ence, is distinguished from what is inherent in the nature or constitution. The universal moral consciousness of man forbids the belief that a person is morally responsible for what is born in him. He can no more be responsible for what is born in him than he is for being born. This common consciousness is expressed by Shakespeare:

"Some vicious mole of nature in them, As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin."

And Aristotle says: "It is plain that whatever belongs to nature is not in our own power, but exists by some divine cause in those who are truly fortunate." 1 Men are born with different temperaments, capacities, and powers. Man's free will cannot transcend the limits of his organization and constitution. But within those limits he can control and regulate his constitutional powers and propensities, he can repress or develop them, he can determine their lines of action; thus he can form himself as he will. a man becomes by this self-determining action, as distinguished from what he is by birth and constitution, is his character. The fundamental voluntary determination, preference, or disposition which dominates in this self-formation is his moral character in its primary and deepest significance.

What

2. It follows that the acts and processes of the intellect are not in themselves moral acts and do not constitute moral and religious character.

Rational intelligence is a condition prerequisite to moral action and character. One cannot be sinful or guilty in transgressing a law of which, through no neglect or fault of his own, he is totally ignorant. One cannot even be a free agent without the rational intelligence which enables him to take cognizance of moral law. Without this one cannot do wrong any more than a bird does in eating our cherries. But the acts and processes of the intellect are in themselves non-moral. The perception of an outward object, the consciousness of one's own existence, a creation of imagination, a process of reasoning, have in themselves no moral character. The mere knowing that two and two make four is not in itself a praiseworthy act of virtue. Even the knowledge of the moral law and the approval of it by the reason, while they are characteristic of moral agency, do not of themselves constitute 1 Nichomachean Ethics. Bk. X. chap. ix. 6

moral character. The transgressor may approve in his conscience the law which he violates.

"Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor."

Virtue does not consist in knowing and approving the better course, but in voluntarily pursuing it. Vice consists in voluntarily pursuing the wrong course while knowing and approving the right.

The same is true of religious character. All religion presupposes a belief in a god. But the mere belief, without voluntary service rendered to the god and the feelings involved in it, would not be religion nor constitute religious character.

Among us the doctrine that either moral or religious character is primarily knowledge or any intellectual act or process has little currency. It found more acceptance in the Greek philosophy. Socrates taught that righteousness and every other virtue is wisdom. His meaning seems to be, not merely that virtue will insure the highest good and, therefore, that to be virtuous is both wise and prudent, but also that if any man knows what is beautiful and just and good he will choose it above all other things, while those who do not know this will not attempt to be virtuous or if they do will miss it. Thus the evil in man is not sin but merely ignorance. He does not need a change of heart or will; he needs only education, enlightenment, so as to know what is truly the right, the beautiful, and the good; then he will certainly choose it. A tendency to the same type of thought appears in other schools of Greek philosophy, accompanied sometimes even in the same author with different and higher ethical conceptions. Aristotle, on the contrary, refers virtue and vice to the will. He teaches that it is not sufficient to know what virtue is, but to possess and practise it. He recognizes the free will as the basis of moral responsibility even when vice by long indulgence has so attained the mastery that the man finds it seemingly impossible to resist temptation to it. But he declares that man's highest happiness and well-being are in intellectual action and philosophical meditation. He says that sensuous pleasure is a happiness which any one, even a slave, may enjoy, — though no one allows that a slave has any claim to happiness or well-being, as indeed he has no claim to the real and highest life. The activity

1 Xenophon's "Memorabilia," Bk. III., chap. ix. 4 and 5.

of the intellect insures the highest happiness; because intellectual activity, as in the study of philosophy for example, is the exercise of that which is highest in man; it gives the most continuous happiness; its pleasures are the most pure and stable; it has its end in itself and seeks no result beyond itself, and is, therefore, self-sufficient and self-satisfying; it implies leisure, freedom from care, and all the elements commonly making up the idea of a happy man. In it is the germ of immortality; for, though little in bulk, the intellect surpasses all the other powers in dignity and capacity; it seems to be each one's own very self. In meditation is the blessedness of the gods; they have no occasion for buying and selling, for work and business like man's; they are blessed in meditation or contemplation alone. Here he presents a conception of the gods very like that of Epicurus, or of Carlyle's deist, -a god who having made the universe as a machine and set it in motion, is occupied ever after only in seeing it go.1

In like manner some of the German philosophers identify religion with knowledge. J. G. Fichte teaches that religion is never practical and was never intended to influence our life. Pure morality is enough for that, and it is only a corrupt society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action. It gives the man a clear insight into himself, answers the highest questions, and thus imparts to us a complete harmony with ourselves and a thorough sanctification to our minds. It needs no argument to prove that a mere intellectual assent to the idea of God presented by this philosophy is not religion.

