CHAPTER IV.

THE PROVISION FOR THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN.

Two elements are essential to the process of thinking, the intellect and the truth. One is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Two elements are also essential to the process of volition, the will and the right. The one within, the other without. The one subjective, the other objective. Before sight is possible, there must be an eye and there must be light. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before hearing, there must be an ear and there must be sound. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before breathing there must be lungs and there must be atmosphere. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective.

No definition of man is large enough to accommodate the facts of his nature, that does not embrace what he is without as well as what he is within, what he is objectively as well as what he is subjectively. It must not only embrace the intellect, but the truth which it thinks; not only the will, but the right which corresponds to it; not only the eye, but the light which gives it meaning; not only the ear, but the sound which matches it; not only the lungs, but the atmosphere to which they are correlated. Human nature is dually constituted, so that the larger half of itself is outside of itself.

Illustrations of the same duality of constitution may be found on a limited scale in the organic and in the inorganic worlds. The greater half of the oak is not in the life germ of the acorn, but in the elements of the soil and the sky which environ it. The larger part of the fish is in the ocean which surrounds it. Most of the fuel which makes the heat in the grate is not in the carbon of the coal, but in the oxygen of the air which fills the room.

I.

The possession of a will and the capacity for choice make man a moral being. Man’s will is bounded on every side by the laws of God. These laws are only another name for God’s will. Man is made in God’s image and has a will, as far as it goes, just like God’s will.

By choosing to act and to move along the lines of law which gather from every whither about his will, he finds he can go somewhere, that he can leave the narrow, provincial, and local neighborhood of ease and sense and subjection, and find his life in that broad realm of freedom, that belongs to him as a thinking and willing being.

At the termini of some railroads there are huge contrivances called turntables. They are constructed of immense timbers and balanced on pivots. They are large enough to accommodate the full length of a steam engine. Iron rails are laid across these tables, of the same size and the same distance apart as the rails which make up the lines of the main track. When the train comes in from the far interior, the engine is run out on one of these tables and turned round, so that the headlight faces the main track again. Before the engine is ready to leave the short track, however, the rails on the turntable must exactly correspond to the rails on the main road. Then the engineer pulls the throttle, and the great locomotive rolls past the circumference of its pivoted and temporary resting place into commerce with the railways of the globe. Imagine railway lines coming together about such a revolving table from all the earth, so that an engine could pass from this circular platform toward any quarter of the globe, the only condition being that the short track on the table correspond to the rails of the long track on which it was proposed for the engine to run, and you have an illustration, which in some degree helps us to understand the relation of man’s will to the laws of God.

Should the engineer undertake to get the engine from the table without reference to the lines upon which it was intended to run, we know very well what the consequences would be. He would not go far, and even the little distance he should manage to make would be attended with tremendous bumping and friction. All movement would be in the direction of chaos and confusion. However great the expenditure of energy, no point would be reached, and the end of the undertaking would be waste and failure. If, on the other hand, we should imagine an engine on such a revolving plane, capable of making fifty miles an hour, with no tracks leaving it, we know it could not go anywhere, and besides there would be no reason for its being. It would be without meaning. Before the distance between one point and another can be passed by a train, two things are necessary, an engine and a railroad. The one may be called subjective, the other objective. The one implies the other. They are the necessary elements of transportation. As long as the train keeps to the iron rails laid for it, it moves without friction. It is only when the subjective element jumps the track and essays to determine its own objective direction, that trouble comes. Then it is that cars are ditched and people killed or crippled. The laws of God run to and fro throughout the whole earth. They cross and recross every realm. They pass through every domain, physical, mental, and moral. They go straight through matter and straight through mind. They lead under the sea and over the sea and through the sea. Down through the earth and up through the air they may be noted, embracing with their invisible tracks every square inch of soil and sky. They insure the order of the universe, visible and invisible, tangible and intangible. They reach from globe to globe and make possible the commerce of the spheres. They run out into the infinitely great and back into the infinitely small, and bind in unity the atoms and the stars.

When man, by the aid of his reason, discovers the truth of things, which is the provision for his intellect, these laws appear as provision for his will.

