As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion, ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation. It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the political organisation of society, and in the problems which concern the eternal future. {71} However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits. Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely apart from every other element and every other consideration. Those moral facts are briefly as follows:-- The distinction between moral good and moral evil. The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil. Moral Liberty. Moral Responsibility. Moral merit and demerit. {72} These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology, or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot elude this question. I have established that the moral law is not of human invention; that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not one of those laws of fate by which the material world is governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject. Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life is passed? {73} Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget, Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order reigning in it:-- "Je ne puis songer Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."