. Thos.,
2a 2æ, q. 72, art. 3.

CHAPTER III.

OF SPEAKING THE TRUTH.

SECTION I.--_Of the Definition of a Lie_.

1. "Let none doubt," says St. Augustine, "that he lies, who utters
what is false for the purpose of deceiving. Wherefore the utterance of
what is false with a will to deceive is unquestionably a lie." The
only question is, whether this definition does not contain more than
is necessary to the thing defined. The objective falseness of what is
said makes a _material_ falsehood: the will to utter what is false
makes a _formal_ falsehood (_Ethics_, c. iii., s. ii., n. 7, p. 33):
the will to create a false impression regards, not the falsehood
itself, but the effect to follow from it. If a person says what is not
true, but what he takes to be the truth, he tells indeed a material
lie, but at the same time he puts forth no _human act_ (_Ethics_, c.
i., n. 2, p. 1) of lying. If on the other hand he says what he
believes to be false, though it turns out true, he tells a formal lie,
though not a material one, and moreover, he does a _human act_ of
lying. But _human acts_ are the subject-matter of morality. The
moralist therefore is content to define the _formal lie_: the
_material_ aspect of the lie is irrelevant to his enquiry. A formal
lie is saying what one believes not to be true, or promising what one
intends not to perform: briefly, it is _speaking against one's mind_.

2. We shall show presently that to speak against one's mind is
intrinsically, necessarily, and always evil. But when a thing is thus
evil in itself, there is no need to bring into the definition of the
act, from a moral point of view, the intention with which it is done.
There is no use in prying into ends, when the means taken is an
unlawful means for any end. If a person blasphemes, we do not ask why
he blasphemes: the intention is not part of the blasphemy: the
utterance is a sin by itself. But if a person strikes, we ask why he
strikes, to heal or to slay, in self-defence or in revenge. So, if
speaking against one's mind is a thing indifferent and colourless in
point of morality, and all depends on the intention with which we do
it, so that we may speak against our minds to put another off, but not
to deceive him, then certainly the intention to deceive must be
imported into the definition of lying. But if, as we shall prove
presently, the act of so speaking is by no means indifferent and
colourless, but is fraught with an inordinateness all its own, then
the intention may be left out of the question, the act is to be
characterised on its own merits, and _speech against one's mind_ is
the definition of a lie.

3. Then, some one will say, it would be a lie for a prisoner in
solitary confinement to break the silence of his cell with the
exclamation, _Queen Anne is not dead_. The answer is simple: it takes
two to make a speech. A man does not properly speak to himself, nor
quarrel with himself, nor deal justly by himself. Not that it would be
a lie to deny the death of Queen Anne even in public: for speech is an
outward affirmation, the appearance of a serious will to apply
predicate to subject: but in this case there is no appearance of a
serious will: on the contrary, from the manifest absurdity of the
assertion, it is plain that you are joking and do not mean to affirm
anything. This perhaps is as far as we can go in permission of what
are called _lies in jest_.

_Readings_.--St Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 110, art. 1.

SECTION II.--_Of the Evil of Lying_.

1. Human society cannot go on, if men are to be allowed
indiscriminately to lie to one another. Thucydides (iii., 83) gives as
the reason of the extravagant length to which faction ran in Greece in
his time: "For there was no power to reconcile the parties, no
plighted word reliable, no oath held in awe." Even in trifles no one
likes to be lied to, and we are not to do to our neighbour what we
would not have done to ourselves. The laws of good fellowship require
that we should "put away lying, and speak the truth every man with his
neighbour: for we are members one of another." (Ephesians iv. 25.)
This at least in ordinary circumstances. The same good fellowship
requires that in ordinary circumstances we should respect the lives
and property of our fellow-men.

2. But it is lawful to take life in pursuance of the just judgment of
authority: it is lawful to seize upon property in self-preservation.
These exceptions stand very harmoniously with the well-being of
society, or rather are required by it, as we shall see later on. The
law against lying, so far as it is founded on the general prejudice
done to society by the shock of social confidence, and on the
particular annoyance of the party lied to, may seem to admit of
similar exceptions. Whoever has no reasonable objection to having life
and property taken from him in certain contingencies, can he
reasonably complain of any hurt or inconvenience that he may suffer
from a lie being told him at times?