So truth and law, reality and righteousness, expressions of the thought and will of God, are the everlasting facts to which man is to adjust his intellect and will, if he is to cross the oceans, travel the continents, and claim the possessions which in the universe belong to him. If he misreads the facts, he will of course misread the laws which govern the facts, and will thus be unable to get facts or laws to serve him. But clearly seeing the truth of things, he is able to avail himself of the laws of things. As long as he only saw things in the lump, and looked upon the world as so much air and earth and fire and water, he missed the subtle laws which regulate the atomic and molecular structure of bodies, and failed to make them his servants. When, by the aid of observation and experiment, he reduced the earth to its ultimate particles and came to such knowledge of it as corresponded to the facts of it; when he came to see the laws and drift of things, the tendencies and affinities of things; he had only to put the productions of his will in line with the way things were going, to have them serve him. Seeing that forces have power to do work in proportion to their energy of position, and applying this insight to the river with forty feet fall, he builds his mill beside it and thus utilizes it to grind his wheat. Seeing what soil and sunlight and rain can do when they combine to unwrap the life in a seed, he commits his wheat to their benevolent tendencies and gets a harvest of twenty bushels for every one he seems to lose. He studies fire. He sees it wrap in flame and level in an hour fortunes it took a lifetime to accumulate. He learns what a furious and awful force it is. He gets insight into its real nature. He gets knowledge of it that corresponds to the reality of it. He sees that it is only a flaming and lurid method of movement. With the truth of it he gets the law of it. So by the aid of volition, put forth in accordance with intelligence, he contrives a machine corresponding to the laws of heat, as a mode of motion. In this way he utilizes the heat that burned up his cities, to transport him in ease and comfort over the country. He studies the stars until his knowledge of them corresponds to them as they are; along with this knowledge, he comes to an understanding of their laws, their uniform methods of action. Then he builds his great ships and commits them to the wild and storm-tossed sea, sure that his power to guide them will never fail as long as law and order remain in the heavens.

That there is a natural order, with certain inhering laws, men readily accept. That this order has the consistency of being developed in one way; that there is a dip to things that must be followed; that there is a clew, in accordance with which things may be worked; that there is a trend, drift, and law of things that must be accepted and followed; all this, men readily assent to. They do not attempt to farm the Sahara Desert, for they know the conditions of harvests are not there. They do not put out orange groves in Minnesota, nor plant cotton in Canada, nor sow rice in British Columbia. They do not expect the soil that spews up the ice to produce watermelons at the same time. They do not pretend to navigate ships over the continents, and to lay their railway lines on the surface of the sea. They fix their telegraph wires to poles by means of little glass contrivances, and never attempt to send electricity through the grape vine. Natural laws they know inhere in the facts of nature, and are not read into earth and rock and river and atmosphere. They know that necessary laws reside in the facts of condition, and that they must study these laws to know the line of practical work they require. In building a house of stone they know it is necessary to defer to the law of gravity, that this law cannot be ignored or set aside, so they carry up the edifice in such conformity to rule and line as that the center of gravity falls in a line inside the base. They might prefer a house built with reference to a different order of things, one in which the center of gravity would fall in a line outside the base. But it is very well understood among men that the law of gravity must be respected. Even anarchists and nihilists, who seem to have irrepressible antipathy for all ancient orders and laws and establishments, do condescend sufficiently to respect the time-honored, even if slightly belated, laws of gravity.

II.

The time was when men accepted the existence of a moral order with the same implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all men to-day accept the existence of a natural order. In Homer’s Themistes we have an illustration of this confidence. The very word by which the decision of a judge is described attributes it to Themis, the invisible embodiment of justice. Thus the judge is but the channel through which the decision passes from the unseen moral order into the Greek court of justice. The judge is not respected because he has authority to make the decision, but because his vocation makes him the vehicle through which the decision of a higher power is rendered. Moses said to the people of Israel, “Thou shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but these were not his words simply, but the words through which a moral order was interpreted. The solemn and awful import given to these commands did not arise from the vehicle through which they passed into the Hebrew social order, but from the fact that they inhered in the very constitution of man as a social being, and when they were uttered, they were felt to come from the God who fashioned man’s life and set him in communities and states. They had the same sort of authority in the moral realm that the declarations of Newton, concerning the power of gravity, had in the natural. Newton did not conceive in his own brain the laws of gravity, he saw them and formulated them. Nor did Moses create the Ten Commandments, he saw them and interpreted them. The laws of gravity were transcripts from the will of God concerning matter, the Ten Commandments were transcripts from the will of God concerning men. When natural bodies come together, it would be found that they always attracted each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. When men come together, it would always be found, that if they were to live together in harmony and health; if they were to advance and get above the planes of the brutes and the savages; they must abstain from lying, and stealing, and adultery, and thus be truthful, and honest, and virtuous.

