The Moral Law
(lin the Heart of Man and on the Tablets of Stone)

by

REV. JAMES M. 6ILLIS, C. S.

Editor of the Catholic World

Bight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour,

sponsored by the National Council of Catholic

Men with the co-operation of the National

Broadcasting Company and its asso-

ciated Stations.

I. Morality, Old and New
n. Conscience

ni. Religion as an Obligation

rv. Parental Authority and State

Authority

V. Crime and Warfare

VI. Immorality

yn. Honesty in Business and

Politics

Vin. Christmas

National Council of Catholic Men

Sponsor of the CathoUc Hour

1314 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.





The Moral Law
(In the Heart of Man and on the Tablets of Stone)

by

REV. JAMES M. GILLIS, C. S. P.,

Editor of the Catholic World

Eight addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour,

sponsored by the National Council of Catholic

Men with the co-operation of the National

Broadcasting Company and its asso-

ciated Stations.

I. Morality, Old and New

II. Conscience

III. Religion as an Obligation

IV. Parental Authority and State

Authority

V. Crime and Warfare

VI. Immorality

VII. Honesty in Business and

Politics

VIII. Christmas

National Council of Catholic Men

Sponsor of the Catholic Hour

1314 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor
Huntington, Indiana



IMPRIMATUR:

•^-JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.,

Bishop of Fort Wayne.



AUTHOR^S INTRODUCTION

It has been a great joy toi speak of the moral law to a

vast radio audience. It is a still greater satisfaction to have

evidence from all corners of the country that the people as a

whole remain enthusiastically devoted to the ancient and

everlasting code of morality in spite of persistent efforts of

sophists and amoralists to abrogate it.

Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the demand for

printed copies of addresses made “on the air’ is proof that

the usefulness of the old-fashioned printing press has not

been entirely destroyed by the more novel and more miracu-

lous microphone.



DEDICATION

To the Memory of my Father and Mother who first
taught me the Moral Law by precept and by example.



THE MORAL LAW 5

MORAUTY, OLD AND NEW
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 9, 1930)

Commencing a series of talks on the Ten

Commandments, I find myself face to face with

the fact that in these days of skepticism and

iconoclasm, not even the Decalogue has escaped

attack. Until rather recent years, everybody, pre-

sumably, accepted the Ten Commandments as the

ultimate and irrefragable basis of morality. What-

ever theological controversies might divide Chris-

tians from one another or from non-Christians, it

was supposed that there could be no controversy

about the authority and the binding power of the

Commandments. Even those who did not believe

in God, and consequently could not accept the

Mosaic law as a divine revelation, admitted at least

that the moral code of Sinai is the expression of

high human wisdom, and that it is indispensable to

morality.

But nowadays nothing goes unchallenged.

Every phase of human life is in turmoil—politics,
finance, philosophy, theology—are in a bewilder-

ing, not to say a chaotic condition. Even music,

architecture, literature, and the drama are in the

throes of revolution. It is not surprising therefore

that ethics should feel the effect of this universal

uncertainty. Notice I say ethics, not merely

morals. Morals have to do with conduct, ethics

with the principles underlying conduct. A man’s
morals may be bad but his ethics good. That is to

say, he may have good principles but fail to live up

to them. That is indeed a pity, but if he have no

principles, no philosophy of conduct, his condition



6 THE MORAL LAW

is evidently worse. If his morals and ethics are both

gone, he is in a desperate plight.

Unfortunately, in these days it would seem that

not only the fabric of morality is weakening—the
foundation is endangered. In earlier times a man

might break the Commandments, but he believed in

them none the less. The very phrase “Break the

Commandments” was known to be a metaphor.

You couldn’t break the Commandments. They re-

mained intact and inviolable, the same yesterday,

today and forever. You might break your neck, so

to speak, in the attempt to break the Command-

ments. You might break your heart, or more likely

some one else’s heart. But you didn’t really break

the Commandments. They remained granite, ada-

mant. They were written not by the hand of man

with a pen upon perishable paper, but by the finger

of God upon the rock. Of them God might say

“Quod scripsi, scripsi.” What I have written that

I have written. You may keep these Command-

ments or not: keep them to your salvation, break

them to your damnation. But even if no one keeps

them, still they remain. Heaven and the earth

shall pass, but the moral law shall not pass.

So it was always understood. Men, indeed,

turned their backs upon the Commandments. They

went fornicating (to brorow the strong Scriptural

phrase) after strange gods, easier gods, more in-

dulgent gods than Jehovah. They had their fling.

They took part in the orgies of the heathen. But

when they discovered what all sinners must dis-

cover, that sin is Dead Sea fruit, they came back to

the one True God, and to His eternal law. And

when they came back, they found the Ten Com-

mandments still graven upon the tables of im-



THE MORAL LAW 7

perishable stone, resting secure in the ark of the

Covenant,—in the very Holy of Holies. The Deca-
logue had not been erased or expunged.

But of late there has arisen a tendency to dis-

credit the Commandments as an authorized and

irreformable code of conduct. The most popular,

though perhaps the least philosophical of the

critics of the Commandments is H. G. Wells. Re-

peatedly in American and English magazines and

newspapers he proposes the thesis that the ancient

and venerable code that came down from the days

of Moses is now obsolete. “What,” he asks, “is the

cause of the wide difference between the behavior

of people now and the behavior of people fifty

years ago?” And he replies that nowadays the

world has no accepted standard. People hold, he

says, that “there is no value in faith and no

virtue in chastity.” And he gives his opinion that

the moral code has collapsed because the “arbitrary

imperatives” which once sustained it have been

repudiated. By “arbitrary imperatives” he means

the familiar “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.”

Well, there was a greater philosopher than Mr
Wells—much greater—Immanuel Kant, who used
to say that two things most deeply impressed him

—overwhelmed him—the starry firmament above,
and the “categorical imperative” in the heart of

man. The categorical imperative is the equivalent

of the “ought” and “ought not,” “shalt” and “shalt

hot” within man’s conscience. It was immense-

ly important to Kant, but the lesser philoso-

pher, Mr. Wells, tells us it is now gone, and weeps

no tears over it. It is significant, I imagine, that

Kant mentions the moral law in the same breath

with the heavenly firmament. He seems to say that



8 THE MORAL LAW

the destruction of the categorical imperative would

be as great a calamity as the blotting out of the

stars of heaven and we agree with him. But Mr,

Wells, to tell the truth, seems rather relieved and

pleased to think that all imperatives are gone.

He has a particular grievance against the Com-

mandments that are phrased in the negative. “Thou

shalt not” is an offensive expression to him. Well,

we can easily remedy that. It doesn’t require an ex-

cessive amount of literary skill to translate the Com-

mandments into the affirmative form. In fact it has

already been done, and by One whom even H. G.

Wells must respect as a teacher of morals. Jesus

Christ Himself being asked “Which is the great

Commandment of the law?” replied, “Thou shalt

love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with

all thy soul and with thy whole mind and thy whole

strength. This is the first and the greatest Com-

mandment. And the second is like to this. Thou

shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” If Mr. Weils or

any other exponent of the higher morality revolts

from the ignobility of negative commands, I rather

imagine that living up to Christ’s affirmative version

will keep him occupied, if he will but try it.

The truth is that a great many men need the

abrupt and forceful negative “thou shalt not,” In-

deed I think we all need it, sometimes. If we im-

agine that we have advanced so far in the moral life

that we have no need of “thou shalt not,” there still

remains “Thou Shalt.” But if, as I suspect, the ob-

jection is against any kind of command, affirmative

or negative, I fear we can do nothing about it.

The man who objects to any imperative must go his

lawless way, and take the consequences.

It would of course be absurd to cite H, G. Wells



THE MORAL LAW 9

as a philosopher or moralist. I quote him rather as

a reporter of modern conditions. But there are

philosophers of considerable repute in certain cir-

cles who have made some rather plausible attacks

upon the authority of the Ten Commandments.

One of these was the late William Graham Sumner

of Yale who familiarized the more learned world

with the notion that morals after all are only cus-

toms, and that as customs change, morals and

moral codes change with them. Consequently, a

code of morals is simply a reflex of the customs of

the tribe in which it originates, and “Thou shalt,”

and “Thou shalt not,” are a mere survival of the

taboos of the tribe. According to this theory the

Ten Commandments may have served very well for

a primitive, oriental, agricultural community like

that of the Jews in the days of Moses. But (so the

argument runs) we are no longer a primitive peo-

ple; we are modern, some of us ultra-modern, a

few of us the last word in modernity. We are not
oriental, but occidental. Ours is not an agricul-

tural but an urban and industrial civilization. So

the code of the children of Israel in the wilderness

or in the Promised Land, while suitable for a race

of nomads 3000 years ago, is not appropriate for

our own sophisticated and complicated civilization.

The theory sounds learned. But suppose we

translate the academic terminology into simple and

concrete terms. Let us ask, does the proponent of

that plausible theory mean that “Thou shalt not

steal” was a necessary commandment for a tribe of

migrating cattlemen, but unnecessary for modern

politicians or flnanciers? Or that “Thou shalt not

kill” had a meaning for primitive cave men or the

sheiks of the day® Abraham, but that there is no



10 THE MORAL LAW

need of it amongst the gangsters today? Or was

adultery wrong in King David’s time, but no sin

in ours?

It was a wise critic who warned us always to

“disentangle the reality of things from the trickery

of words.” Theft and murder and adultery were

wrong 10,000 years ago, and they are wrong today.

