MORALS pertain to right living, to the things we do, in relation to
God and His la was opposed to right thinking, to what we believe,
to dogma. Dogma directs our faith or belief, morals shape our
lives. By faith we know God, by moral living we serve Him; and this
double homage, of our mind and our works, is the worship we owe our
Creator and Master and the necessary condition of our salvation.
Faith alone will save no man. It may be convenient for the
easy-going to deny this, and take an opposite view of the matter;
but convenience is not always a safe counsellor. It may be that the
just man liveth by faith; but he lives not by faith alone. Or, if
he does, it is faith of a different sort from what we define here
as faith, viz., a firm assent of the mind to truths revealed. We
have the testimony of Holy Writ, again and again reiterated, that
faith, even were it capable of moving mountains, without good works
is of no avail. The Catholic Church is convinced that this doctrine
is genuine and reliable enough to make it her own; and sensible
enough, too. For faith does not make a man impeccable; he may
believe rightly, and live badly. His knowledge of what God expects
of him will not prevent him from doing just the contrary; sin is as
easy to a believer as to an unbeliever. And he who pretends to have
found religion, holiness, the Holy Ghost, or whatever else he may
call it, and can therefore no longer prevaricate against the 1aw,
is, to common-sense people, nothing but a sanctified humbug or a
pious idiot. Nor are good works alone sufficient. Men of
emancipated intelligence and becoming breadth of mind, are often
heard to proclaim with a greater flourish of verbosity than of
reason and argument, that the golden rule is religion enough for
them, without the trappings of creeds and dogmas; they respect
themselves and respect their neighbors, at least they say they do,
and this, according to them, is the fulfilment of the law. We
submit that this sort of worship was in vogue a good many centuries
before the God-Man came clown upon earth; and if it fills the bill
now, as it did in those days, it is difficult to see the utility of
Christ's coming, of His giving of a law of belief and of His
founding of a Church. It is beyond human comprehension that He
should have come for naught, labored for naught and died for
naught. And such must be the case, if the observance of the natural
law is a sufficient worship of the Creator. What reasons Christ may
have had for imposing this or that truth upon our belief, is beside
the question; it is enough that He did reveal truths, the
acceptance of which glorifies Him in the mind of the believer, in
order that the mere keeping of the commandments appear forthwith an
insufficient mode of worship. Besides, morals are based on dogma,
or they have no basis at all; knowledge of the manner of serving
God can only proceed from knowledge of who and what He is; right
living is the fruit of right thinking.
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