DIOCESE OF AUCKLAND

New Zealand Tablet, 29 February 1912, Page 25

DIOCESE OF AUCKLAND

* CATHOLIC MARRIAGE LAWS A PASTORAL INSTRUCTION IN THREE PARTS (Continued from last week.) PART I. —Things more or less Fundamental. I. The Family in Relation to Society. 11. The Family: Duty in the Home. Grounds of such Duty—(l) As furnished by pagan . Greece and Rome; (2) as furnished by ‘ modern ’ Philosophies ; (3) ‘ parasitic ’ Morality ; (4) grounds of Duty in the Home, as furnished by Religion. 111. Religion and the Family—-(1) The Church: her Mission and Authority in regard to the Family and Society. (A) Why the Church was founded. (B) The Church’s Teaching Authority. (C) The Church’s Authority: Legislative, Judicial, Executive. (D) The Church’s Independence in the Exercise of her Authority. (E) The Church’s Continuity. (F) Summary of Part I. HENRY WILLIAM, by the Grace of God and the favor of the Holy Apostolic See, Bishop of Auckland: To the Clergy, Secular and Regular, and to the Laity, of the said Diocese, Health and Blessing in the Lord. 11. THE FAMILY: DUTY IN THE HOME. It was said in- the olden days of Greece; ‘The Athenians know what is right, the Spartans do it.’ The essence of duty consists in doing,* not merely in knowing. When Matthew Arnold described right-doing, or good conduct, as ‘ nineteen-twentieths of life,’ he merely gave a mathematical turn to the Redeemer’s words : ‘He that doth the will of My Father, Who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven ”* Man, as a being endowed with reason, with freewill, and with the senses (which he has in common with the animal world), is ruled in accordance with his 1. Matthew vii.. 21. " ——

nature. His reason seeks after truth—has truth for its object. His free-will has for its object that which is apprehended as good. Pure evil as such, misery as such, he cannot desire. When reason aims at real truth (and not at falsehood mistaken for truth); when the will is controlled by real good (and not by merely apparent good); when the senses (by which are here meant the animal instincts and cravings) act in due subjection to right reason: then we have duty, moral order, true harmony and equilibrium, in human life. Reason is the guide, pointing out the way. But the will rules decides whether it shall or shall not follow. The exercise of free-will does not mean arbitrary choosing in the absence of all motive, as by mere, blind, determining impulse. Man, as a rational being, is (as stated) ever attracted by what is apprehended as good. That good ' presents itself in many forms and under many aspectsthe pleasant, the prudent, the right, the tie, the beautiful —and in reflective or deliberative action we can choose among these.' Within the region covered by libertyespecially when some act is recognised as good or evilthere is more or less of a consideration and balancing of motives inducing actionfollowed by free choice. What adequate motive can be assigned why the individual members of a family should knowingly and freely perform the manifold (and .often difficult) duties towards each other which are necessary for the domestic well-being ?

1. Grounds of Duty: as Furnished by Pagan Greece and Rome.

Pagan Rome based domestic and social duty chiefly on law and force; pagan Greece mainly on intellectual culture. The Roman ground of duty was cold, lifeless, uninspiring; it created a monstrous paternal authority over life and death in the household; it provided a marriage without stability, without guarantee, without honor; it degraded woman to the position of a puppet, a servant or slave; it led to the exposure and slaying of countless children. Even for good, that pagan basis of morality was effective only when backed by material force. It proved itself of its nature incapable of resisting the spreading domestic degeneracy which finally led to the decline and fall of the mightiest empire of ancient times. Greek culture trained the head; it left the will and the moral conscience the centre of duty —unmoved ; of its nature, it offered no barrier to debasing sensuality or ‘ cultivated ’ abominations—an external conventionalism or aestheticism merely filming ‘ The ulcerous place, Whiles rank corruption, mining all within/ deeply infected the domestic life of the people and dragged the nation into dishonor and decay. 2. Grounds of Duty as. Furnished by Modern Philosophies. ' Not less lifeless and ineffective are the grounds of domestic and social duty and sacrifice presented to us by the many shifting (and often mutually contradictory) systems sometimes collectively known as ‘modern’ philosophy. These systems embrace every form of irreligious error, down to the hard materialism which looks upon man as merely a highly developed chimpanzee or Barbary ape, and human society as simply a piece of fortuitous mechanism in a mechanical and purposeless world. In the words of St. Augustine, such philosophies ‘ have their beginning and their end in this world, and seek after nothing save what can be seen here.’ l These false philosophies offer no higher incentive to duty and self-sacrifice, in domestic and social life, than passion, or a self-centred instinct, or expediency, or passing sentiment, or the pressure of physical force or of social conventions and adjustments, or the attractions of pleasure, or the repulsions of pain, or some or other form of utilitarianism. 2 Such motives merely represent, on the one hand, an optional sentiment or feeling, or, on the other, a calculating policy, on the part t 1. ‘ De Civitate Dei/ 1. 15, c. 17. . 2. By far the best popular exposition of this subject known to us is Why Should I be Moral? A Discussion on the Basis of Ethics,’ by Rev. Ernest A. Hull, S.J. (London : Sands and Co.), obtainable from all Catholic booksellers. It should be in all Catholic schools and parish libraries.