The practical tendency of the belief that either moral or religious character is primarily of the intellect is evil. It tends to substitute intellectual culture for moral and religious development, the wisdom of man for the law of God, prudence for duty, interest in science and art for trust in God and love to God and man, and thus to obliterate the very ideas of law, of duty, and of the eternal distinction of right and wrong. Thus it tends to restrict the possibility of virtue and the service of the true God to the cultured few, trained by instruction in philosophy in some portico or academy, or initiated into the mysteries of an esoteric religion. It cannot proclaim the privilege of every one who will to trust in God and live in communion with him, and the obliga1 Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. x., chaps. 9, 7, 8.

tion of all to obey the universal law of love, conformity with which is free to every person in every condition and every grade of culture and will transform him into the likeness of God who is love. Thus it issues in exclusiveness and caste. Even Aristotle, in his eloquent exhibition of the dignity and happiness of philosophical meditation, does not recognize the promotion of any interest of mankind by the study, but only the enjoyment of the student himself in the enthusiasm of his own thinking. On the contrary he presents it as an excellence of intellectual activity that it has no end beyond itself. He makes no allusion to the life of universal love in trust in God and service to God and man, and the development of the man thereby to his highest perfection, wellbeing and blessedness. In Aristotle's praise of meditation, withdrawn from the active life of the world and dissociated from all promotion of the interests of mankind, as constituting the highest and most blessed life, we seem to see a type of thought similar to that which has led Buddhist devotees to the life of asceticism and meditation in the hope of becoming a Buddha, the Enlightened.

This tendency to substitute culture for virtue and religion, to restrict the highest moral and religious development and wellbeing to the cultured few, and so to introduce caste into the moral and religious life and to consign the many to hopeless inferiority and separation from the true God, is inherent in the Hellenism which Goethe, Schiller, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and others would thrust into our civilization as a substitute for Christianity. If thus thrust in, it would thrust out the all-pervading idea of the supreme, inviolable, divine law of love binding on all alike, the consciousness of the duty and privilege of all to obey God's law, and the consciousness of God's love to all, revealed and made an abiding power of spiritual renovation in Christ and his Spirit of holiness, and seeking to draw all men away from sin and evil to be like God in the life of universal love.

3. The sensibilities or feelings are essential to moral and religious character as motives to the will and as emotions resulting from its action; but in themselves they are non-moral, neither right nor wrong. This is true not only of the appetites and the natural or instinctive desires and affections, such as acquisitiveness, the desire of esteem, curiosity, anger, parental and filial love, but also of the distinctively rational susceptibilities, the

scientific, moral, æsthetic, and prudential motives and emotions, the feelings connected with self-respect, the sense of honor and worthiness, and the religious feelings.

The feelings are essential prerequisites to moral and religious character as motives to action, without which man would never act. He would starve to death because he would feel no motive to eat. If we could conceive a being of pure intelligence without feeling, it would merely know without any interest in knowing or in anything known. It would feel neither pleasure nor pain, joy or sorrow, desire or affection. It would never act, for it would have no motive to act. And susceptibility to the distinctively rational motives is essential to any free moral action. man were susceptible only of natural appetites and instincts, he could never rise above them to the consciousness of the higher motives and interests of the rational and spiritual life. He would be like the brutes, impelled by the instincts of nature with no power to rise above and control them.

If

But while the feelings are essential prerequisites to moral action and character, they are not in themselves moral action or character, and moral character cannot be predicated of them.

This also is accordant with universal moral consciousness. The range of feeling is not commensurate with the range of free determination and moral responsibility. One cannot blame himself for being hungry, unless it is in consequence of his own wilful neglect. All the feelings belong to man's nature or constitution. They are not directly subject to the will; they will not come and go at the word of command. They rise instinctively in the presence of the objects which call them forth. We cannot fill our souls at will with joy or sorrow, with hope or fear, with pity or anger. Therefore the feelings cannot in themselves constitute moral or religious character. We are conscious of moral responsibility in them only so far as we have determined their action by our own free wills.

The belief that moral character is primarily in the feelings practically tends to evil. It gives no basis for a supreme and universal moral law and the immutable distinction between right and wrong. It issues in substituting sentiment for duty, in sentimental admiration of the criminal and sympathy with him, instead of indignation at his crime, sympathy with his victim, and reasonable, righteous, and firm support of the law and of the order of