Man’s primary right is to be treated as what he is. But we cannot study man in a vacuum. He exists in a universe. The universe, not being a chaos, has laws, and man is subject to them.
Exploring the universe, man discovers more and more of its laws, and, with each new law discovered, his freedom increases. If this sounds paradoxical, that is only because we are thinking of the laws of the universe—God’s laws—as though they were like the laws that man makes. Man’s laws constrain us only when they are enacted, so that we may feel each new law as a new interference. But when a scientist announces a law of nature, he has not enacted it but only discovered it.
The laws of the universe are there all the time, and we are affected by them whether we know them or not. We do not need to know about vitamin B to die of malnutrition for want of it; the newborn baby can be destroyed by the law of gravity as easily as Sir Isaac Newton. So that man’s discovery of these laws is not the beginning of his subjection to them; on the contrary, once he knows what they are, he can learn how to cooperate with them and by so cooperating increase his own freedom within them. His freedom can be only within them, never from them. By discovering the laws of flight, man was able to harmonize himself with them more perfectly and so gained the freedom of the upper air. The utmost freedom for man lies in cooperation, obedience, and harmony with the universe and its laws.
Real Freedom?
But is the freedom thus gained real freedom or illusory? The answer depends on what we are submitting ourselves to, harmonizing ourselves with. If there is a divine Person behind the universe and responsible for its laws, then submission to it is simply submission to him, and so true freedom and not servitude; for there is no servitude in harmonizing one’s mind with a mind of infinite knowledge, one’s will with a will of infinite love. But if there is no Person, only the universe and nothing more, then subjection to it is subjection to the mindless and can only be enslavement: We are simply moving about more largely and more comfortably on a longer chain.
For a being with a mind there is no freedom, there is only degradation, in harmonizing himself with a mere mechanism, taking his orders from hydrogen and oxygen and such. There is only grotesqueness and indignity in being forced into harmony with things less than ourselves. One way or another all thinkers have told us that we must be in tune with the universe. But why shouldn’t the universe be in tune with us? If we do not believe in God, we must see ourselves performing in an orchestra under a conductor who does not even know that he is conducting, does not even know that he is. There can be no enslavement so total as that of minds to the mindless. And if there be no Mind behind the universe, then mindlessness says the last word as it said the first. But the mind of God is there, and it is with him that we are to be in tune, in obedience to his laws that we are to find freedom.
Freedom and Law
The absolute dependence of freedom upon law known and obeyed applies not only to our relations with the universe but to the conduct of our own selves in their inmost reality. Man is not the one lawless object in the universe. Man is not a being so universally adaptable that it does not matter what he does or what is done to him, does not matter in what ways he treats himself or others treat him, because he thrives equally well under all possible treatments. Such a being indeed is inconceivable. Of any being at all it must be true that some sorts of treatment are good for it and others bad for it, some help it to be more fully itself, some hinder and cripple it. Man is not a chaos any more than the universe is, and as he learns the laws that govern him, he is freer. The dependence of freedom upon law is invariable.
Looking at man, with no views already formed as to the nature of law, an observer would say that he is subject to bodily and mental laws and that he subjects himself to moral laws. The first two, which may roughly be lumped together as physical laws, the observer might see as the statement of how bodies and minds work so that men would be wise to act accordingly. The moral laws he might feel as being in a different category—man thinking that this is what God wants and that it would be virtuous to act accordingly.
So feeling, the observer would be only partly right. That God’s command gives the moral law a new quality that the physical laws have not got is true. But the moral laws are, just as much as the physical laws, statements of how things work.
Moral Laws Are not Optional
If you contravene the bodily laws, you will have disease, deformity, and death. If you contravene the laws by which the mind works, you will be kept from discovering the truth, so that there will be a veil between you and reality; if you collide too hard with them, the result might be insanity. The moral laws are just as objective. They are for the handling of the whole man, and for the direction of the whole life, but they are laws all the same—statements that reality is like that, therefore we must act like that or take the consequences. The moral laws, like the physical laws, tell us how to handle ourselves harmoniously with reality.
We must not think that, whereas physical laws operate with or without our consent, we have a choice about the moral laws. They are not simply rules that it is virtuous to observe. They too operate. In this matter the position is exactly the same for both. We can treat either set of laws as though it does not exist. But that is the limit of our choice: We have no choice about the consequences in the one or in the other.
The law of justice is as much a law as the law of gravity (the latter is more easily discoverable, but not therefore more important—more beneficial in its observance, more catastrophic in its ignoring). Every sort of consequence flows from this. Because each is a law, we cannot break either. We can ignore them or flout them by walking over a cliff, for instance, or stealing; but the law of gravity is not broken in the one case or the law of justice in the other. Both laws continue to operate, and it is we who are broken. Material law or moral law: Either way, you are living under God’s law, and that applies to every creature of God, from the ruler downward.
They Can’t Be Broken
Moral law is not only moral; it is law. The run of rulers do not realize this, at any rate not all the time. They know that physical laws are what they are and cannot be changed by them, no matter what the emergency. Food nourishes and lack of it starves; night follows day; microbes kill; muscles and minds, unexercised, atrophy.