They are wrong in the orient and the Occident, in

spite of Kipling’s ruffian who desired to be taken

“east of Suez where there ain’t no Ten Command-

ments.” A little horse sense is sometimes better
than a lot of pretentious philosophy.

One might indefinitely continue the list of the

learned—or the pseudo-learned—^who attempt to
provide philosophical respectability for disregard of

the Ten Commandments.

Some six months ago. Professor William P.

Montague of Columbia University approached the

matter from what seems a new point of view. He

is not opposed to morality. On the contrary, he

professes to preach a higher morality, a morality

so high that it doesn’t depend on God, either for its

origin or for its sanction. In an address before the

Yale Divinity School he advocated that religion

should no longer be considered a foundation for

morality. He said

:

“It is my thesis that true morality is without
sanction. ... To make religion the basis of

morality, to make the obligation to follow the bet-

ter way and to do the noble thing contingent upon

the will of a god, is not only to degrade the nature

both of morality and of religion : it is to put their

^ery existence in jeopardy.”

That is to say, if I understand the professor,

morality stands or falls of itself. It needs no pro-



THE MOKAL LAW 11

mulgation from God, and no sanction from God.

If so, the Ten Commandments of course are a super-

fluity, perhaps an impertinence. Man is a law unto

himself. He needs no God to tell him what to do,

and still less a God to tell him what will happen to

him if he does not do it.

I hope I may be pardoned if I express a distrust

of all such excessively flattering estimates of the

mind and heart of man. It is not well for man to

think himself independent of God. Getting rid of

God and expecting human morality to remain is like

expecting a shadow without any substance, or an

echo, without any sound. There is no man so in-

wardly enlightened that he needs no direction from

on high. Have we not already said that ethics is un-

certain like everything else in this sadly disarranged

contemporary world? And if you eliminate God and

Divine Authority, I fear you will have only confu-

sion worse confounded.

Is there not indeed a superabundance of evi-

dence of that confusion? Take, for example, these

despondent sentences from Walter Lippmann’s Pre-

face to Morals:

“Of all the bewilderments of the present age,”

he says, “none is greater than that of the con-

scientious and candid moralist himself. . . When

customs are unsettled, as they are in the modern

world ... it is presumptuous to issue moral com-

mandments, for in fact nobody has authority to

command. It is useless to command when nobody

has the disposition to obey. It is futile when

nobody really knows exactly what to command.,

. . . ‘The good,’ said the Greek moralist, is ‘that

which all things aim at’ : we may perhaps take this;



12 THE MORAL LAW

to mean that the good is that which men would

wish to do if they knew what they were doing.”

I think I have never met a more desolate expres-

sion than that
—
“what men would wish to do if

they knew what they were doing!” Yet those words

were written not in irony by a cynic but in dead

earnest by an intelligent and conscientious student

of moral problems. His hopelessness can be under-

stood only by those who have read a good deal of

modern philosophy. St. Paul said “Unhappy man

that I am, the good that I will, that I do not, and

the evil that I vdll not, that I do.” St. Augustine

also has many heart-rending complaints to the

same effect in his “Confessions.” But the modern

man is unhappier than St. Paul or St. Augustine

even in their unregenerate days. They at least

knew the good from the bad, the right from the

wrong. But the man whose mind has been un-

settled and whose heart has been torn by the con-

fusions and contradictions of modern ethics, con-

fesses that he doesn’t even know good from bad,

right from wrong.

There can be no cure for this dismal condition

unless there be a Moral Code having authority not

from man but from God. It is of course true that

there is implanted in every human soul a primary

rudimentary knowledge of right and wrong. And

-one might be tempted to say, therefore, that a man

in doubt about morals need only consult his own

heart and conscience. So it may have been before

man’s heart became corrupted, his conscience clouded

with sin and doubt, and his mind upset in these

latter days with the bewildering contradictions of

rival philosophical systems. But, however clear

and sure man’s conscience may have been when it



THE MORAL LAW 13

came new from the hand of the Creator, one thing

is certain, man is not now a law unto himself. In

fact, a condition in which every man would be a law

unto himself would be sheer nihilism.

We need authority, certainty, infallibility. “If
the trumpet speak an uncertain sound, who shall

gird himself for the battle?” The only trumpet

that rings clear and true and unmistakable in the

moral world is the Divine Clarion proclaiming

“Thus sayeth the Lord!”

The Ten Commandments are not the voice of

man: they are the revelation of the mind and the

will of the Almighty. The children of Israel cried

in olden days to Moses, “Speak thou unto us and we

will hear, let not the Lord speak unto us lest we

die.” “Not so,” cries Thomas a Kempis, the Chris-

tian saint, “not so. Lord, not so I beseech Thee, but

rather with the prophet Samuel I humbly and

earnestly entreat ‘Speak Lord for thy servant hear-

eth.’ ” And so the Lord speaks directly to the soul,

but lest the still small voice be inaudible or mis-

understood, God thunders corroboration from the

Mount. But whether He whisper or whether He

thunder, the message is the same, the infallible,

everlasting moral law, in brief the Ten Command-

ments.



14 THE MORAL LAW

CONSCIENCE
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 16, M30)

It often happens that a very familiar word is

commonly misunderstood. Take for example the

word that shall concern us in this talk
—

“conscience.”

Everyone pays at least lip-service to conscience.

Everyone thinks, or pretends to think, that con-

science is somehow sacred and inviolable. Even

those who don’t believe in God, often insist that

they honor conscience more than those who do be-

lieve in Him. In fact, certain agnostics tell us that

they decline to believe, not because they love religion

less but because they love conscience more. Even

those who reject belief in the soul, still sometimes

hold to conscience. Now here is an anomaly. Con-

science, the voice of God, the voice of the soul, still

revered by those who reject God and the soul!

What is this wonderful, mysterious, vener-

able thing called conscience? Many philoso-

phers and moralists have attempted a definition.

Schopenhauer (an exception to the rule that every-

one reveres conscience) analyzes it as though it were

some sort of chemical compound and declares con-

science to be composed of equal parts of fear,

superstition, prejudice, vanity and custom. Even

more contemptuous was Bradlaugh, a kind of Eng-

lish Bob Ingersoll, who said that conscience is only

a spasm of the diaphragm, like a sneeze or a cough.

Decent people generally will find such statements

sacrilegiously flippant, but I doubt if the brazen

infidels are more to be blamed than those timid

agnostics, who “half believe they half believe, half

doubt the substance of their own half doubt,” and



THE MOEAL LAW 15

therefore attempt to hold to conscience without

God and without the soul. Speaking frankly, if

there is no God, nothing is either good or bad, right

or wrong. In that case, conscience, which purports

to tell right and wrong, good and bad, is a deln.sion.

If there be no soul, man is only a brute animal (dis-

guise the ugly fact as you may) and a brute animal

can have no conscience. If we get rid of God and the

soul, logically we shall have to go all the way and

get rid of conscience. We cannot eat our cake and

have it too.

Infidels ridicule conscience, and agnostics hold

it insecurely. But even religious minded persons

not seldom have a perilously vague concept of con-

science. To judge from the conversation of certain

amateur theologians, one might imagine that con-

science is an instinct, or a sentiment, or a feeling,

irresponsible, and a law unto itself, a solitary some-

thing living a life of its own, somewhere in the

inner man, fulminating its commands, with reason

or without reason, superior even to divine revela-

tion.

The truth is that conscience is nothing more or

less than the human mind itself uttering its judg-

ments upon matters that pertain not to speculation

but to action, and more particularly to action that

is imminent—action to be performed here and now
and not at some future time. Let me illustrate. Ham-

let in the famous soliloquy proposes the question “To

be or not to be.” He ponders “Whether ’tis nobler in

the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrage-

ous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of

troubles, and by opposing end them.” As far as

speculation is concerned, he seems to lean to the idea

that it were better to “make his quietus with a bare



16 THE MORAL LAW

bodkin,” and so to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” But

just when that thought might lead to action, con-

science steps in, warning him that “the Everlasting

hath fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” and

that therefore suicide is a sin.

Now the mind of Hamlet, or anybody’s mind

which considers the question speculatively, is

the self-same mind that commands “Thou shalt

not.” The mind reflecting upon an intellectual

problem is called the intellect or the reason.

The mind commanding good and forbidding evil is

called conscience. Conscience therefore is nothing

else but the mind issuing a dictate as to the mor-

ality of an action.

But even though conscience is essentially hu-

man, it is endowed with quasi-divine prerogatives.

Indeed the importance of conscience in our the-

ology is amazing and perhaps all but incredible to

persons who are not familiar with Catholic moral

teaching. For there exists, I fear, a rather general

suspicion amongst those not of our fold, that be-

cause we Catholics believe the Church to possess

infallible authority, we must therefore deny the

dignity of conscience. There is an old phrase about

the Chancellor of England being “keeper of the

king’s conscience.” And perhaps there are some

who fancy that the Church is held to be the keeper

of the conscience of Catholics. But no institution

and no person, no Church, no pope can claim

dominion over conscience. Amongst all inalienable

rights, the rights of conscience come first. A man
has a right to call his soul his own. A right and a
duty. No one may usurp another’s conscience. Nor

may any man surrender conscience. In the moral



THE MORAL LAW 17

life conscience comes first and last ; first, since

the soul is antecedent to the Church ; last, because

even when the Church has spoken, there remains

conscience as the last court of appeal. Beyond

priest, preacher, prophet
;
beyond the Bible and the

Church, a man may appeal to conscience. We may
even make bold to say that in a certain sense, a man

may appeal from God to conscience. God may

speak, God may thunder. But if man does not hear,

or hearing does not understand, he still will be

saved if he follow conscience. John Stuart Mill

wrote with a touch of melodrama unexpected in a

philosopher, “If an omnipotent being can condemn

me to hell for refusing to believe what I see no rea-

son for believing, then to hell I will go.” He meant

his pronunciamento to be a defiance of Christian

teaching. But the Catholic theologian will find no

fault in it, except the irreverent phrasing. A man
cannot go to hell except by violating conscience.