The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and contact with one another. Thus living, they were lower than the beasts that perish. They could not live together without rules of some sort to regulate their lives. And laws which looked to the preservation of truthfulness, honesty, and virtue, were thought better than laws which looked to the production of lying, dishonesty, and adultery.

Because of the impetus given to the studies of material science within recent years, by the discoveries of scholars, the attention of men has been directed to the objects of the natural world and the laws which regulate them. Discoveries into the nature of heat, light, etc., has had the same effect upon the human mind that the discoveries of the gold fields in the West had upon the people of America in the early days. People abandoned fields and shops and stores and went in search for gold. The attention of the civilized world has in this generation been directed to the consideration of outward facts. There has been promise here of earthly fortune. Conviction as to the existence of a moral order with its rewards and penalties is not so deep and abiding as it once was among English speaking people. But it is well to remember that the moral laws of the universe have not in the meantime been suspended, because men have not seen proper to consider them and to act with reference to them. They are just as real and as unfailing as ever. When accepted and followed, their presence is seen in health, in political stability, in intellectual progress. When ignored and forgotten, their presence is seen in disease, in political corruption, in mental stupidity, in sham and emptiness. In one way or another they always manage to get in their work. They never sleep, they never tire, they are eternally present to bless or to curse, to lift up or to cast down. They get round to every man’s home, and sooner or later to every man’s life, bearing honor or dishonor, legitimate reward or righteous infamy. They are not to be bribed, whitewashed, or bulldozed; they come clean, unvarnished, and unveneered to posit their labels on every man’s character; and whatever is read on the label, absolutely defines the content. Irrespective of money, titles, place, or rank, they come. The president in his seat, the judge on his bench, the preacher in his pulpit, cannot escape. If the president gets labeled pigmy, pigmy he is. If the judge gets classified fraud, fraud he is. If the preacher gets down as trimmer and sham, trimmer and sham he is.

III.

How are we to find moral laws? Just as we find natural laws. When we find the truth of natural bodies, reason sees the laws which inhere in them, and prudence dictates such action on our part as these laws require. When we come to truth, on the moral plane, or to such knowledge of the facts as corresponds to the truth, reason, unless perverted, sees the laws that reside in them, and conscience dictates that these laws should be obeyed. Conscience unerringly and infallibly approves the right. By the aid of the light which is thrown upon it when the intellect comes into relations of knowledge with moral truth, it recognizes the laws the will ought to follow. These laws make up a part of the truth. Before the right can be recognized, the truth must be seen. When that which the intelligence takes for truth is not the truth, the conscience will recognize laws for the will to follow that do not correspond to the laws of God. It has often happened that what the intelligence took for truth did not correspond to objective reality, and hence was not the truth; hence the conscience has often approved and suggested lines of action that were at variance with that which was essentially and eternally right. Those who followed the dictates of conscience, however, under such conditions, did, under the circumstances, right. To have refused to follow conscience would have increased their confusion. A man in the bog, with the certainty of death before him, ought to follow the guide that appears, even though he should not know how to lead him out of the swamp. Conscience never fails to come as near recognizing the right as the intellect comes to discovering the truth. When that which the intellect apprehends as truth corresponds to objective reality, we may be sure that the laws which inhere in it, and which conscience suggests as the ones the will ought to follow, correspond to the laws of God. One’s conscience may lead him wrong, but only when the intellect has led him wrong. St. Paul’s conscience led him wrong when it impelled him to persecute the Christians of the early church, but it was because that which he held for truth did not tally with the outward facts, and hence was not the truth. Had the supposed truth which he held while persecuting the Christians been real truth, then in persecuting the Christians he would have done right. The reversal of conscience resulted from the incoming of new truth, or such knowledge as was sustained by the outward facts. The conscience of the Hindoo mother that leads her to throw her child into the River Ganges is as good as the conscience of the Christian mother that leads her to carry her child to the Sunday school. The trouble with the Hindoo mother is not with her conscience, but with her religious knowledge; it does not correspond to the facts of the order of the moral and spiritual universe. We are to determine the value of the affirmations of conscience by determining the value of the knowledge out of which those affirmations grow. Knowledge is valuable in proportion to its correspondence with that which is real. As often as the intellect grasps the truth, the conscience will suggest the right that accompanies it. There is no truth of a moral nature that has not its attendant right.