3. I put forward this difficulty, not as though it were without its
answer in the principle of General Consequences: still it is a
difficulty. Besides, if the whole harm of lying is in the unpleasant
effect wrought upon the deceived hearer, and the scandal and bad
consequences to society at large, it is a long way to go round to show
that lying is impossible to God. He in whose dominion are all the
rights and claims of man, is not to be restrained by the mere
reluctance of His creatures to be deceived, or by the general bad
effects of a lie upon the edifice of human credit. As Master He might
impose this annoyance upon the individual, these bad consequences upon
society: or by His Providence He might prevent their occurring,
whenever He willed in His utterances to swerve from the truth. The
only help for the argument for the Divine veracity on these grounds,
is to urge with Plato that none of the motives which lead men to lie
can ever find place in the mind of God: that a lie is a subterfuge, an
economy, a device resorted to under stress of circumstances, such as
can never serve the turn of the Supreme Being. But though God be
inaccessible to human reasons for departing from the truth, may He not
have higher reasons, mysterious, and unsearchable, for such a
deviation? It is long arguing out this point. Better bring the
discussion sharp round with the question: Is there not some element in
the Divine Nature itself, which makes it impossible for God to speak
false?

4. Undoubtedly there is such an element, deep down, even at the root
of the sanctity of God. God is holy in that, being by essence the
fulness of all being and all goodness, He is ever true to Himself in
every act of His understanding, of His will, and of His power. By His
understanding He abidingly covers, grasps, and comprehends His whole
Being. With His will He loves Himself supremely. His power is
exercised entirely for His glory--entirely, but not exclusively, for
God's last and best external glory is in the consummated happiness of
His creatures. Whatever God makes, He makes in His own likeness, more
or less so according to the degree of being which He imparts to the
creature. And as whatever God does is like Him, and whatever God makes
is like Him, so whatever God says is like Him: His spoken word answers
to His inward word and thought. It holds of God as of every being who
has a thought to think and a word to utter:

  To thine own self be true,
  And it must follow as the night the day,
  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

5. God's sanctity is in His being true to Himself. His veracity is
part of His sanctity. He cannot in His speech, or revelation of
Himself, contradict what He really has in His mind, without ceasing to
be holy and being no longer God. But the sanctity of intellectual
creatures must be, like their every other pure perfection, modelled on
the corresponding perfection of their Maker. Holiness must mean
truthfulness in man, for it means truthfulness in God. God's words
cannot be at variance with His thought, for God is essential holiness.
Nor can man speak otherwise than as he thinks without marring the
attribute of holiness in himself, that is, without doing wrong.

6. To speak against one's mind is an act falling upon undue matter.
Words are naturally signs of thoughts. Not that the words of any given
language, as English or German, have any natural connection with the
thoughts that they express; but it is natural to men, natural to every
intellectual being, to have some mode of expressing his thoughts by
outward signs; and once a sign is recognized as the sign of a certain
thought, so long as the convention remains unrepealed, whoever uses
that sign, not having in his mind at the time the thought which that
sign signifies, but the contradictory to it, is doing violence to the
natural bond between sign and thing signified, by putting forward the
former where the latter is not behind it. And since the due and proper
matter for the sign to be put upon is the presence in the mind of the
thought signified, to make that sign where the opposite thought is
present, is, as St. Thomas says, an act falling upon undue matter. The
peculiar spiritual and moral inviolability of the connection between
word and thought, appears from the consideration which we have urged
of the archetype holiness of God. This then is the real, intrinsic,
primary, and inseparable reason, why lying, or speech in contradiction
with the thought of the speaker, is everywhere and always wrong.