of one who is assumed to be a law unto himself. Such motives of conduct can result only in an exaggerated individualism, and in consequent disorders such as pievailed when ‘ there was no king in Israel,’ and ‘ everyone did that which seemed right to himself j’ s Such motives are, moreover, foreign to the very idea of morality—which means ‘duty’ or ‘ obligation ’ that ‘ ought to be fulfilled. Duty is that which is due to’ some person; ‘ obligation ’ 4 means being ‘ found ’ or ‘ tied ’ to some person; ‘ ought ’is what is owed to some personsuch person, in each case, having the 1 right ’ to impose His will upon us, and to Whom we, in turn, owe the ‘duty’ of obedience. For, obviously, we can have no ‘ ought ’ or ‘ duty ’ (that is, a debt) to a mere thing; nor can a mere thing ‘ tie ’ or ‘bind’ our will to itself (that is, create an ‘ obligaton ’ on our part towards it). There can be no debt or obligation except to a definite person, for a definite cause, and in a definite way. The substitutes offered to the family by modern anti-Christian philosophies for a binding moral' code are reducible to a merely optional sentiment or impulse or self-interest. By reflection and analysis the human reason is able to discover that this Person is God, that His Divine Mind is the source of duty as a moral truth, as it is of all truth ; that He must will us to act in conformity with right reason ; that this Will of His is law in our regard. And within us we feel, in the impulse of conscience, s the Divine Will commanding this moral truth (or good order in conduct) to be observed—thus conforming our human wills with that right reason which is also the expression of the Divine Will.. ‘Duty is thus, in its origin, the voice of the Eternal. . . . Duty divorced from religion, and not based on God, loses all its force to sway the heart and mould the whole conduct of man. If not rooted in God, it dwindles, at best, into a cold, lifeless branch of human law, held up only by brute force. As experience shows, duty reared, not on the fluctuating reason or varying opinions of men, but on the transcendence and independence of God, can alone sustain moral effort in the mass of mankind. Duty that does not strike root in the divine element of religion deals only with outward acts, leaving untouched the whole field of motive, which we all feel to be the very soul of duty. . , . Hence, nearly all nations have sought in religion for the sanction of the duties imposed on their citizens. However false of visionary, yet what appeared to them as the ‘ high will of heaven,’ seemed the only solid foundation on which to raise their laws and base the duty, of .the people called upon to observe them.’ 6 ‘ Philosophy,’ says Balfour, ‘has never yet touched the mass of men except through religion. 7 Without religion there remains no adequate motive or inspiration for the right ordering of human life in the family or in the State. Without religious training there can be no true moral training. So great a statesman and patriot as Washington emphasised this in his ‘Farewell.’ ‘ Reason and experience,’ said he, ‘ both forbid us to expect that morality can prevail to the exclusion of religion. A whole volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.’ ‘ Modern ’ philosophies, and the social and economic schemes based upon them, aim, at best, at restricting the results of that selfishness which is so ingrained in our fallen human nature; religion tends towards the elimination of selfishness itself, .and thus strikes at the root of most—and the worst of the evils which, through the family, have ever afflicted human communities. As regards the ( abstract and impersonal motives of duty advanced by h 3. Judges, xxi., 24. 4. From the Latin ‘ obligate/ to bind or tie together this connection by the bond of a moral claim or precept, which can have a relation to a person only. f 5. Conscience is a practical judgment which passes a verdict on an act, before we perform it, as to whether such act is right or ’ wrong. _ Under the name, ‘an act/ are included a thought (which is an internal act), speaking, and an omission, which, in moral matters, is equivalent to an act. Conscience itself, as a practical judgment, is, strictly speaking, itself an act.(of the mind), and lasts only while it is being produced. , But it is also, and not without reason, spoken of as a permanent thing, as its judgments are formed by a permanent faculty, and belong to a special department of the understanding. ;(< -■■■-. 6. ‘ Duty/ by Rev. William Graham (p. 7). 7. In his lecture, 'Decadence’ (Cambridge University Press' • 1906, p. 53).