Catholic faith in this matter has been forcefully

expressed by the Fourth Ecumenical Lateran Coun-

cil which declared: “He who acts against his con-

science loses his soul.”

On the other hand, he who follows conscience,

right or wrong, cannot be lost. Cardinal Newman,

who has assembled the teaching of many theolo-

gians on this matter, quotes a Spanish Franciscan,

Antonio Corduba, who says: “In no manner is it

lawful to act against conscience, even though a law

or a superior commands it,” and this same doctrine

is reinforced by Natalis Alexander, a French

Dominican, who says: “If in the judgment of con-

science, though a mistaken conscience, a man is

persuaded that what his superior commands is dis-

pleasing to God, he is bound not to obey.” And



18 THE MORAL LAW

says Newman, “the word ‘superior’ certainly in-

cludes the pope.”

Finally the Cardinal cites a long list of

the highest authorities in Catholic moral theo-

logy who declare that “conscience must always

be obeyed whether it is a true conscience or an

erroneous conscience and whether the error is the

fault of the person thus erring or not.” “If.” h(

adds, “a man is to blame for being in error, which

he might have escaped had he been more in earnest,

for that error he is answerable to God, but still he

must act according to that error while he is in it,

if in full sincerity he thinks the error to be truth.”

To put it in still more succinct form, a bad action

done in good conscience becomes good, and a good

action with a bad conscience becomes bad. For

example, we read that Robin Hood stole from the

rich to give to the poor. He counted that a virtue.

It was therefore no sin—for him. A head hunter
in the wilds of Borneo considers it no crime to slink

through the jungle, catch a man from a neighbor-

ing tribe unawares, lop off his head and carry it

home as a trophy. He knows no better. He com-

mits no sin. An ancient Spartan or a Roman Stoic,

who, weary of life, deliberately fell upon his sword,

or the modern Japanese who commits hara-kiri, is

not guilty of sin if, forming his conscience on the

moral code of his country, or of his religion, he

thinks his action virtuous. If Oliver Cromwell was

so thorough-going a fanatic as to imagine God had

chosen him to obliterate the Irish off the face of the

earth, the butcheries he committed in Ireland were

not murder. And—not to prolong this catalogue
of examples—if Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus
Christ to death was conscious of no wrong, he was



THE MORAL LAW 19

guilty of no crime. Our Savior Himself said: “The

hour cometh when whosoever killeth you will think

that he doth a service to God.” If he think he doth

a service to God, God will not condemn him. More

than that, he shall have reward in heaven for doing

what he thought was good, even though it was

multiple homicide.

It must be obvious then that conscience is not

infallible. It can be mistaken. After all, have we

not said that conscience is the mind of man, and not

a special, separate, supernatural faculty? The

mind of man is liable to all kinds of mistakes,

even most tragic and ghastly mistakes. The mind

of man is clouded with sin and error. His own

sins and the sins of the race, both tend to obscure

the natural light of reason and even the super-

natural light of grace. And when the mind, the

mind that speculates and reasons, is darkened,

conscience, the mind that commands, is sure to

blunder.

But let no one think that since a man is justified

if he act in accordance with conscience, he is there-

fore excused from the duty of enlightening his con-

science. It is quite possible to do an action in good

conscience today and to do the same action in bad

conscience tomorrow. Yesterday it was no sin.

Today it is a sin. Between times a man may have
had the chance to learn that his action was wrong.

Once he has learned, he sins if he repeats the action.

St. Paul, for example, persecuted the followers of

Jesus. He was hounding them to death. But up to
the moment of the dramatic episode on the road to

Damascus, he committed no sin in killing Chris-

tians. After he had heard the voice of Jesus, it

would have been murder. Of course a man -may



20 THE MORAL LAW

see the light, and yet turn his back upon it. King

Agrippa, to whom in later days Paul preached the

Gospel, confessed “a little more and thou per-

suadest me to be a Christian.” If the king refused

to go ahead with “the little more,” fearing that to

adopt the Christian religion would involve unwel-

come obligations, he may have been from that

moment in bad faith, that is to say, in bad con-

science. No man can be saved who knowingly turns

his back upon truth and shuts his eyes to the light.

Inculpable, invincible ignorance excuses from sin,

but wilful ignorance is itself a sin and the cause of

a thousand sins. Indeed the voluntary and per-

manent blinding of the eyes of the mind is the un-

pardonable sin. It is the duty of the individual not

only to act in accordance with conscience, but, ac-

cording to his opportunity, to develop and perfect

his conscience. One who refuses to be enlightened

or neglects the chance to be enlightened, and then

alleges that he is acting “in good concsience,” is

really acting in bad conscience.

There is a doctrine current amongst certain

moralists of our day to the effect that morality

means, after all, only conformity with the custom

of the time and the place in which we find our-

selves. Catholic ethics has no countenance for such

a theory. If a man violates his own conscience to

conform with public opinion, he is in the way to

lose his soul. No man may act upon another man’s

conscience. If my conscience says a thing is
wrong, though your conscience calls it right, I must

follow my conscience. It would be a sin for me to
follow yours. If in the day of Judgment I say

“Lord, I suppressed my own conscience, and adopted
my neighbor’s,” I shall hear from the Great Judge,



THE MORAL LAW 21

“You shall be judged by your own conscience, and

by no other!” Likewise, if ten thousand neighbors

or ten million, or a hundred million neighbors think

that a certain action or a certain course of conduct

is good, and I think it bad, I must not do that action.

Athanasius contra munchim. Athanasius against the

world ! Conscience against the world

!

If, therefore, while we exalt conscience above

priest and church and pope, and even seem to make

conscience superior to the Ten Commandments of

God, a person hastily judging, might declare our

doctrine dangerous, I am sure that all deliberate

and accurate thinkers will understand that, on the

contrary the supremacy and the independence of

conscience involve most serious responsibilities.

Conscience is not free in the sense of being wild

and reckless and irresponsible. Noblesse oblige. No-

bility has its obligations. The higher the nature of

man, the more exacting will be his judgment. The

nobler his prerogatives the greater his moral respon-

sibility. Conscience makes him like a God upon the

earth, but in consequence he must walk the earth

like a God.

In these days of mass thinking and mass action,

when so many seem to think that “everybody’s doing

it” is a valid principle of moral conduct, and when,

furthermore, there prevails the curious notion that

private morality is one thing and public morality an-

other, and that the two are essentially different, I

feel that I cannot conclude a talk on conscience with-

out a word on what I may call the public conscience.

It is a Christian and Catholic principle that no

man is free to do for his country what he would not
do in his private capacity as a man. We demand of
the President and of every man in authority under



22 THE MORAL LAW

our Government, of every diplomat and senator and

congressman that, as- far as he is concerned, he will

direct the course of the nation as he would direct the

course of his own individual action, strictly on prin-

ciple, and in complete accordance with the dictates

of conscience. In other words, we believe and teach

that the basis of all governmental morality as well

as of all personal morality is in the Ten Command-

ments.

A man must not steal, a nation must not steal. A

man must not covet his neighbor’s goods, a nation

must not covet its neighbor’s goods. A man must

not lie. A nation must not lie. A diplomat must not

lie for his country. A man must not bear false wit-

ness; a nation must not bear false witness. A man
must not kill except in defense of his life, or the

lives of his family or his neighbor
;
likewise with the

same exceptions a nation must not kill.

Now these statements I know are platitudinous.

But they have been flatly contradicted by the action

of diplomats in all countries and in all times. Ol

course, I would not be understood to say, except ir

the metaphorical sense, that a nation has a soul, and

therefore a conscience. A nation may indeed be re-
warded for its virtues and punished for its mis-

deeds. But the nation will not, as such, stand before

the bar of Eternal Justice on the last day. We go
to judgment one by one. Alone, we shall meet God

alone. We shall not be swept into Heaven on the
skirts of our country, any more than we shall be

swept in on the skirts of our Church. In that dread

moment which shall determine our everlasting des-

tiny, we shall stand or fall,

—

alone. This I take to be

the most tremendous and magnificent,—or, which
may God forbid,—^the most tragic consequence of
our fidelity or our infidelity to conscience.



THE MORAL LAW 23

REUGION AS AN OBUGATION
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 23, 1930)

On the tablets of Moses, the First Commandment

read : “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have

strange gods before me.” But when our Savior was

asked, “which is the first and greatest Command-

ment?” He amplified and interpreted the Mosaic

reading, thus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

with all thy mind and with all thy strength,” and He

went on to add the second, indicating that the two

are inseparable. “The Second Commandment,” He

said, “is like to this, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as

thyself.’ ‘In these two Commandments is the whole

law and the prophets.’ ” Indeed the Old Testament

and the New, with all their beauty and charm and

spiritual inspiration are comprised in the love of

God and of one’s fellow-man.