It is exactly the same with the moral law. The mightiest despot cannot drive a Ford save as the Ford company made it to be driven. If he wants to drive a Ford, then, like the humblest of his subjects, he must study the maker’s instructions. God is man’s maker, and the laws of morality are his instructions for the running of man. They cannot be broken, but they can be ignored. And, with the man as with the car, the ignoring is destructive. This may not appear immediately—there may even be temporary gain—but the result is always loss.
As I have said, it is hard for the ruler to realize that the moral law is law in this sense. It is hard for everybody, because we have so free a choice whether we shall act morally or immorally. All health for men and communities lies in realizing two truths about the moral laws. The first is that they are laws of reality: to say for example that economics has nothing to do with morals is like saying it has nothing to do with physics: It is not simply morally wrong to go against God’s laws to gain something for ourselves; it is plain foolishness: We cannot gain by going against them because they are a statement of the way things really are, observing them goes with sanity. The second is that this is not servitude but freedom, for in observing them man is more fully man and not a travesty.
Two Ways of Knowing
God’s laws for the ordering of man’s life are given, promulgated so to speak, in two ways: written into our nature and uttered to us by God or by his teachers. Both ways are worth study.
The laws of morality, like the laws that govern our body and our mind, are written into our nature. That is to say, God made us with certain powers that can function properly only in the line of the moral law and certain needs that can be satisfied only by action in that line. Just as our bodies are made with the power to digest certain foods and will function only if fed by them, the moral laws are in man’s structure much as the laws of diet are.
If we do not observe the bodily laws, we get protest in the body—a stomachache for example. If we do not observe the moral laws, we get that protest in the mind—a troubled conscience, which is in fact the protest of the spiritual part of man against action contrary to the moral law that is woven into the very making of man.
Conscience
Unfortunately, neither the body’s nor the mind’s protest gives us infallible guidance. The body can settle into bad habits and cease to protest, at any rate, vigorously enough to catch our attention. We may, for instance, be eating food of such sort that the body is not fully healthy; but we may feel satisfied enough, especially if we have never known what perfect health is.
Neither is the conscience an infallible guide. In itself conscience is the practical moral judgment of the mind, the judgment the mind makes as to the moral rightness or wrongness of our actions—not their wisdom or unwisdom but something more profound that can be expressed only as ought or ought not.
In making this judgment of ought or ought not, the mind’s standard is the law of God that is, in the sense already set out, in the very structure of man’s nature. But a lot has happened to man’s nature since it came new-built from the power of God; and too much of what has happened has damaged it and not perfected it. Men have damaged their natures by misuse, in spite of the protests of conscience, and have settled into certain routines of misuse so that on all sorts of wrong actions there is no longer any audible protest.
Indeed, some of these aberrations have managed to impose themselves as duties, with conscience active on their behalf. Thus there have been peoples who, when a man died, slew his wives to bury them with him and would have thought it shocking not to. Even when conscience speaks loud and clear against some particular wrong action, some matter upon which our nature is still as God made it, we can find philosophies to explain away the protest, so that ultimately it too falls silent. And one way or another we grow comfortable in at least some of our sins. But they are, slowly or quickly, imperceptibly or spectacularly, damaging us all the same.
The second way of learning the laws of morality, by hearing what God explicitly teaches, brings us to the real distinction between physical and moral laws. Physical laws God leaves man to discover for himself; moral laws he tells man—not only tells him what they are but tells him to observe them so that his moral teaching is at once information and command.
Harder to Discover, more Essential to Know
One can see a twofold reason why God should tell us the one set of laws and not the other. (1) The moral laws are harder to discover. (2) They are more essential to be known.
For the physical laws, the only problem is to discover what actually is, what actually happens, and the evidence is all here under our noses. It concerns the material universe or the operations of our minds, and any errors we may make about these things produce their results in this life, so that man can see them and correct them; and in a general way the story of man has shown a continual progress in their discovery. Whereas the moral laws treat not only of what is but of what we ought to do; and the evidence is not all available—what follows on being right or wrong about the moral laws does not always show in this life so unmistakably that only the blind can miss it. Much of it appears only in the next life so that it does not help us to rectify errors here upon earth.
The precepts of the moral laws concern the whole man and the direction given to the whole of life, and they involve that thrust of the self that is the dynamic element in human life: If it goes wrong, life goes wrong. How well or ill the body works, how well or ill the intellect works—these things are facts and significant but not of the same order of significance as the direction the will takes. Ignorance or even error about physical laws need not twist the whole self out of the right relation to God and to other men.
You have there all the difference between error, which must be involuntary, for obviously no intellect would choose to be in error, and sin, which is wrongness embraced. God teaches us the moral laws because he wants men to be what he made them to be and help others to be so, because he wants the order of reality to be observed and not mocked. And he can make the laws of morality into commandments precisely because the will is free—only that which has a choice can be commanded.