A Manual of Moral PhilosophyPeabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Philosophy
A Manual of Moral Philosophy
Peabody, Andrew P. (Andrew Preston)
Ethics
*Christianity covers the entire field of human duty*, and reveals many
fitnesses, recognized when seen, but discovered by few or none
independently of the teachings and example of its Founder; while it gives
the emphasis and sanction of a Divine revelation to many other fitnesses,
easily discoverable, but liable to be overlooked and neglected.
In defining *the relations of the individual human soul to God*,
Christianity opens to our view a department of duty paramount to all
others in importance and interest. His fatherly love and care, his moral
government and discipline, his retributive providence, define with
unmistakable distinctness certain corresponding modes, in part, of outward
action, and in still greater part, of action in that inward realm of
thought whence the outward life receives its direction and impulse.
*The brotherhood of the whole human race*, also, reveals obligations which
would exist on no other ground; and for the clear and self-evidencing
statement of this truth we are indebted solely to Christianity. The
visible differences of race, color, culture, religion, and customs, are in
themselves dissociating influences. Universal charity is impossible while
these differences occupy the foreground. Slavery was a natural and
congenial institution under Pagan auspices; nor have we in all ancient
extra-Christian literature, unless it be in Seneca (in whom such
sentiments may have had indirectly(3) a Christian origin), a single
expression of a fellowship broad enough to embrace all diversities of
condition, much less, of race. But the Christian, so far as he consents to
receive the obvious and undoubted import of Christ’s mission and
teachings, must regard all men as, in nature, in the paternal care of the
Divine Providence, in religious privileges, rights, and capacities, on an
equal footing. With this view, he cannot but perceive the fitness, and
therefore the obligation, of many forms of social duty, of enlarged
beneficence, of unlimited philanthropy, which on any restricted theory of
human brotherhood would be neither fitting nor reasonable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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