7. Grotius (_De Jure Belli et Pacis_, I. iii., c. i., nn. 11, seq.)
argues a lie to be wrong solely inasmuch as it is "in conflict with
the existing and abiding right of the person spoken to." If _right_
here means something binding in _commutative justice_ (_Ethics_, c.
v., s. ix., n. 6, p. 106), we deny that any such right is violated by
what is called a _simple_ lie, that is, an untruth not in the matter
of religion, and not affecting the character, property, or personal
well-being of our neighbour. For if a simple lie is a violation of
commutative justice, it carries the obligation of restitution
(_Ethics_, c. v., s. ix., n. 6, p. 107); that is, we are bound to tell
the truth afterwards to the person that we have lied to, even in a
matter of no practical consequence,--quite a new burden on the
consciences of men. Again, if the bar to lying were the hearer's
right, whoever had dominion over another's right might lie to him; the
parent might lie to the child, the State to the citizen, and God to
man, a doctrine which, away from its application to God, Grotius
accepts. Lastly since _volenti non fit injuria_, the presumed
willingness of the listener would license all manner of officious and
jocose lies, as the authority of the speaker would sanction official
fabrications. Thus, what with official, and what with officious
speeches, it would be very hard to believe anybody.

8. By our rejection of Grotius' theory we are enabled to answer
Milton's question: "If all killing be not murder, nor all taking from
another, stealing why must all untruths be lies?" Because, we say,
killing and taking away of goods deal with rights which are not
absolute and unlimited, but become in certain situations void; whereas
an untruth turns, not on another's right, but on the exigency of the
speaker's own rational nature calling for the concord of the word
signifying with the thought signified, and this exigency never varies.
_Untruth_ and _falsehood_ are but polite names for a _lie_.

_Readings_.--St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 110, art. 3, in corp., ad. 4; _ib_.,
q. 109, art. 2, 3, in corp.; Ar., _Eth_., IV., vii.; Plato, _Rep_.,
382, 389 B, C.

SECTION III.--_Of the keeping of Secrets without Lying_.

1. There are _natural_ secrets, secrets of _promise_, and secrets of
_trust_. A _natural_ secret is all a man's own private history, which
he would not have made public, as also all that he discovers by his
own observation of the similar private history of his neighbours. If a
man finds out something about his neighbour, and, after he has found
it out for himself, the neighbour gets him to promise not to publish
it, that is a secret of _promise_. Lastly, if one man comes to
another, as to a lawyer, or a surgeon, for professional advice, or
simply to a friend for moral counsel, and in order thereto imparts to
him some of his natural secrets, those secrets, as they are received
and held by the person consulted, are called secrets of _trust_. This
latter kind of secret is privileged above the other two. A natural
secret, and also a secret of promise, must be delivered up on the
demand of an authority competent to inquire in the department where
the secret lies. But a secret of trust is to be given up to no
inquirer, but to be kept against all who endeavour to come by it,
except where the matter bodes mischief and wrong to a third party, or
to the community, and where at the same time the owner of the secret
cannot be persuaded to desist from the wrong. This proviso does not
hold for the _seal of confession_, which is absolutely inviolable.

2. The main art of keeping a secret is, not to talk about it. If a man
is asked an awkward question, and sees no alternative but to let out
or lie, it is usually his own fault for having introduced the subject,
or encouraged the questioner up to that point. A wise man lets drop in
time topics which he is unwilling to have pressed. But there are
unconscionable people who will not be put off, and who, either out of
malice or out of stupidity, ply you with questions against all rules
of good breeding. This direct assault may sometimes be retaliated, and
a rude question met by a curt answer. But such a reply is not always
prudent or charitable, and would not unfrequently convey the very
information required. Silence would serve no better, for silence gives
consent, and is eloquent at times. There is nothing left for it in
such cases but to lock your secret up, as it were, in a separate
compartment of your breast, and answer according to the remainder of
your information, which is not secret, private, and confidential. This
looks very much like lying, but it is not lying, it is speaking the
truth under a _broad mental reservation_.