The psalms and the other sapiential books,

though they go deep into the unfathomable riches

of religious thought, have discovered no wisdom

beyond love, human and divine. The Gospels which

contain the very words that fell from the lips of

Incarnate Truth have no inspiration, no revelation

more illuminating than this,—that God is love, and
that religion is love of God, and of man, the image

of God. Vast libraries of pretentious books have

been written in the attempt to expound what men

call a philosophy of life, but there is no philosophy of

life so sublime as that which comes out of the mouths

of babes who prattle, “God made me to know Him,

to love Him and serve Him in this life, and to be

happy with Him forever in the next.” Philosophers

may isolate themselves in their studies for a life



24 THE MORAL LAW

time, or they may sometimes seek solitude and again

mingle with men in search of wisdom
;
they may

scrutinize the heavens above
;
they may penetrate the

earth beneath and the waters under the earth in

the attempt to uncover the mj'^stery of the universe,

and to construct therefrom a plan for human life;

they may, like the wise old pope of whom Brown-

ing speaks, “search many hearts beginning v/ith

their own,” but in the end they can have nothing

more to offer than what is contained in those half-

dozen words “Love of God, love of man.” All phil-

osophy from Socrates to Bergson is true or false ac-

cordin gas it approximates to that wisdom or falls

short of it. The law, the prophets, the gospels, phil-

osophy, ethics, religion, all that man lives for, all

that man lives hy eventually arrive at the point

where the Master of Masters, Jesus Christ, com-

mences: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with

all thy heart and with thy whole soul, and with all

thy mind and with all thy strength.”

Now in these bewildered days, there are some

—

not a few, I fear,—who say sadly : “The love of one’s
fellow man I recognize as a duty, and perhaps a

possibility. But how can I love God? And how can

God command that I love Him? And how can I love

Him unless I first believe in Him? If I had faith,

[ might proceed to love. But I have neither faith

nor love for God.”

Now be it remarked that those who speak thus

are by no means all militant atheists or what is

called “rank” infidels. They do not blaspheme God o^

indulge in any other melodramatic and hysterical

anti-religious performances. Only once in my life

have I heard a man curse God. Of course we have

some ranting atheists, who go about frothing at the



THE MORAL LAW 25

mouth against God. But 1 suspect that their rant-

ing is a kind of defense mechanism. They protest too

much. For why should anyone vociferate madly

against something that does not exist?

But with such as these I am not now concerned.

I rather aim to help those who say like an acquaint-

ance of mine, “I have nothing against religion, your

religion or any other man’s; but as for me, it isn’t

in me. I am simply non-religious.”

Now I rather fear that in our grandfathers’

day, or somewhat further back, even so neutral an

unbeliever would have received “short-shrift.” Our

ancestors felt that if a man did not believe it was be-

cause he would not, it was incredible that he could

not. Unbelief was held to be in every instance crim-

inal, the fruit of satanical pride or of carnal sin.

And it is probable that in many cases our ances-

tors’ judgment was just. Our Savior Himself, gen-

tle and tolerant as He was, cried out against those

who were stiff-necked, hard of heart and slow to

believe; and He put His finger on the sore spot

when He called them “a wicked and adulterous gen-

eration.” In His day there were many who complain-

ed that they could not believe His doctrine, when

their real objection was not to the doctrine, but

the life implied in the doctrine. In our day there

are those who denounce the creed, when their real

stumbling block is the Commandments. They cry

out against Dogma. But it is not Dogma, it is Moral

that irks them.

However, it cannot be denied that there are on

the other hand a considerable number of persons

of respectable, if not altogether irreproachable char-

acter, who find it impossible to believe, and who

sincerely lament their unbelief. Some of them ad-



26 THE MORAL LAW

mit that without faith they are mentally miser-

able. They say they envy us who have the faith

and that they would make any earthly sacrifice for

the gift of faith. They have the will to believe but

they doubt that they have the right to believe.

Such persons as these deserve kindly considera-

tion. Their unbelief is a misfortune rather than a

fault. They have fallen perhaps under the spell of

eloquent speakers or brilliant writers who beguile

them with “persuasive words of human wisdom.”

They have listened to some deceptive oracle of the

drawing room or the smoking room, and they have

not philosophy enough to detect his plausible falla-

cies. Perhaps they move in ostensibly intellectual

circles where religion is always attacked and never

defended, or in social circles wherein it is consid-

ered bad form to go to church, to pray, or to be in

any way religious. They have succumbed, not to bold

and blatant atheism, but to the polite agnosticism of

the intelligentsia.

Or, in some rare cases, unbelief arises from a

purely interior mental conflict. “The flesh lusteth

against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.”

But more agonizing still, spirit contends against

spirit, mind against mind itself, on the battlefield

of man’s soul. The mind believes and the same mind

disbelieves. And when a man’s own mind battles

against itself, the poor fellow hardly knows which

is his real self, his better self.

Nevertheless it remains true that man is com-

manded to believe in God and to love Him; not in-

vited but commanded, and not by some prophet or

preacher, but by God himself. If, because of some

twist of the mind or flaw in conscience, the man

does not hear the voice of God clear and true in



THE MOEAL LAW 27

his soul, he may, I dare say, plead ignorance in the

day of Judgment. But no man can exculpate himself

if, through laziness or cowardice, he abandons all

effort to discover religious truth. He may insist that

he has been anything but lazy. He has studied until

his head is dizzy with conflicting opinions, he has

been listening to every self-appointed expounder

of philosophy, and has become in consequence be-

wildered. The wise thing to do in such a case is

to retire within himself, shut the door of his heart

against the noises of controversy and hear what the

Lord God will speak within him.

In other words, a man should pray. Let no one

say that he cannot pray. It is as natural to pray as

to breathe. William James, who knew something of

psychology in its true sense, the science of the soul,

said : “I read many reasons why we should pray and

many reasons why we should not pray. But few

seem to remember that we pray because we are

made that way.” The impulse to pray is human.

To smother that impulse is to be inhuman. Not that

prayer is a purely natural act. It is supernatural.

No man can say “The Lord Jesus, but by the Holy

Spirit.” Divine grace is indispensable to prayer, but

grace is not denied to any man who follows hi.s

nobler natural impulses and does what in him lies.

I remember hearing the president of a state uni-

versity, speaking to an assembly of thousands of un-

dergraduates, declare boldly, “To be irreligious is

to be degenerate.” That’s a strong word, but if it be

degeneracy in a human being to have lost a human

function, I think the president was right. It is

human to be religious. It is non-human to be irre-

ligious. When a man admits that he is non-religious
he certainly pays himself no compliment. My friend



28 THE MORAL LAW

said he was simply non-religious. But he would

not say, “I am simply non-intellectual,” or

“I am simply non-rsocial,” for intellectuality and at

least a certain degree of sociability are necessary

human attributes. Not to have them is to be some-

what less than human. But religion is also a prim-

ary, essential, indispensable attribute of man. Leave

a man alone, don’t smother his soul with multitu-

dinous and perhaps fallacious opinions, let him con-

sult his own human nature rather than books, and

he will be religious. “Know thyself,” said Socrates,

“this is all wisdom.” And St. Augustine prays,

“Lord that I may know myself; that I may know

Thee.” He who knows himself will know God. He

that knows God will love God.

Furthermore, if a man is all at sea because he

has read this and that and heard thus and so, for

and against religion, it seems obvious to me that

he should have recourse to a Teacher, not some phil-

osopher making “Guesses at the Riddle of Exis

fence,” but a Teacher with Divine Authority. Jesus

Christ was such a teacher. Men with distracted

souls and perplexed minds came to Him because

as they said, “He speaks not like the Scribes and

Pharisees, but as one having authority!” The doc-

tors of the law were accustomed to tell the people

“Thus sayeth Hillel,” or on the other side of the

argument “Thus sayeth Shammai.” True pro-

phets said “Thus sayeth the Lord!” But Jesus,

calmly and with absolute assurance said “I say unto

you!” He spoke as God! “The Father speaketh and

I speak! He that heareth me, heareth the Father.”

And today there is a Teacher upon the earth,

a Church that says of herself, “As the Living Father



THE MORAL LAW 29

hath sent Christ, Christ hath sent me. He that hear-

eth me, heareth Christ.”

One thing is certain, if there be no infallible

authority here on earth entitled to use the majestic

formula, “Thus sayeth the 'Lord,” then we must

all grope around in the dark as best we may, and

even if we stumble upon truth we shall not know

it. Like Pontius Pilate, we may be looking truth

in the eye; we may have truth at our finger tips,

and yet say “what is truth?” We are all blind, and
our teachers are but blind leaders of the blind, un-

less there be some one who can speak with

authority and not as the self-confessed agnostics,

who in the last resort can only say, “I know not.”

Unless there be certainty, faith is impossible, and

love is impossible, religion is impossible.

But if a man has tried all the variegated and

kaleidoscopic philosophies, and has only been be-

wildered by them, why shall he not, if he really

seeks faith and love and religion, deliberately and

deeply investigate the only Church confident enough

of her Divine Mission to claim infallibility. No

earnest seeker has done all in his power until he

has done that.

However, the inquiring mind must not expect

or demand an overmastering demonstration of the

truth of religion. The mind is not bludgeoned into

belief, beaten and bruised until it cries “Credo!”

The will also remains free. It must not be coerced.

Christ said “Go out into the highways and byways

and compel them to come in.” But he did not mean

go out, over-power them and drag them in uncon-

scious. The arguments for religion are not so ab-

solute that only an imbecile or an idiot could resist

them. They do not compel assent. The assent of



30 THE MORAL LAW

faith remains a free act. Religion is to a degree

natural, but it is not an irresistible impulse. It is

supernatural, but not the result of a divine con-

pulsion.