IV.

We know the moral truth as we know material truth, through its relations. Relation makes the difference between chaos and cosmos. To define any natural object is to place it in its relations. We could not define oxygen without naming the elements to which it is related. To take it out of relation is to take from it any meaning. Error is wrong relation. When the mind assigns a place to an object other than that which really belongs to it, in the order of which it forms a part, we call this error. If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over a field by a storm, we should confound a sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from its proper place and take away its meaning as a part of the building. All of our knowledge is of relations and not of sensations, as Hume taught. Sensations set the mind to classifying and comparing, and the knowledge it comes to is of relations. Take the sensations the mind has when a red object is presented to the eye. Does not the mind begin at once to distinguish this sensation as one of redness from other sensations that are of different colors?

Is not its reality as a particular color constituted for us by its relation to colors, by its place in the scale of colors? If there was but one color, and that color the one we now know as red, how could we know it as such? How could we call it red unless to distinguish it from some other color with which we, for the time being, compared it or contrasted it? So true is it that reality is constituted for us by the sum of its relations, that if the relations of things are maintained, no increase or diminution of the quantity of things related will be detected in our knowledge of them. If the earth were compressed into a sphere no larger than a marble, no one could know it if the relations among the objects which make it up were the same.

Again, the earth might be enlarged until it should be a billion times larger than what it is; yet this could not be known as long as men and gates and spoons and saucers and houses and cuff-buttons were enlarged in the same proportion. The leaf of a man’s dining table might be ten miles square, and the ball of butter on his table as big as the Stone Mountain in Georgia; yet if cook, and cat, and stove, and water-bucket were increased in the same ratio, he would not recognize any difference.

V.

We enter the world of humanity, which is the realm of morality, through the family. Here we open our eyes to the light, and here we have the first intimations of truth, which is provision for the intellect, and of righteousness, which is provision for the will. The truth of the family is the sum of the relations which subsist among the members of it. The family consists, we will say, of father and mother, and children. Here is a man and a woman, then, bound together by the relation of marriage. The children are related to the parents as offspring. The children are related to one another as brothers and sisters. Altogether they are one and they are many. There is unity and there is difference. In the relations implied in the names husband and wife, father and mother, parents and children, brothers and sisters, we have the truth of the family. We know the family and can only know the family through these relations. Take the relations away, and you take the family away. There cannot be a husband without a wife, a father without a mother, parents without children, and children without a father and a mother. Abiding in these relations, which make up the truth of the family, wrapt up with them and growing out of them, are the laws of right which the will is to obey. The relation of marriage is accompanied by certain obligations and duties which husband and wife are to observe. These obligations and duties are divine laws, because marriage is a divine relation. The relations involved in the term parents, are attended by certain necessary laws the father and the mother are to observe with reference to children. The names of child, brother, sister, imply relations that in turn imply laws the child is to follow with reference to parents, and brothers and sisters are to regard with reference to one another. These laws, which grow out of the relations which constitute the family, are not arbitrary, artificial, or accidental. They have not been formed by the opinions of men, nor formulated in the legislative assemblies of men. Legislative bodies have, perhaps, confirmed them and reproduced them in statutes, but this was not to create, but to transcribe what was already present. The laws with reference to which the members of a family find themselves placed are as essential and constitutional as the laws governing natural objects, which we define when we say bodies attract each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. These are subtle and invisible principles which cannot be read out of rocks and logs and moons and suns. Displace rocks and logs and suns and moons, and the apparent power of these laws would not be seen, but upon the appearance of the natural objects, they would be immediately grasped and dominated by the power of the laws.

We pass from the family into the school. Here again we find laws already laid for the will to follow. They grow out of the truth, constitutive of the school, and this truth is made up of the relations subsisting among the members of the school. There are teachers, whose duty it is to control and to instruct. There are children, whose duty it is to learn and obey. The school is an institution, the object of which is to lead young minds into a knowledge of the earth, its continents, seas, rivers, and mountains; into a knowledge of language, its structure, uses, and the meaning of its terms; into a knowledge of humanity, its races, governments, and religions. If children are to share in the benefits of the object for which the school is established, they must observe the laws which inhere in the very constitution of it.

