FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 29, 5 August 1925, Page 51

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

(By the Right. Reverend Monsignob Power, V.F., for the Tablet.)

God, the Supreme Being and man His creature exist. Has God now left man to his own way? Wo cannot think so. - Since Vi'-''. - , . ... . man cannot be a self-existing being and since God cannot exclude any part of His creation from His own knowledge, it r follows that •- I - V. ° man s actions cannot be indifferent to God Man must endeavor to please God. To say that God and man exist, is to say that God is a Law-Giver, to whose will man’s will must be voluntarily conformed. God must love justice and hate iniquity ; ’ therefore, He must have set up a Moral Law for the right direction of human conduct. Reason requires this in God, Who is Supreme Reason, and in man, who is a reasoning being. To grasp the sense of duty and to realise it in conduct is an essential condition of man’s real progress. Man in every age has endeavored to discover and fulfil this duty; the endeavor has not always been successful, and the religious rites resulting have sometimes been grotesque, but the endeavor and the rites were always there to prove that man felt that he had duties towards the Supreme. He had ample evidence that he himself enjoyed free will, and he was conscious that the Supreme was a Master Who saw all things, and to Whom he was amenable for praise or blame. To do right is, therefore, pleasing to God, to do wrong displeasing, and this is the sole basis of any morality that can com pi end itself to human reason. History assures ns that morality so based and so buttressed, is the only guarantee of progress for nations as well as for individuals. . Disbelievers in God vainly search for other basis of right. They see that without morality of some,kind there can be no true human life, but they will not have that morality which springs from the being of God. Morality for morality’s sake, or as a matter of mere taste and refinement, makes in our day a systematic appgal to our allegiance. This morality tries to balance itself in the air without foundation or motive. Indeed, it ridicules any idea of motive for rightdoing os criminal and superstitious. The propounders of this phantasy hold that it is enough to know that vice is vulgar and ungentlemanlike, and that self-disgust and selfreproach should take the place of fear. Men must get rid of the idea that sin is an offence against God; at worst it is a mere crime against human nature, and at best only a folly. There is no law-giver outside ourselves, conscience is not his word, but a mere dictate of our own mind, a mere'sense of the fitness of things; in comic opera phrase, merely proper self-respect and no- • f * ft , # . thing more. This is really worse than paganism. Plato, and Cicero, and Seneca would rebuke these propagandists of independent morality; their own basis of ; morality, was sounder, since it rested on something; . it they* did not know the one, ‘ true God, they had at least gods and godesses on Olympus who were avengers of- wrong, and helpers ; of right. .

S.—THE BASIS OF MORALITY.

* But the beau-ideal of godless intellectualism would have neither helper nor avenger ; he is self-complacent, self-confident, selfpossessed. Away ' with this idea of reward and punishment! The natural advantages of honesty and virtue should be - motive enough for right-doing; to be bribed, and terrified, and made mercenary by considerations of Heaven and Hell are unworthy 1 of a gentleman, of a man of breeding and politeness. But common experience arid; the verdict of history attest that ‘‘gentlemen” are as much subject to the subtle appeal of the Seven Deadly Sins as are those who are not gentlemen in the pagan sense; and history and experience again assure us that the gentlemanlike qualities are mote soften than not but a screen for vice, a poor screen that nature in a crucial moment draws aside that we may view what lies behind it. «JBut even here the “gentleman” is logical; being detected is his only crime, his inner sense of shame his only punishment. Failures themselves in the trite sense of- the word, they bring about in others the paralysis of all human energy by removing that which must ever -be the will’s great motive of action, the desire to reach the Supreme Good. The human reason, seeing God by its own light, can find a secure sanction for morality only in the desire of seeing Him in vision hereinafter. \ Some disciples, breaking away from this fantastic school, but yet denying God, hold that mere civil morality should bo sufficient for a reasoning man. Let man cultivate a sense of. civic worth and patriotism, and let him do right for the mere sake of shedding lustre on his city, and of advancing the material interests of the fatherland. Obedience to the laws of the country thus becomes the test of morality. If reward be sought, let the approval of public opinion be a sufficient motive during life, with some columns of fulsome praise and; perhaps, a monument after death. All this, of course, begs the question of patriotism and national prosperity. The real progress of a nation means the growth, in happiness and virtue outlie men and women and children of that nation ; but happiness and virtue are not the offspring of an earthly city, nor do they come from the possession and enjoyment* of earthly goods. Public opinion can set up a fixed standard of right and wrong only when itself is rightly based and directed.. Obedience, to merely what the Civil Law commands will never commend itself to that natural reason which is an endowment* from Him Who ,is . Supreme and Living Reason, and it will be evaded by many a philosophic unbeliever as often as he can elude thje vigilance of the State police. National morality has been tried arid found wanting;- its 5 hitter fruits are apparent around us ; iin business and economics, for example, in the antagonism betweeen Capitalism; and Labor, .in the worship of Mammon, and in the foul cult of Lust. The earth is .no longer the Lord’s,

nor,. the -fulness thereof, and they who have claimed liras their own have defiled 'it s before making it their object of worship.

• Again, we - often hear ,it said that a mam should find sufficient motive for right-doing in the wish to ‘have realised at some indefinite future date the : perfectibility of the human, race. He should make it a constant practice to exalt his higher over his lower nature in the hope that his will, thus perfected, may bqcome a common will and a universal law for the universal race. This is not, a new gospel; it was ridiculed by Professor Huxley when he wrote: “It is not clear what compensation the Eohippus gets for his sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby.” If there be no God and no future with reward and punishment, why should a man exalt his higher above his lower nature? Are they not both of the earth earthy, and why should he not hold an equal balance between two things that are equal in origin? .Nay, why should he not stand "by the lower and see that it is not dominated by the higher? Why should the lower nature he tortured in the attempt to stifle all but imperious desires: Cui hono? In a. little while both natures will "t commingle in a. common dust; they have no other future if there be no God,

. Lot those who hold that a man should suppress his lower nature in order to bring about in some far distant future the perfectibility of the race put their motive of right, their basis of morality to a practical test: let them sail off to a -desert island and try to establish a new State on such a basis of right, and then let them *and the world see what will happen. Despite their groundless theory,• the lower nature will always make the stronger appeal, and the weaker appeal of the higher, if it is to prevail, must be strengthened by the sense of duty with its divine and permanent sanction. Those who know 7 a little about even Civil Law should surely know that no law can become universal without a universal and adequate sanction.. Why should a man not follow the pleasurable course in preference to a nobler one that brings him only present pain? Why should he, that is if there be no future happiness to compensate him for the pains of the fleeting present ? . If there be only this present time, why should not brief-living man he allowed to enjoy whatever little pleasures he can secure. We do not separate a dog from the pleasures of his little life!

Morality, then, is not a matter of taste, nor a. passion for good for mere goodness’ sake, nor an enthusiasm for well-ordered humanity in some indefinite future, nor a worldly-wise calculation. It is a matter of .clear obligation, finding its source, its authority, its sanction,, and its guardianship in God and in religion. Such morality dignifies a man, welds a community, gives stability to a nation, and leads humanity to an everlasting reign. r . v - ■' V/

p Patience in all things and everywhere, this is what .I, specially v recommend. : Even if they ■ j- --. ■ • * . >v, i > \ ■ .. ?■ . ... oppose thee, if they , strike thee, thou shouldst be grateful to them, and desire it should be thus, and not otherwise.—St. Francis of Assisi. - 5