If a man is to believe, he must bring the will

into play as well as the intellect. As some one has

wisely said of St. Augustine: “He reached his de-

cision by throwiing his heart (that is, his will) into

the scales.”

Now this, I am aware, is held a capital sin in the

eyes of unbelievers. They scorn what William James

calls “the will to believe.” Throwing the heart into

the scale is to them the same as loading -the dice.

They seem to think that a man should come to be-

lief, if at all, by the mind and the mind alone. All

the rest of him—feelings, instincts, emotions, even
the free will,—must stand aside, watch the intellect
struggling for faith, but remain coldly, rigidly neu-

tral.

There are two objections to that program. First,

it cannot be done. Second, if it could be done it

would be inhuman. A man is not a machine, not
even a thinking machine. Man is something more

than mind. Man is heart and mind and soul, to say

nothing of flesh and blood. In a true man, heart and

mind and soul interact upon one another, assist

one another, cooperate with one another. And so it

is when one makes an act of faith. “To believe,” says

our greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, “is

an act of the understanding adhering to divine

truth by command of the will, which is moved by

the Grace of God.” (2.2 qu. ii, art. 9.)

Now in spite of divine grace, it always remains

possible for man to withhold his will, or to refuse

the command of God. In that case he sins against



THE MOEAL LAW 31

faith—against religion, against the First Command-
ment, against God Himself. And so irreligion or un-

belief is a sin.

Let me add one very important consideration.

The intellect and the will, to make a moral act,

must work together, not at odds with each other.

If the mind does not see its way, the will must not

drive it. To believe, or pretend to believe, when the

mind sees no reason to believe is hypocritical and

immoral.

There is a stanza in Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

“Let knowledge grow from more to more

But more of reverence in us dwell

That heart and mind according well

May make one music as before

But vaster.”

I take that to be good poetry. I know it to be

good theology. Faith, love, religion is the result of

“heart and mind according well,” under the direc-

tion of Divine Grace. The first Commandment there-

fore resolves itself into this: Be yourself. Be your

best self. Be human—completely human. Be the full
measure of a man. You are not completely man un-

less you are religious, with all your heart, and all

your soul, with your whole mind and with your

whole strength.



32 THE MORAL LAW

PARENTAL AUTHORlTy AND

STATE AUTHORITY

(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, November 30, 1930)

Every serious-minded person is asking nowadays

“what’s the matter with the moral world?” Not

that the political world is serene, or th6 financial or

the industrial world. But the particular sore spot

in contemporary civilization seems to be the world

of morals. Not only preachers and reformers, tradi-

tionally supposed to be prone to pessimism, but par-

ents and teachers, principals of high schools and

presidents of colleges, philosophers (professional

and amateur), welfare workers, especially in chil-

dren’s courts, judges on the bench; the police (from

the- patrolmen on the beat to the chief at headquar-

ters), novelists, essayists, dramatists; the intelli-

gentsia and the Babbitts, the m.an in the street

(whether it be Main Street or Wall Street, or per-

haps Broadway), all sorts and conditions of men, no

matter how widely and deeply they may differ on

other matters agree that the moral world is topsy-

turvy. Ethical standards that had been fixed for

centuries and that seemed everlasting are unsettled.

Actions that used to be called sins are now condoned

or even exalted as virtues, and on the other hand

traditional virtues are looked at askance.

Some observers of the “liberal” or “radical” type

profess to be pleased at the revolution in morals;

most sensible people lament it as a calamity; a few

rather timid souls, having little experience and less

historical knowledge, are crying that nothing like



THE MORAL LAW
’

68

this has been seen before in all the history of the

world.

When it comes to assigning the cause or locating

the blame, some say it is the war, others remember

that conditions were alarming even before the war.

Some—not a few—attribute the trouble to a mater-
ialistic-evolutionistic education. Socialists and com-

munists blame the excesses of capitalism, financial

scandals, stock market gambling and the like. Cap-

italists, in turn, declare that there is a Bolshevist

conspiracy to demoralize the world.

In America a good many profess to think that

Prohibition is the cause of all our troubles. Others

remind us that the same evils exist also in Europe

where they laugh at Prohibition, and so the argu-

mient runs, or not so much argument as crimination

and recrimination.

But it seems to me that the all-important ques-

tion is not how we got into the mess, but how we are

to get out of it, not what’s the matter with the world,

but what are we going to do about it?

I dare say that on that question also every man

has his own opinion
;
but perhaps I may be permitted

to propose my panacea;—yet not mine but that of
the vast and venerable Church to which I belong,

the Church of infinite experience and of ages-old

wisdom. Do not assume that I am immediately go-
ing to suggest religion as the only cure-all of social

evils, and the savior of civilization. Religion, of

course, would save the world, but religion is gone

from the souls of millions of people and you cannot

turn the mill-wheel with the water that is past.

Nor let any one imagine that where religion

fails, law will succeed. Some superficial thinkers
cry “there ought to be a law” for this and for that.



34 THE MOKAL LAW

But we have more laws than we know what to do

with; we are stuffed, choked, suffocated with laws,

and it does seem that the more laws we have, the

fewer we obey.

Recognizing that fact, some five or six countries

in Europe have suspended the operation of their par-

liaments, have selected one man, a dictator, and

have said to him “You be our law!” But that plan

will not work for long. It is too much like putting

a lid on a volcano and sitting on the lid. The vol-

cano! will blow up some day.

Perhaps some one anticipates that my cure-all

is education. Education is indeed often proposed as

the remedy for all the ills that society is heir to. As

one of the popular modern prophets has said, “The

race is on between education and catastrophe.” But

I suffer no illusions about education. We have had
universal popular education for a hundred years

past, and yet the very people who hail education as

salvation, loudly declare that we are worse off

morally now than we were before the free or popu-

lar school system was inaugurated, and before col-

leges became multiplied. The man who coined the

phrase, “Education or catastrophe” favors a new

kind of education, but his kind of education would

not forestall catastrophe
;
it would precipitate catas-

trophe.

Well, what then shall save us? To maintain the

suspense no longer—the solution is nothing
novel, nothing spectacular

;
but something very

simple. The salvation of society is in the family,

the reorganization of the family, the recon-

struction of family virtues, parental authority and

filial obedience. The family is the nucleus of all so-

ciety. You can have no prosperous state unless the



THE MORAL LAW 35

family is healthy. You can have no effective church

unless the family is sound. Every human being who

comes into the world is born into two societies, a

family and a state, and traditionally into three, a

family, a state, and a church, and of these three, the

family comes first and is of most fundamental im-

portance. The family is the organic cell from which

all human societies are constructed.

Now any doctor will tell you that if a man is sick,

he cannot be cured unless by medicine and nourish-

ment and rest you can reconstruct the broken-down

cells in his body. Tuberculosis can be cured by the

rebuilding of myriads upon myriads of cells slowly

and, as it were, one by one. Cancer will be cured

when a way is discovered to rebuild the cells faster

than the disease breaks them down. No matter what

the disease may be, even though it appears on the

surface of the body, it can be cured only from with-

in. You cannot cure Bright’s Disease by slapping a

plaster on your back. You cannot cure boils by rub-

bing on an ointment. You don’t really cure a sallow

skin with rouge. You don’t increase red corpuscles

with a lipstick.

Now society is an organism, that is to say, it is
like a living body. If it is sick, you can’t bring it

back to health with superficial applications. You

must get inside—inside the individual cells. To
complete the analogy, enacting a law to cure a moral

condition is like slapping on a plaster to cure

disease
; to rely upon book-learning as a cure for im-

morality is like going to a beauty parlor to get rid of

indigestion.

Now this is all elementary, so much so that one
is almost ashamed to spend time saying it. But,,

like a good many other elementary facts, it is for-



36 THE MOKAL LAW

gotten. Take, for example, the statesmen who are

trying to patch up this broken world. How do they

go about it? They summon international confer-

ences
;
they meet and debate and lay down rules and

regulations about warships and airplanes and poison

gas and international commerce. But of all absurd

notions (and their name is legion) the silliest is that

a disintegrating civilization can be held together by

conferences or by diplomatic maneuvering. If his-

tory teaches us anything, we ought to know that

the fate of nations does not depend upon the en-

couragement of trade, the payment of war debts,

the adjustment of customs and taxes, the regula-

tion of commercial rivalries, or even upon the sup-

pression of the opium traffic, or the control of the

manufacture and distribution of alcoholic drink.

What doth it profit the state to arrange all these de-

tails if the home, the family, the soul of the state be

lost? Statesmen are careful and troubled about

many things, but one thing is necessary, domestic

morality.

In the days of the decadence of the Roman Em-

pire, the Emperors who, with all their faults, were

less blind than most contemporary statesmen, made

frantic and desperate attempts to reconstruct the

old institution of the Roman family. They failed;

the family was so badly disintegrated that it could

not be built up again, and so the Empire tottered

and fell. It wasn’t so much the barbarians from

without that smashed Rome. It was domestic cor-

ruption. In earlier days, when Rome was healthy

and vigorous, she could have taken on the success-

sive waves of barbarian invasion and turned them

back as a rocky headland turns back the breaking

surf.



THE MORAL LAW 37

Now all these observations are by way of calling

attention to the supreme importance of the Fourth

Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother,

that thou mayest be long lived upon the land which

the Lord thy God will give thee.” It has been fre-

quently remarked that this is the only Command-

ment with a promise, and I hope it is legitimate to

interpret that promise as made to the nation, and

not to the individual. Whether the Lord meant that

one who obeys his parents will live longer than one

who does not, may perhaps be questioned, but one

thing is certain, a nation will not long survive if

parents cannot command and children will not obey.