They must obey the teacher, they must study the books, they must be polite, forbearing and kind to one another. It often happens that a child enters the school and refuses to follow the laws that reside in the structure and purpose of the school. He is willful and conceited, and thinks his own way better than the necessary and essential way ordained for him. He has the same sort of experience the engineer has who attempts to run his engine from the turntable, without reference to the railway lines laid for it. There is friction and trouble. Various methods of punishment are resorted to with the view to get his will to move along the lines laid for it. If rebuke and punishment fail, then he is turned out, to attempt the stupid and insane experiment of getting himself through the world without reference to the laws fixed for his will to obey. Of course he does not go far. He turns up sooner or later in the jail, the hospital, the penitentiary, or the poorhouse.

Leaving the school, we find ourselves citizens of the state, members of society. But we do not go into society like an ax-man in a frontier forest to clear a place for his house, his fence, and his field. Methods of conduct are already prescribed, lines of action are already fixed, and the laws which claim our obedience are already formulated. Society is an organism of mutually dependent members; the object of it is the equity of all, the welfare of all, and the liberty of all. Equity, liberty, welfare do not come by accident. Men cannot reach them out of touch and contact with one another. They are only possible to men living together, and only possible in conformity with certain conditions, and in the observance of certain laws. These laws lie folded in the nature of men as social beings. They are fundamental, and Aristotle saw them when he said, “man is by nature a political animal.” The germs of government and law are in the depths of every man’s being, as the germs of the oak are in the acorn. Wise men, living in society, have seen the truth of society, made up of the relations subsisting among people living together. Accompanying these relations, and counterparts of them, they have discovered the laws necessary to insure the equity, liberty, and welfare of all. These laws have been embodied in constitutions, enactments, and statutes. To carry out these laws and to make them prevail, certain institutions have been established, a body of men whose duty it is to execute the laws, a Judiciary, whose duty it is to interpret and expound the laws, and a legislative body, whose duty it is to repeal old laws that did not work well, and to frame new laws to meet the exigencies of new conditions. To protect the rights of all, certain penalties have been made to accompany the violations of laws. To make these penalties real, and to inflict them upon the proper parties, courts and jails and penitentiaries have been established.

So we see, as the acorn cannot grow without appropriating the elements already prepared for it in the soil and the sky; and as the carbon cannot burn without laying hold of the oxygen already existing for it in the atmosphere of the room; and as the fish cannot swim without utilizing the water already adjusted to its fins; so man cannot fill out the possibilities of his being without obeying the laws he finds already ordained for his will, when he comes into the world. These laws converge about his will in the home where he first sees the light, and are always deducible from the particular relations in which, at any time, his moral life is placed. They are as real as the laws of heat and motion and gravity. They run out from the home through the school, and from the school through all the continents of the social realm. They grow out of the truth of the facts of the family, the school, and society. They are as fundamental, necessary, and divine as the family, the school, and society. By observing them, man is able to turn into his character the tenderness of the home, the learning of the school, and the resources of society.

VI.

The authority of the laws which govern society is not found in the fact that the laws have been made by the will of the majority, or the will of the minority, or by the will of a king, or by the wills of any or all of the people; but because they are founded in the constitution of human nature. The basis for the constitution of human nature is the mind of God, who created man in his own image. Social laws have authority, then, because they are consonant with the nature of man, and have their source in the will of God.

It is easy to show, however, from the records of history, that nations have often lived under laws imposed upon them that contradicted every principle of human nature. Men were accustomed once to find the laws of society as well as the laws of nature, not from the study of men, or from the study of the objects of nature, but in the depths of their own imaginations. In former times men met in convention and council and determined by resolution the shape of the earth and the sun’s method of movement. They also subjected themselves to the criticism of posterity by cutting the heads of the people off who did not agree with them. But it gradually dawned on the human mind that to find out for certain the shape of the earth it might be well to devote a little study to the earth itself. Thus it happened that in the course of events men ceased to read laws into God’s material universe from the boundless realms of their fancy and conceit, and fell upon the more rational habit of taking the laws that were already there. Herein is the difference between mediæval and modern times.

