THE WILL OF GOD.

III. The Will of God as the Ground of Obligation.

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209. Some have maintained that the whole moral law originated in the will of God; that the duties enjoined in it are right, solely because he has commanded them; and that, if he had so pleased, our duty might have been maue to consist in actions different or contrary.

The error of this doctrine will be discovered on simply asking the question, whether God could have exempted us from the duty of loving himself, or have made it our duty to hate him; and whether the same change might have taken place with respect to the love of our neighbor?

Others have run into the opposite error, and maintained that the whole moral law is founded in the nature of things; and, consequently, that, no part of it could be altered. It is exactly what it must always be, while God and man continue the same.

The true doctrine lies between those stated, and is this: that although the moral law in general is founded on the nature of things, or on the relations of man to his Maker, and to his fellow-creatures, yet some particulars are the subject of positive institution. For example, the fourth commandment is acknowledged to be partly moral and partly positive: moral, as it requires the consecration of a part of our time to the immediate service of God; positive, as it appropriates a seventh part of it rather than some other proportion. As another example, the law respecting marriage may be referred to, by which the relation is forbidden to persons standing in certain degrees of consanguinity and affinity. The prohibition is implied in the seventh commandment. Whatever reason may be assigned for the prohibition, we cannot consider it as of the same immutable obligation with the precept not to steal, or not to lie. It may be dispensed with, not by human authority, but by the Supreme Lawgiver; and accordingly, marriages within the forbidden degrees have been contracted with his express approbation. In the beginning of the world, the sons of Adam married their sisters, and, by the Mosaic law, if a man died without issue, his brother was required to marry his widow. Such marriages are now held to be incestuous.

We may therefore say, that there is a mixture of moral

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and positive in the Decalogue; and there is truth in the old observation, that some things are commanded because they are just, and some are just because they are commanded. Those which are just because they are commanded may be altered by the same will which enacted them; but those which are commanded because they are just, are of perpetual obligation.

210. While to God's creatures his will is the immediate rule of duty and ground of obligation, yet in its legislative prescriptions that will is not capricious and arbitrary. There must be certain principles by which it is itself determined, conformity to which is what, in his estimation, constitutes right, and disconformity wrong; and by which, consequently, the rules of duty prescribed by him to his intelligent offspring are dictated. Such rules, therefore, should be regarded as right, not simply because God wills them, but the correct sentiment is, that God wills them because they are right. The principles by which the divine will is actuated in issuing moral rules are seated in the divine nature, are eternal, unchangeable, and exist of necessity. By these principles also was he guided in the formation of the universe, in fixing the constitutions, allotting the circumstances, and adjusting the mutual relations of all his creatures. Hence these principles are the ultimate ground or reason of moral obligation.

211. IV. In support of the doctrine that the divine nature, and not the divine will, is the ultimate origin and ground of rectitude, Dr. Chalmers eloquently says: "We must express our dissent from the system of those who would resolve virtue, not into any native or independent rightness of its own, but into the will of Him who has a right to all our services. Without disparagement to the Supreme Being, it is not His law which constitutes virtue; but, far higher homage to Him and to His law, the law derives all its authority and its being from a virtue of anterior residence in the character of the Divinity.

"It is not by the authority of any law over Him, that truth, and justice, and goodness, and all the other perfections of supreme moral excellence have, in His person, had their everlasting residence. He had a nature, before he uttered it forth into a law. Previous to Creation, there existed in His mind, all those conceptions of the

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great and the graceful, which he hath embodied into a gorgeous universe. In like manner, previous to all government, there existed in His mind those principles of righteousness, which afterward, with the right of an absolute sovereign, he proclaimed into a law. Those virtues of which we now read on a tablet of jurisprudence were all transcribed and taken off from the previously existing tablet of the divine character. In the fashioning of law, he pictured forth Himself; and we, in the act of observing his law, are only conforming ourselves to his likeness. It is there that we are to look for the primeval seat of moral goodness-or, in other words, virtue has an inherent character of her own-apart from law, and anterior to all jurisdiction.

"Instead therefore of deriving morality from law, we should derive law, even the law of God, from the primeval morality of his own character; and so far from looking upwardly to his law as the original fountain of morality, do we hold it to be the emanation from a higher fountain, that is seated in the depths of his unchangeable essence, and is eternal as the nature of the Godhead. There was an inherent, before there was a preceptive morality; and righteousness, and goodness, and truth, which all are imperative enactments of law, were all prior characteristics in the underived and uncreated excellence of the lawgiver."