The Catholic Church includes under that Com-

mandment the entire matter of family discipline, the

duties of parents as well as of children. For, of

course, there is no rule that does not work both

ways. If children have duties to parents, parents

have reciprocal obligations to children.

It is not my purpose to enter into minute detail
with regard either to parental or to filial' duties. I

think it better to present some few fundamental con-

siderations and leave both parents and children to

apply them in the family life.

Parents, then, first of all should be persuaded of

the duty and the dignity of their vocation. The

primary purpose of the union of man and wife is

procreation, and that very word hints at the God-

like prerogative of fathers and mothers. God Him-

self is Creator, and the masterpiece of God’s creation

upon earth is a human being. Men of science are

fond of dilating upon the magnitude and the mys-

tery of the starry firmament. Astronomers tell us

unimaginable, incomprehensible facts about the uni-



38 THE MORAL LAW

verse revealed by the telescope. And on the other

hand biologists insist upon the equally bewildering

mysteries discovered by the microscope. But there

is no marvel in nature that can surpass the miracle

of the origin of a human being. Only God can pro-

duce life, but by a most amazing condescension He

has permitted man and woman to share His divine

prerogative. Under God they say “Let there be

life”; under God they become creators. When a

mother brings forth a child it is as it were a sub-

lime miracle. She might well hold up the babe in

her arms and offer it to God, as the priest in the

Mass elevates the newly consecrated Host in the

sight of God and man. And from that moment the

parents are not only endowed with a quasi-divine

dignity, but with a most sacred responsibility. The

task placed upon them, say rather the vocation with

which they are blessed, is one that requires the use

of high intelligence, as well as affection, and such

difficult virtues as patience and everlasting vigilance.

There can hardly be any vocation that calls for more

devotion, loyalty, self-sacrifice than that of being a

parent. If man and wife have hitherto been careless,

self-indulgent, sinful, they dare not continue to be

so after the birth of a child. Formerly they en-

dangered only their own souls, now they are to a

degree responsible before God for the soul of their

child. They must watch over his physical and men-

tal development, the growth of his moral character,

learn to read the riddle of his personality, and bring

to bear upon his training every ounce of intelligence

and good will that God has given them.

Successfully to rear a child, or a houseful of chil-

dren, is a work more difficult, more worthy of study

and at the same time more interesting and more



THE MORAL LAW 89

praiseworthy than to rule a city or to be president

of a nation. Perhaps that is the reason why there

are so few notably successful parents. The world is

full of incompetent ones. They allege the difficulty

(they call it the impossibility) of bringing up a fam-

ily under modern conditions, in a world that has

grown reckless and immoral, in a society where the

privacy and the sanctity of home life is generally

disregarded
;
where there are so many distractions of

mind, so many influences that over-stimulate the

passions, so much glaring bad example, so much os-

tentation, luxury, artiflciality
;
in an epoch when dis-

obedience and heedlessness, always characteristic of

childhood and of youth, are particularly accentuated.

But they must understand that God expects them to

fulflll their duty, even in spite of the obstacles pre-

sented by an artificial civilization. Modern

parents cannot expect medieval conditions; if they

live in a great American city they must not com-

plain because they are not situated in a quiet, remote

little village of, let us say, the Austrian Tyrol, where

presumably, raising a family is a simple and easy

matter. God gave them love, the impulse to pro-

create, and God will not play them false. With dili-

gence (and again I repeat with intelligence, for I

consider intelligence a prime necessity in a parent),

with good-will and well-balanced affection, with self-

control, with prayer and study of their problem,

with divine grace flowing not for one moment but

permanently into their married life from the Sacra-

ment of Matrimony, they may expect to succeed.
If finally, through no fault of their own, they fail,

wholly or partially, they may be excused, like a priest
who is devoted and energetic and self-sacrificing
but who seems not to get results. Even Jesus Christ



40 THE MORAL LAW

did not save and sanctify all with whom He came

in contact.

Evidently, all these obligations and responsibili-

ties on the parents’ side imply sacred duties on the

part of sons and daughters. It is generally said now-

adays that you cannot command young people to

obey. Catholic moral theology lends no countenance

to such an opinion. Parents have a right and a duty

to command, and children are bound under pain of

sin to obey the just commands of parents.

Fortunately, young men and young women have

naturally high ideals. If they do wrong it may be

partially on account of the innate evil tendencies,

but more often it is because they are ashamed or

afraid to be unlike their chums. But if you know

how to elicit their true interior convictions, you will

find them, I believe, in most cases highly idealistic.

Tell them, therefore, to live their own life and not to

be apes of the vices and follies of persons with whom
they come in contact. When they need advice, they
must have it, and having it they are morally bound

to heed it. It is not a matter of option, but of divine

command : “Honor thy father and thy mother
!”

When fathers and mothers and children live to-
gether in a happy home, you have the acme of civili-

zation. The home at its best is a shrine, a temple, a
citadel of defense against an evil world, a center

from which virtue and healing go forth for the re-

generation of the race.



THE MORAL LAW 41

CRIME AND WARFARE
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. GilUs.i C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 7, 1930)

The Fifth Commandment is short and sharp.

Thou Shalt Not Kill! Any commentary on that clear,

curt command might seem superfluous. Could any

four little words be simpler,—Thou Shalt Not Kill!
So I can understand if one should say, “That fifth

commandment is clear as crystal. Don’t cloud it.

Don’t complicate it. Leave it alone.”

And yet a moment’s reflection will show that

even that simplest and plainest of texts gives rise

to scores of questions. And not all these questions

are captious. Some of them are quite honest and

legitimate. For example: “Thou Shalt Not Kill!”

Does that mean that no man must go to war, and

and that every soldier is a murderer? “Thou Shalt

Not Kill!” What? Not even in self-defense? Not

even in defense of father or mother, or wife or

child? Neither in defense of life nor in defense of

virtue? “Thou Shalt Not Kill!” Is capital punish-

ment, then, a crime? Are the judge on the bench and

the legislature back of the judge, the prosecuting

attorney and the jury, the warden and the execu-

tioner, the attendant who leads a criminal to the

electric chair, perhaps even the clergyman who

walks with the prisoner—are they one and all mur-
derers?

Or—^to take a totally different kind of problem:
in child-birth if the mother’s life is imperilled may

the life of the babe in the womb be crushed out by

a physician to save the mother ? Or yet again, may a

patient suffering unendurable pain and crying for

death be “put out of his suffering” ? And what about



42 THE MORAL LAW

suicide? Certain ancient Stoic philosophers, Greek

and Roman, condoned it, or even recommended it.

Chinese and Japanese consider it in certain circum-

stances a matter of honor. In some elite military or-

ganizations if an officer has shown the white feath-

er, he is handed a revolver and left to himself. Shall

he abide by the code and shoot his brains out?

Again, if two men, after shipwreck, are clinging

to a bit of wreckage that will hold only one, may

one purposely slip off to give the other a chance?

Was the companion of Robert Scott, the explorer,

justified when he walked out of the tent to sure

death in an Antarctic blizzard, so there might be

one less mouth to feed?

Take yet another species of problem: If a wo-

man’s virtue is 'in peril, may she leap from a high

window even at the risk of death? Or may she kill

the man who threatens her chastity? If a woman

has already been outraged, may a committee of citi-

zens spare her the further ignominy of appearing in

court, take the law into their own hands and lynch

the assailant? In pioneer days on the frontier, were

the vigilantes justified in hanging horse thieves

without court procedure?

You see there is no end of problems that flow

spontaneously from that simple, clear-cut little com-

mandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill!” Answer these

questions, solve these problems as you may, you can-

not deny that there is room for honest argument at

least about some of them.

Obviously I have not time to discuss all these

questions, but since I have mentioned them I dare

not leave them hanging in the air. So permit me to

answer most of them swiftly and categorically, not

out of my own mind (personally I am no infallible



THE MORAL LAW 43

moralist) but out of the mind of my Church, the

Catholic Church, upon which, as I hold, God did

confer infallibility. Then I shall pass on to a more

detailed discussion of what I think to be the two

most pressing and important of all the problems

concerning the Fifth Commandment.

Well then, to give the Catholic answers point

blank without argument. Suicide is never justifia-

ble. The pagan philosophers in Greece, in Rome, in

China and Japan, were wrong. Neo-pagans in Eng-

land or America, or in any modern civilized land

are wrong—and with less excuse. Suicide is always
wrong—horribly, hideously wrong. As for the wo-
man who leaps from a height to save her honor,

she is no suicide. Her motive is escape. She does

not seek death, though death may come incidentally.

Sir Robert Scott’s companion did wrong, though

doubtless with a noble purpose. The shipwrecked

man who lets go of the spar that will not hold two,

is justified; he aims to save life, not to

take life. The surgeon who directly kills the

unborn babe, even to save the mother’s life,

commits a crime. The sufferer from incurable dis-

ease must not be put to death
;
he may be eased by

arugs as far as possible; beyond 'that he must await

the will of God. The officer in a swagger regiment,

convicted of cowardice, must not blow out his brains,

the traditional code of honor notwithstanding. Such

a code is pagan. Finally, lynching is always a crime.

If there be a law requiring the appearance of the

plaintiff in court, the law may be amended, but

otherwise the grieved party must wait upon the law.