The disposition to read laws into nature, without reference to the facts of nature, was in line with the programme to read laws into the social realm without reference to the facts of human nature. The laws of astronomy to-day are such as have been found by a study of the stars. The laws of chemistry are such as have been found by a study of the atomic structures of bodies. One might fall out now with the celestial laws of Ptolemy, and head a movement to set them aside. But it is not rational to fall out with the astronomical laws of Norman Lockyer, for that is to buck against the sun, and to make faces at the stars. Lockyer’s laws came straight to him from the skies, and find their value and verification in the close calculation of every steamer that sails on the wide, restless sea. The laws of civilized nations to-day are such as have been found by a study of the facts of human nature. To quarrel with them is to set one’s self against the way man is built. It would not do to say that the social laws of civilized peoples to-day are exact transcripts from the will of God concerning the conduct of social life. Men do not now, and perhaps will not for a long time, read aright the facts of human nature. One thing is certain, however: in the making of laws among civilized, republican peoples, reference is had to the facts of human nature, and not to the fancy of those who wish to govern. It cannot be disputed that the right facts are considered from which to make deductions. This means a complete change of front in the modern world over the ages past. There are doubtless many minor laws on the statute books of the liberal and progressive nations of the earth to-day which are not in accordance with the nature of man; but it seems that any rational person is compelled to admit that the great legal trunk-lines conform to the essential laws of human nature. Take the Constitution of the United States. Some one has said that the apple from which Newton deduced the laws of gravity was two thousand years falling. He would have been nearer the truth if he had said six thousand years. The Constitution of the United States is as clearly a deduction from the facts of human nature, as were the laws of gravity from a study of falling bodies. The convention that met in Philadelphia to frame the Constitution of the United States, in 1787, was called to order on the top of the centuries. The members had such advantage of position as made it possible for them to look all down the ages. They were in a position to see all sides of human nature, under all forms of government.

In the preamble to the Constitution, they specified certain objects for which, in their esteem, this government should be formed—union, domestic tranquillity, justice, liberty, welfare. Any government constituted by a document like that has for the basis of its existence the facts of human nature, as really as the law of gravity has for the basis of its existence the facts of the stars.

VII.

If it is necessary that man grasp the truth of things before he can determine the laws of things, we cannot fail to see how important it is that he have a proper theory of knowledge.

Man’s idea of law will correspond to his theory of knowledge. When the French people accepted Locke’s theory of knowing they immediately applied it to the laws, establishments, and institutions of the nation. They concluded logically, if all knowledge is of sensations, then there can be no authority for the belief in God, the immortality of the soul, or the divinity of law. These are universal and transcendent facts, but the mind has no capacity to know universal or transcendent facts. So society was to be dissolved into its constituent atoms, in order that individuals could arrange their lives on a universal, go-as-you-please principle. All existing laws and institutions were to be obliterated. Everything that was up was to be put down. There are to-day, scattered through the civilized states of Europe and in some parts of the United States, men who want to emancipate the people from the dominion of all authority. All this grows out of the fashionable and sensational theory of knowledge taught first by John Locke and David Hume, and within recent years by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Here is the source of anarchy. There is not an influential anarchist in the world, but is one upon the basis of the physiological theory of knowledge. There is no objective reality, but such as is composed of material atoms. These have got their arrangement and collocations without the agency of any great co-ordinating mind. They come together in pairs and clusters and groups, by the aid of no power but such as issues from the unknowable. A man is no more a criminal for killing people than is the Mississippi River for overflowing its banks and drowning people. Men are mere products of nature, and their thoughts are only secretions of the brain. Laws and institutions are just the brain deposits of animals we call men, as dams across rivers and cells in gums are the deposits of the brains of beavers and bees.

In a document found on the person of a recent anarchist arrested by the authorities in England, it is asserted that the purpose of the anarchists is to put down all political, religious, and military authority; to burn all churches, palaces, soldier-barracks, fortresses, provisions, and to destroy all that has lived till now by business-work without contributing to it. From such documents we are to understand that the anarchists take it for granted that all laws and institutions among civilized peoples have been imposed arbitrarily by those who govern upon those who are governed; that the parties to be governed have as much right to ignore them as the governing parties had to make them; that there is in the universe no moral order to which the political and social orders among men correspond; that every man has the privilege of setting up his own order; that every engineer has the right to ignore the rails laid for the flanges of his wheels on the long roads leading out from the turntable, and the inestimable subjective liberty of pulling open the throttle valve and running out into the country according to his own sweet will. Suppose all the anarchists in the world should be sent to some great island so that they could test their own theories, would they not be under the necessity of founding some sort of a government? They would have to construct roads, devise ways and means for lights, water, and for protection against individual violence. Would they not have to bind themselves together by some kind of social contract, or compact? If a number of men should unite themselves into a syndicate for the purpose of building houses without reference to the laws of gravity, if they should declare it as their set purpose to so build houses as that the center of gravity should fall in a line outside the base, the whole company would be tried for lunacy and confined in the insane asylum. So the most summary and straightforward methods should be adopted for ridding society of all that class of men who propose to manage human affairs without reference to the facts of man’s nature and the laws of the universe. It is a question whether they should be put into an insane asylum or into a jail, for it is hard to determine which they have the most of: insane stupidity or insane meanness.