sundry .' modern ’ philosophers.: they are, indeed, feeble and impferfect, with little power of appeal to ordinary human minds and wills, especially in times of tempta-tion-little influence against the inherent selfishness of our frail nature and its proneness to act under the stimulus of impulse and passion. ‘ Faith in a Personal God,’ as someone has remarked, ‘ may be said to be hard to acquire; faith in an abstraction is vastly harder to brace the will.’ The broad Waikato cannot rise above its source. And to what high motive for the daily holocaust of domestic duty, and for the daily conquest of our natural love of ease, can we expect a hard materialistic philosophy to rise?— a philosophy which, for instance, looks upon human progress as the mere mechanical outcome of the play of tooth and claw and 'cunning in an incessant fight for self, self, self? What higher aim for the individual and the family could such a view of life offer than a selfish struggle, in which the strongest, the most cunning, and the most unprincipled would survive? If there were no element in duty but what is human and this-worldly, then duty would be based, on the one hand, on brute force (for the maintenance of public order), or, on the other hand, it would degenerate into unrestricted license to do what to each may seem advantageous. Why should a man aspire if the future were a blank, with no object beyond this , life of sense worthy of his aspirations? Why curb passions or limit impulses, if his origin and destiny were the same as that of the goat, the ape, or the orang-outang ? There is no need to criticise in detail these philosophic . systems (many of them mutually destructive) that have been built up apart from, and in opposition to, God and His Holy Gospel. Not one of them makes unselfish devotion, renunciation, self-sacrifice in the family and social circle a matter of real obligation. They can never touch the hearts of the mass of men or give a, moral uplift to their lives. They are incapable of providing morality with a sound basis. ‘ They can give no satisfactory answer to those who ask why they are obliged to live, to toil, to be upright, to make sacrifices, to restrain their appetites, to devote themselves to the service of others, and to pursue with all their strength a lofty moral ideal.’ ‘ They have,’ says Garriguet in The Social Value of the Gospel (pp. 207-8), ‘deceived the hopes reposed in them; they have led to a bankruptcy which even such men as MM. Buisson, Fourniere, Seailles, and Deherme do not dream of disputing. These men, who are counted among our adversaries, do not conceal their alarm as. to a deficiency, the dangerous consequences of which they understand better than anyone. “ Without God,” says M. G. Deherme, ‘‘we have not been able to invent an effectual moral code. . We find our hearts to-day emptied by philosophic criticism. All that has so far been offered to us as independent, scientific, rational,,.or positivist morality, is but a parody and a distortion of religious morality.’’ ’ Another atheistic French author and official, M. Payot, writing some time ago in the ‘Volume’ on the moral crisis which has disorganised French thought,’ says: ‘ The men who ought to throw light on the road, throw light on nothing ; they are themselves in the dark. . . . They have given up Catholicism, and but 'a short time is needed to see that they have put nothing in its place, and that their life is guided by their former habits 8. ‘Le Morale Sociale,’ p. 207. Despite the universality of the moral ideas and convictions of, mankind, despite the testimony of consciousness to ■ our moral freedom, free-will is denied, by some modern philosophers. It is so denied by some who hold the theory that human beings-are mere pieces of soulless mechanism in -i a purposeless world. The outcome of such a theory may be gathered from the following extract from a book by Robert Blatchford, in the concluding chapters of which the author writes ’ with much feeling on the failures of the methods devised for dealing with criminals. In the twelfth chapter of- Not Guilty,’ p. 203, he writes : ‘ A tramp has murdered a child on the highway, has robbed her of a few coppers, and has. thrown her body into : a ditch. Do you mean to say that tramp could not help doing that? Do you mean-to sav that he is not to blame? Do'you mean to say he is not to be punished? Yes.- I say all these things; and if all these things are not true, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on.’ (Quoted by de Tunzelmann, p. 122). . " ■ Like so many other disbelievers in free-will, Mr. Blatchford, in his writings,, denies and (directly or by necessary implication) ■ also asserts' free-will in a very curious way. Without free-will there cannot, of course, be any such thing as moral merit or demerit is, there can be no moral right or wrong

of feelings and thought.’ ‘We can,’ says Benedict Malon, ‘count on our fingers the men whom philosophy has ennobled. Four pages would contain the history of the aristocracy grouped under this title. The remainder, given up to its dreams, fears, or avarice, have rushed pell-mell through the ; dangerous valleys of instinct and delirium. They have endeavoured to find a justification for their actions and beliefs in the bewilderment of their brains and in the impulses of their hearts,’ B . Even so sturdy a Rationalist as Renan, in The Future of Science (p. xviii.), deplored, as a ‘serious thing,’ his inability ‘to perceive a means of providing humanity in the future’ with an acceptable ‘catechism,’ except on the condition of returning to religious faith. Hence,’ adds he, ‘it is possible that the ruin of idealistic beliefs may be fated to follow hard upon the ruin of supernatural beliefs, and that the real abasement of the morality of humanity will date from the day it has seen the reality of things.’ (By ‘the reality of things ’ is here meant nature and life as seen through the medium of the irrational system that claims the name of Rationalism). (To be continued next week.)