No man is a law unto himself, in a land where courts

are in operation. As for the vigilantes on the fron-

tier, they were the law, they were the court, until



44 THE MOEAL LAW

a regular court could be established. Finally, capital

punishment is permitted by the law of God as well

as the law of the land.

Let me repeat. I cannot in twenty minutes argue

these cases out. Any one of them would require

that amount of time. I answer them inadequately

rather than leave them entirely unanswered.

And now let us come to the problems that I

have called most pressing and most important
;
first

the problem of crime in America, and second the

problem of war.

And first with regard to crime: I remember

that some twenty-five years ago, when a band of

our mission preachers went into a certain state

(which I prefer not to name) they were warned

by the bishop “Preach the Fifth Commandment
;
in

this part of the world there is too little respect for

human life.” A .few years later in Chicago, I was
shocked to learn that for every ten murders in that

city only three arrests were made, and of the three

arrested, only one received the full legal penalty.

More recently in New York City, conditions have be-

come, I fear, as bad as they were years ago in Chi-

cago, if not as bad as they are in Chicago now.

Indeed the entire United States seems to have be-

come a happy hunting ground for murderers. Here

is the scandal of the world and the shame of Ameri-

ca. We are the youngest of peoples : we commenced

a century and a half ago with a splendid new ex-

periment in government. Our Declaration of Inde-

pendence, in spite of all caustic criticism, is a glori-

ous and stirring manifesto, a bugle call for .justice

and right and national honor. Our federal constitu-

tion. again, in spite of all atrabilious hypercritieism,

is, with the exception of one of its amendments.



THE MORAL LAW 46

a beacon for the enlightenment of civilization. That

is to say we have the best law in the world, but

—

here is the screeching anomaly—we are the most
lawless people in the world. We have in proportion

to our population.twenty times more murders than

England: we are more addicted to crimes of vio-

lence than any country in Europe with the possible

exception of Russia, and even in Russia it is the

Government and not the gangs that makes life un-

certain. It is humiliating also to acknowledge the

truth that our murder rate is higher than that of

Mexcio, which we are accustomed to think has a less

developed civilization than our own. In China just

now there is social and political chaos, but China,

which has in round numbers four times our popula-

tion, would need 48,000 murders a year to equal our

murder rate, and I doubt if there are that many in

China, unless you call by the name of murder what

the Chinese call warfare. At least there are not in

any civilized country bands of murderers to com-

pare with our American gangsters, racketeers and

other organized criminals, with whom murder is a
trade and a method of transacting business.

Mr. Arthur Brisbane has recently written that

we have become blase about murder. He records

(rather ghoulishly, I must admit) the discovery of

parts of a dismembered human body, the torso

floating in the Hudson River, “the legs lying in the

street,” and he added: “Once this would have been

‘a great murder mystery,’ [rivaling the famous Gul-

densuppe case, or the ‘Lamp Black Swamp Mys-

tery.’] But mere individual murders cease to inter-

est. In Chicago eight young bandits enter a cabaret,

one announcing: ‘This is a stickup.’ A railroad
watchman enters with a big dog. The dog bites the



46 THE MORAL LAW

‘stickup’ men. They turn out all the lights, then

fire at random. Three female entertainers of the

cabaret are killed, half a dozen others wounded.

The police find corpses, and hysterical women and

men. One little chopped-up torso is mild compared

with that.”

Of course Mr. Brisbane is not really indif-

ferent, but is trying to shock us out of our indif-

ference. However, it is possible that our feelings

and our moral sense have been benumbed by

constant reading of an endless succession of sen-

sational crimes. It is commonly said nowadays that

it is impossible to arouse the American people, as a

whole, to high indignation against dishonesty, even

gigantic dishonesty. But I pray to heaven that our

people be not also beyond indignation at murder.

We have reason to be worried over our unhappy
supremacy in crimes of violence. I believe

that every American sociologist and penologist,

and I dare say, every thoughtful American

citizen, is appalled by the fact that crimes of mur-

der and man-slaughter are more numerous now than

they were even in pioneer days before our civiliza-

tion became settled, and that they are constantly

increasing. Murder is more than seven times as

frequent in New York City as in London. Only re-

cently a London correspondent of the New York

World reported a decrease of more than 50 percent

in the number of murders in the London area, com-

pared with the average of the last 20 years. In 1919

there were 10 murders and 37 manslaughters in

London. There were 357 murders or manslaughters

in New York for the same period.

President Hoover, in a speech delivered to mem-

bers of the Associated Press, shortly after his inau-



THE MORAL LAW 47

guration, like a High Priest making public confes-

sion of the sins of his people, declared that “more

than nine thousand human beings are lawlessly kill-

ed in the United States each year” (others

say twelve thousand) and he added this most

amazing and yet undoubtedly true statement:

“No part of the country, rural or urban, is

immune. Life and property are relatively more un-

safe [here] than in any other civilized country in

the world.” There may be some critics of the Presi-

dent who will say that he ought to have been more

discreet and not to have uncovered our shame be-

fore all the world. In Europe there is a great deal

of Pharisaical comment upon our preeminence in

crime, and our European enemies pounced upon Mr.

Hoover’s confession with unholy glee. Neverthe-

less, I, for one, am glad that the President spoke

as frankly as he did. If he can lead us away from

that sickening self-satisfaction which so many felt

when our leaders were singing “Prosperity, Pros-

perity” (as if Prosperity, even when genuine, could

be the mark and measure of a nation’s greatness)

the change will be for the better. Perhaps, by

the way, the present depression, though it

seems an unmitigated calamity, is a blessing in dis-

guise. It will be so, if it teaches us, as our Savior

said, that “A man’s life consisteth not in the abun-

dance of things which he possesseth.” In us the

Scripture is fulfilled: “Thou sayest I am rich and

made wealthy and have need of nothing and know-

est not that thou art wretched and miserable and

poor and blind and naked.” We have more money,
more foreign trade, more manufactures, more au-

tomobiles and other luxuries
;
we live in finer homes,

eat better food and have more expensive pleasure



48 THE MORAL LAW

than the rest of the world, but what doth it profit

us if, on the indubitable evidence of hard cold facts

and figures, we lead the world also in crime?

I hope that no one will be so unkind or so un-

fair as to imagine that I state this appalling fact

with any satisfaction. I repeat it in the same spirit

in which Mr. Hoover spoke of it. As a good Ameri-

can, sincerely anxious for the welfare and

the honor of the country of my birth and

of my affection, I am primarily concerned not

with evidence of our shame but with hope

and desire for our improvement. Our regen-

eration, our salvation depends on our getting back

to the Commandments of God. “It is an evil and

a bitter thing for thee to have left the Lord thy

God,” said God himself to the people of Israel. It

is as evil and bitter for America as for Israel.

And surely America has left the Lord if she no

longer keeps His Commandments. Perhaps a na-

tion, as a nation, has no soul, and therefore it may

be a metaphor to say that a nation has lost its soul.

But, literally or metaphorically, this nation is in

danger of being damned. It will be if it does not

return to the service of the Lord our God. We must
get back to those forgotten, ignored, violated, com-

mandments, and though it be humiliating to con-

fess it, we (I say “we” : I mean of course Ame-

rica) must go all the way back to that primary

elementary rudimentary commandment, the com-

mandment that first lifts us out of sheer savagery,

“Thou Shalt Not Kill!”

Tn my talk a week ago, I dwelt on the theme

that if our nation is to be saved, we must recon-

struct the home, re-establish the authority of par-

ents and the obedience of children. In a word, I



THE MORAL LAW 49

cried “Back to the Fourth Commandment
—

‘Honor

Thy Father and Mother.’ ” Today I feel myself com-

pelled, with considerable chargin, to cry aloud, not

indeed to my individual hearers but to our country,

to America, “Back to the Fifth Commandment

—

‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’
”

I devote the remaining few minutes to the prin-

cipal problem connected with the Fifth Command-

ment, the problem of war. It seems a simple prob-

lem. Indeed, to certain persons it seems no problem

at all. They solve it instantaneously and dogmati-

cally. They say : War is always wrong
;
no conceiv-

able combination of circumstances can justify war;

no motive, however exalted, noble, altruistic, can

sanctify warfare. Some extremists go further still

and declare that every man who fights in battle,
whether he volunteered or was conscripted, is, po-

tentially at least, and in most cases actually a mur-

derer. If that theory were true, every soldier who
discharges a rifle or flings a hand-grenade, or wields

a bayonet in battle is as guilty before God as a gun-
man in a gang-war. Men may sing a soldier’s prais-
es, pin medals on his breast and worship at his tomb
as at a shrine, but before God his hands are red with
blood; his soul is stained with murder, and if he
meet with suddeh death, as is probable, he can have
no hope of salvation. That, I say, is the utmost ex-
treme of the pacifist theory.

I think that theory needs only to be stated to be
refuted. I certainly shall not debate it. I am a
lover of peace myself. I am a member of societies
organized to assure and perpetuate international
peace; I may, in a sense, be called, I have been called,
a pacifist. But I certainly cannot agree with the



50 THE MORAL LAW

mad theory that all war is organized murder and

that the soldier is ipso facto a criminal.

There is, or at least there may be, such a thing

as just warfare, the conditions of which have been

laid down by Christian moralists. One recent Cath-

olic theologian, Fr. Strattmann, of the Dominican

Order, has summarized these conditions. He num-

bers ten, but for our purpose three of the ten will

suffice. First: “The war must be caused by very

great moral guilt on one side, and one side only.”