3. _Mental reservation_ is an act of the mind, limiting the spoken
phrase so that it may not bear the full sense which at first hearing
it seems to bear. The reservation, or limitation of the spoken sense,
is said to be _broad_ or _pure_, according as it is, or is not,
indicated externally. A _pure mental reservation_, where the speaker
uses words in a limited meaning, without giving any outward clue to
the limitation, is in nothing different from a lie, and is wrong as a
lie is always wrong. A good instance is Archbishop Cranmer's oath of
fealty to the Pope, he having previously protested--of course out of
hearing of the Pope or the Pope's representative--that he meant that
oath in no way to preclude him from labouring at the reformation of
the Church in England, that is, doing all the evil work which Henry
VIII. had marked out for him in the teeth of the Roman Bishop.
[Footnote 18] Even _broad mental reservation_ is permissible only as a
last resource, when no other means are available for the preservation
of some secret which one has a duty to others, or grave reason of
one's own, to keep.

[Footnote 18: Strype's _Cranmer_, i., pp 27, 28; _ib_., ii.,
Appendices 5, 6; ed. Oxon., 1812.]

4. The point to make out is that no lie is told. To speak under a
reservation is a lie, if it is speech against the mind of the speaker.
But how can it be aught else than speech against the mind, when the
heart thinks _yea_, and the tongue says _nay_? We answer that, in the
case contemplated, the thought of the heart is, _secrets apart, nay_;
and though the word on the lips is _nay_ simply, yet we must not take
that word as the whole locution, but as a mere text, to which the
situation of the speaker and the matter spoken of form a commentary,
legible to any observant eye. The word is an _annotated text; nay_ in
the body of the page, with _secrets apart_ inscribed in the margin.
The adequate utterance is the whole page, text and gloss together;
that speech answers to the thought in the speaker's mind; therefore it
is no lie.

5. The essential requisite is that the gloss, _secrets apart_, be not
written in the speaker's private mind, but be outwardly and publicly
manifest in the matter spoken of, which must be one that clearly
admits of secrets, and in the circumstances of the speaker, who is
driven into a corner, and obliged to answer something, and yet cannot
by any prudent man be expected to answer out of the fulness of all the
knowledge that he may possibly possess.

6. Nor let it be said that all confidence in the replies given to our
questions is hereby destroyed. For most questions are in matters that
do not admit of a secret. There the qualification, _secrets apart_,
which may be said to attach to all answers, has no value and meaning:
it is mathematically equal to zero; and we may take the answer in full
assurance just as it reaches our ear. Again, when a person volunteers
a statement unasked, he cannot be supposed to be reserving secrets.
But when delicate subjects are touched on, and inquiry is pushed to
extremity by an unauthorized questioner, _secrets apart_ is the
handwriting on the wall.

7. But why is not this qualification spoken out with the tongue?
Sometimes it safely may be, and then it should be so added. But, as
the addition is unusual, our taking the trouble to express it would
often certify to the inquirer that his suspicions were correct, though
we ought not to tell him so. Our aim then must be to give such an oral
answer as we should return, were the suspicion quite unfounded. Our
questioner, if he is a prudent man, will piece out our phrase with the
addition, _secrets apart_; and he will understand that he can get
nothing out of us either way, which is exactly what we wish him to
understand. His unauthorized interrogatory has been met by speech that
amounts to silence, arguing indeed our prudence, but leaving him as
wise as before on the forbidden topic. If he is a thoughtless man, he
is deceived, not by any intention or election of ours, but indirectly
so far as we are concerned, an incidental deception which he has
brought on himself.

8. This then is a convention that obtains, not of positive
institution, but dictated by nature herself, that on a matter which
admits of being secret, any answer elicited under stress of necessity
must be so construed, as that any grave secret that may be touched,
not being morally in the power of the respondent to reveal, shall be
taken to remain reserved.