212. V. Moral obligation in the Deity results from the strength of his approbation for what is good, and the strength of his consequent recoil from that which is wrong. It is not however, as with us, an obligation that bears upon him from without. There is no jurisdiction foreign to himself, which can take cognizance of Him. Obligation as acting upon Him is approbation, of a strength and power that carry it up to the degree of a moral necessity.

But obligation acting upon us, while the term may be applied, and often is, to the force of those sanctions which virtue has even in the workings of our own conscience, has more strictly a reference to the sanctions of that divine government which is set up in authority over us.

213. VI. An act is said to be right, because of its moral propriety: it is said to be obligatory, because of the sanctions, whether of reward or penalty, that bind to the doing of it. The distinction is clearly exemplified in

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civil law, under which there are many actions that are obligatory in the strictest sense of the term, but many more which morally are right, but legally are not at all binding. Under the divine government the term obligation is used in the same forensic sense, but with this important difference, that it is not restricted to the enforcement of justice alone. God has framed a code not of equity alone, but of universal morality. Under Him those moralities which are left free, and ought to be in the administrations of an earthly jurisprudence, have become so many imperative enactments, which at our peril we disobey, insomuch that the affections as well as the acts of humanity are legalized.

214. When God bids us do what before was a matter of indifference, it thence becomes a matter of obligation; and that, not more from his right of command than from the rightness of our obedience. When he bids us do what before was felt on our part to be an act of virtue, he only attaches one obligation more to the performance of it. It did not for the first time become virtuous, at the moment he embarked his authority in its favor. But hẹ may be said to have rendered it more an act of virtue than it was before. He superadded upon it one rightness to another, which is by no means a singularity in the affairs of human conduct. When God interposes with the expression of his will on the side of a morality, there is then added to the call of morality the call of godliness.

This should suffice for the question whether virtue have a rightness in itself, or if all its rightness be only derived from the will of God. It will be perceived that virtue hath a higher original than the will of God, even the character of God-or those principles in the constitution of the Deity which give direction to his will. Long ere virtue passed into a law for the government of those who are created, had it a residence and a being in the mind of the Creator; and the tablet of his jurisprudence is but a transcript from the tablet of his own independent nature.

To have a nature like unto His, we must love virtue for itself; and do it because it is right-not because it is the requisition of authority.

If any are afraid that this doctrine casts us loose from the authority of God, we suggest to them that a deference to this authority is the highest of all rightness. We

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affirm that when virtue, though in its own original and independent character, hath taken possession of the heart, its first and largest offering will be to the Divinity who inspired it. [Dick's Lectures; Chalmers' Works, vol. v.]

206. If I ask, why I should pursue one course of action rather than another, what answers are returned?

207. What may be said of the fitness of things, as a ground of moral obligation?

208. What may be said of obligation as resulting from utility, or the tendency of actions to promote the general good?

209. What may be said of the will of God as the ground of obligation? 210. Is the will of God capricious and arbitrary, or is it determined by certain fixed and just principles?

211. In what light has Dr. Chalmers set forth the doctrine that the divine nature, and not the divine will, is the ultimate origin and ground of rectitude?

212. Since the origin and the ultimate standard of moral rectitude are found in the divine nature, whence results moral obligation?

213. How may the rightness and the moral obligation of a given act be distinguished?

214. Is there not an obligation to do a right thing from the fact of its being right, as well as from its being the subject of divine command?

CHAPTER IV.

MORAL QUALITIES OF HUMAN ACTION.

215. HUMAN actions may be distinguished into external and internal. The word action, in the most general manner, may be applied to any exercise of the external or internal faculties of man. We often distinguish actions from words, as when we say a man's actions contradict his words. Yet, in a more general sense, we include a man's words in his actions.

216. We direct our thoughts to an action which we are about to perform; we intend to do it; we make it our aim; we place it before us, and act with purpose (propositum); we design it, or mark it out beforehand (designo).

Will, or volition, is the last step of intention, the first step of action. It is the internal act which leads to external acts.

An action that proceeds from my will, or volition, is my act. But if it do not proceed from my will, it is not my act, though my limbs may be employed in it; as for

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