Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principlesSullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Religion
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles
Sullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Conduct of life; Ethics; Religion and ethics
What is this "light intellectual," this "love of the true," so
unutterably blissful as to quiet all pain and sorrow, but the radiance
of the eternal falling athwart the shadows of this lower life? What is
this miraculous monitor--this "man within the breast," as the Stoics
called it--but the very articulate utterance of the supreme Reason
bidding man to live for the right? No great son of earth ever
interpreted it otherwise. From the days when Socrates scattered "the
sophist clan" in Athens, and forced men by the irresistible majesty of
his own moral elevation to believe in a morality which was more than a
string of rules sanctioned by convention; from the hour when he refused
to escape from prison because his conscience bade him submit to
die;--from the days of the sublime martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus, the
noble school of the Stoics, down to the philosophic Titans of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, with the glorious sage
of Koenigsberg at their head, there has been but one answer to the
question, What is conscience? Conscience, they proclaimed, is the
voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice
of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we
are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the
truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other
voice _can_ we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to
live by a moral law? We are Divine by nature, by what other law of
life should we live?
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