9. We may therefore sometimes avoid seeming to know what we know, or
to be what we are. But we may never of our own proper motion step
forward and court observation as being what we are not, or knowing
what is against or beyond our knowledge. We may dissemble
occasionally, but not simulate. The dissembler of a secret wishes for
obscurity and silence: he wants to have the eyes of men turned away
from him and their curiosity unroused. Whatever he says or does is to
divest the idea of there being anything particularly interesting about
him. But he who simulates--call him pretender, impostor, or quack--is
nothing, if not taken notice of. The public gaze is his sunshine:
obscurity gives him a deadly chill. His ambition is to appear out of
the ordinary, being really quite within common lines: the dissembler
is in some respect beyond the ordinary, but wishes not to show himself
otherwise than as an ordinary mortal with ordinary knowledge. The
pretender is on the offensive, challenging attention: the dissembler
is on his defence against notice. "Simulation," says Bolingbroke, "is
a stiletto, not only an offensive but an unlawful weapon, and the use
of it may be rarely, very rarely, excused, but never justified.
Dissimulation is a shield, as secrecy is armour: and it is no more
possible to preserve secrecy in the administration of public affairs
without dissimulation than it is to succeed in it without secrecy."
(_Idea of a Patriot King_.)

_Readings_.--De Lugo, _De Just. et Jure_, 14, nn. 135, 141, 142; _The
Month_ for March, 1883; Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v., 26.

CHAPTER IV.

OF CHARITY.

1. It is the difference between sensible apprehension and intellectual
knowledge, that the former seizes upon a particular object and it
only, as _this sweet_: the latter takes its object as the type of a
class of similars, _this and the like of this, this sweet as one of
the class of sweet things_. In like manner the love of passion, which
is the love of sense, regards one sole object. Titius is in love with
Bertha alone, not with woman in general. But an intellectual love is
the love of a type of beauty or goodness, of _this_ object and of
others as they approach in likeness to it. Whoever loves William from
an intellectual appreciation of his patriotism, in loving him loves
all patriots. Every animal loves itself with a brute, sensible love,
not a love to find fault with, nor yet a noble and exalted
sentiment--a love purely self-regarding, quite apart from the good
that is in self, but embracing self simply as self, and self alone.
This is the first love of self even in man. But over and above this
animal and sensible love, which no man lacks, there is in all men
worthy of the name a second self-regarding affection of an
intellectual cast, whereby a man loves himself as discerning with the
eye of his soul the excellence of his own nature--"how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a
god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals." Intellectual
self-complacence overflows from self to similars. It is not self-love,
it is love of the race, "the milk of human kindness," philanthropy.

2. But man is a disappointing creature, after all a mere "quintessence
of dust," unless he can rise above himself by relation with some
superhuman being, and make his final fortune in some better region
than this world. Reason requires that we love ourselves, and love our
fellow-men, for and in order to the development of the highest gifts
and capacities that are in us. These are gifts and capacities divine,
preparing us to find our everlasting happiness in God. (_Ethics_, c.
ii., s. iv., n. 2, p. 22.) The love that we bear to ourselves and our
neighbour, in view of our coming from God and going to God, is called
the love of _charity_. Charity differs from philanthropy in looking
beyond the present life, and above creatures. A materialist and
atheist may possess philanthropy, but not charity.

3. Beside the twofold love, animal and intellectual, which we bear
ourselves, we may also and should love ourselves with the love of
charity, seeing God's gifts in us, and desiring the perfection of
those gifts in a happy eternity occupied with God. The charity which
we should thus bear to ourselves is the model of that which we owe to
our neighbour, whom we are to love _as ourselves_, not with the same
intensity, but with the same quality of love, wishing him the good,
human and divine, temporal and eternal, which we wish for ourselves,
though not so earnestly as we wish it for ourselves. Our love for
ourselves is stronger than for our neighbour: for, if love comes of
likeness, much more does it come of identity. But by reason of the
vast preponderance of the good that is rational and eternal over that
which is material and temporal; and also by reason of the principle
laid down by St. Thomas, that "as to the sharing together of (eternal)
happiness, greater is the union of our neighbour's soul with our soul
than even of our own body with our soul" (2a 2æ, q. 26, art. 5, ad
2),--we are bound to love our neighbour's eternal good better than our
own temporal good, and in certain special conjunctures to sacrifice
the latter to the former. We have no duty and obligation of loving his
temporal good above our own temporal good. But it is often matter of
commendation and counsel to sacrifice our temporal interest to our
neighbour's. This sacrifice is no breach of the order of charity,