Society has made great advances, but every increment of progress has been along the lines of the eternal laws of the universe. Those laws were here before man appeared upon the stage of action; they will be here when he is gone. Men may doctor themselves with error about truth, and error about right, until they come to be great imbeciles; but the truth and the right will remain clear and immortal for the intellect and the will of the wise and the good.

VIII.

It is important, as never before, for those who see the truth and recognize the right to declare the same with all authority. It is said that the Emperor Henry IV. stood shivering two whole days and nights in the snows of the courtyard of Canossa Castle, suing piteously for permission to throw himself, in agonized submission, at the feet of Hildebrand. That he was shunned by his subjects more absolutely because of the ban that was upon him than he would have been had he been afflicted with the smallpox. This incident illustrates for us the authority wielded by the Church of the Middle Ages. The Church was then felt to be in touch with tremendous power. Its fulminations carried terror to the hearts of kings and subjects. What the Church declared should be done, or should be left undone, the people felt could only be disregarded at the peril of all hope for time and eternity. It not only declared the duties men were under the necessity of observing in order to save their souls, but the kind of thoughts men were under the necessity of thinking concerning the shape of the earth, the movements of the stars, and the structure of the human body, in order to save themselves from the odium of heresy. The Church reigned without a rival in all the civilized world. She was not expected to give any reason for her actions or her utterances. When she determined what the order of the solar system was, the brains of men were compelled, without question, to acquiesce. Even to doubt was to deny the faith. The Church dictated the policy of the stars without being at the trouble of studying the stars; and no other sidereal opinions were tolerated but such as she formulated and published.

But the minds of scholars and students, in different parts of Europe, began to reach other conclusions concerning the nature and order of things than such as had been ecclesiastically settled for them. Copernicus saw that the heavenly bodies did not move in accordance with the teachings of the Church. And when the Venetian scholars looked through the telescope of Galileo at Padua, and saw Jupiter and his satellites, a central sun and revolving planets, the authority of the Church on the subject of astronomy was gone. In this way the Church has been forced to give up one position after another. The people, seeing she had no foundation for the opinions she held concerning nature, began to question the value of her opinions concerning God, and heaven and hell, and right and wrong.

Now the Church must regain her note of authority. She must do this by seeing what the laws are which grow out of the facts of condition. The laws of the family are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute the family. These will be seen to coincide with the old laws uttered from Sinai. The laws of society are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute society. These, it will be seen, are summed up as was said of old in the formula, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” When men get through framing laws for the regulation of human conduct, from a study of the facts of human nature, they will find to their amazement that they have reinstated the Ten Commandments, and that Sinai is not a burnt out volcano. They will find that the Ten Commandments are still the foundations of social health, and harmony, and progress. God wrote them for Moses on tables of stone because he had already written them in the nature of man. The laws of gravity can no more be read out of the world of space than the Eternal Decalogue can be read out of the world of human life. So the man of law should speak with the same authority as the man of science, without apology and without misgivings.

_BEAUTY._

“If the endeavor to analyze the world is a trifle, it is because the world is such. The sum of things can have no second intention, nor can it be characterized by any trait that is not included in itself. Some things are sweet, but what is our sense which perceives them; some things are good, but what is our conscience which judges them; some things are true, but what is our intellect which argues them; some things are deep, but what is our reason which fathoms them? Everyone who thinks deeply, must have reflected that, if the purposes and results of man’s practice are vanity, so also must be those of his speculation. Goethe said, that there was no refuge from virtues that were not our own, but in loving them; and Ecclesiastes, that there was none from the vanity of life, but in fearing and obeying God. So, also, from the vanity of speculation there is no refuge but in acquiescing in its relative nature, and accepting truth for what it is.”