That is to say, one nation must be wrong, know it-

self to be wrong, and the other must be innocent;

second : The object of the war must be the further-

ance of good and the avoidance of evil; third: The

war must be so conducted that the limits of justice

and of love are never transgressed.” Obviously,

these conditions are difficult, some will say impossi-

ble. Be that as it may, they are the conditions re-

cognized by Catholic theologians back to the days of

St. Augustine, 1,500 years ago.

Theoretically, I believe these conditions can be

fulfilled. Historically I think they have been fulfil-

led, though rarely. I beg leave to illustrate with an

analogy that I used rather frequently during the

War, and that still seems valid to me. Suppose you

hear, in the middle of the night, a cry “Help
!”
“Mur-

der !” from the next room. You leap from bed, grab

a revolver, rush in and find, let us say, your brother

being attacked by a man wielding an axe. The axe

is poised in the air and about to descend. Will you

or will you not shoot, and if need be shoot to kill, to

save your brother’s life? If you answer “Yes, cer-

tainly ! I should be a dastard if I did not !” then you

justify war,—some war. For it makes no difference
whether the cry comes from the next room or from



THE MORAL LAW 61

the next continent, whether the victim
be your broth-

er by blood or by the common relationship of
human-

ity. If you hear a cry for help, not
from a person

but from a nation, you feel and I agree with
you,

that you may rush to the defense of that nation, as

you would rush to the defense of an individual.

Mark you, I am not now justifying the World War.

That would be a stupendous task. I am not even

justifying our entrance into that war. I am not

justifying any particular war. I am supposing a

theoretical case. If that' case actually occurs; if an

innocent person or an innocent people is attacked,

you may take up arms, and Catholic theology denies

to any one the right to accuse you of murder or of

any other wrong.

Of course, when an actual, not theoretical, war is

impending, the question is usually more complicated.

What we have learned to call “propaganda,” that is,

diplomatic lying, gets in its diabolical work; false

rumors and reports are circulated ; “atrocity” stories

are deliberately manufactured, race-hatreds are

stirred up, passions are inflamed, and altogether

there is a conspiracy to befuddle the mind and cloud

the judgment of the citizen. He reads the papers,

listens to furious oratory, and then he himself

mouths his opinions with violence and dogmatic as-

surance. But really, he doesn’t know “what it is all

about.” He goes into the war, dies on the battle-

field, or fights it through, returns, lives his allotted

span, and goes down to his grave, never really know-

ing whether the war was just or unjust. If he could

live for a hundred years and read all the discussions,

study all the histories, pore over all the original doc-

uments, analyze all the hidden facts as they slowly

come to light, he might perhaps finally know who



52 THE MOEAL LAW

was right and who was wrong. But as things go

nowadays in this complicated and bewildering

world, no private citizen, perhaps I might add no

president, can be infallibly sure that the war in

which he participates is justifiable.

Well then, if a man cannot know, is he entitled to

go ahead and fight? For answer I refer you back

to the principles concerning “conscience,” the sec-

ond discussion in this series. The private citizen

must take the information at his disposal, keep his

mind free as far as possible from passion and preju-

dice, form his opinion conscientiously, and then go

ahead.

I say, he must avoid passion and prejudice! And

there is one thing about which we can be certain:

every man isl under the moral obligation to keep his
heart clean from hatred. Our Savior, and after

Him, the beloved disciple, St. John, and after them,

the Church, has taught that hatred is a sin akin to

murder. “It hath been said of old, thou shalt not

kill,” says Jesus, “and whosoever shall kill shall be

in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that

whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in

danger of the judgment.” And St. John adds, with
extraordinary emphasis, “Whosoever hateth his

brother is a murderer.*’

St. John has also a very significant and pointed

question, “If I love not my neighbor whom I see, how
can I love God whom I see not?” One might borrow
the idea, with a slight adaptation, and say, “If I
love not my fellow American whom I see, how can I
love Europeans, and Asiatics, and Africans, and
Australians, whom I see not? How can I make pre-
tense of being a lover of all mankind if I cannot en-



THE MORAL LAW 53

dure patiently the defects of my next-door neigh-

bor?”

How can I keep peace with the Italians in Italy,

if I am intolerant of the Italians in my own city? If

I despise the Jews or the Irish, or the English, or the

Germans, or the Poles, or the Swedes ; if I call them

by opprobrious nicknames, what right have I to send

ambassadors of good-will to London, or Rome, or

Dublin, or Berlin, or emmisaries of peace to

Geneva?

Some thoughtless persons may retort that the

racial or religious prejudices they permit themselves

in daily life have no relationship whatsoever to

big issues that produce a war. But they are mistak-

en. Modern war arises generally from a complica-

tion of causes. Perhaps the first and chief is eco-

nomic. Next comes jingoism, the exaggeration or

caricature of patriotism. But not the least of the

causes of war is the feeling that a man is our born

enemy because the blood that flows in his veins is

different from ours.

Of course, there is no real difference between our

blood and that of any other human being. The

Creator made no difference. Aristocratic blood and

plebeian blood will naturally mingle. If a prince

marries a peasant, his union need not be without

fruit, and in the veins of his offspring the aristo-

cratic corpuscles will not fight the plebeian cor-

puscles.

Furthermore, nature and nature’s God have

raised no barrier between race and race. The Ital-
ian can fuse with the Austrian, the English with the

Irish, the French with the German. Nature has in-
deed erected geographical barriers between man
and man, but not biological barriers.



54 THE MORAL LAW

In ancient days, men went to war because they

were told that the people on the opposite bank of

the river, or on the other slope of mountain, were

monsters. Cruel, savage, uncivilized, and what not.

In these days of easy intercommunication between

nation and nation, we know that the fellow over

there is pretty much the same as the fellow over

here. We are all brothers under the skin. We are
all blood relatives.

Therefore, when war looms up, let us remember

these elementary truths taught by Reason and Re-

ligion. If we keep our heads clear and our hearts
right, we may prevent the next war, no matter how
ardently certain diplomats and financiers and mili-

tarists may desire it If we prevent the next war,
we can prevent any war. If there is no next war,
obviously there will be no war forever. So be it.
God grant it. Amen.

I



THE MORAL LAW 55

IMMORALITY
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis,, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 14, 1930)

A rather serious difficulty confronts any decent
person who attempts to speak on the two Command-

ments which concern us today, the Sixth and the

Ninth. For the Sixth, as Catholics and Lutherans

count it (otherwise the Seventh), is “Thou shalt not

commit adultery”; and the Ninth (or part of the

Tenth in the alternative enumeration) is “Thou

shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Obviously

these two commandments bring us face to face with

the ugly sin of lust, lust in the flesh and lust in the

mind, and no man who respects himself and his au-

dience can approach that subject without misgiv-

ings. I shall therefore preface this talk with a pray-

er for you and for me, a prayer to Jesus, the lover of

chastity, and to Mary, His sweet Virgin Mother, pa-

troness of purity, that they may direct the course of
my thoughts and the choice of my words, and that
you and I may both remember from beginning to end

that I am speaking and you are listening in the pres-
ence of the All Holy God.

That does not mean, however, that I must delib-

erately devitalize my language. Christ Himself,
though infinitely aloof from even the suspicion of

coarseness of utterance, was a plain speaker. Ihose

who imagine a mealy-mouthed Jesus do not know
the Gospels. He was never one to mince words. Take
for just one example this divine declaration from

the tenth chapter of St. Mark, verse 11: “He saith
to them: whosoever shall put away his wife and
marry another, committeth adultery, and if the
wife shall put away her husband and be married to
another, she committeth adultery.”



56 THE MORAL LAW

That strong statement irritated some of His

hearers, and to this day infuriates many. It is a

“hard saying.” But the Gospels are liberally sprink-

led with hard sayings that came out of the mouth of

the gentle Nazarene.

Following Christ, the apostles were plain-spoken

men in regard to sins of impurity. St. Paul indeed

said : “Let these things be not so much as mentioned

among you,” but evidently the warning is merely

against prurient conversation, for in his Epistle to

the Romans he himself enumerated and excoriated

the sins of the pagan world with a straightforward-

ness that in these days would scandalize many a

Christian congregation.

After Christ and St. Paul, the great preachers

and writers of the early centuries, some of whom we

distinguish with the name “Fathers of the Church,”

discussed “immorality” fearlessly and frankly, using

without embarrassment those blunt Old Testament

words of which we moderns seem to be ashamed.

Their language was robust but never obscene, and I

am inclined to think that if we were free nowadays

to speak of sin as the Bible speaks of it, instead of

using a namby-pamby, “nice Nellie” vocabulary, our

morals would be healthier and more wholesome.

Furthermore, it does seem unfair that clergy-

men and other moralists should be commanded to

speak softly about vice, while writers of fiction, of

drama and of talking picture scenarios are free to

use whatever vulgar or profane or obscene word

they think will lend what they call a “punch” to their

productions. If they are permitted strong words for.

an immoral purpose, why may we not counter with

equally strong words for a moral purpose? Why
must we be gagged while they are so loose-lipped?



THE MOEAL LAW 67

Why must we fight like a boxer with one broken fist

that he cannot use?

But let us lament no more the unnatural restraint

put upon us by hypocritical custom. And let us come

to close grips with our subject. And first I address

myself to those persons, particularly the young, who

foolishly imagine that they can find happiness in

sins of the flesh. Of course there is no happiness in

sin, any kind of sin, and the sin of impurity is the

surest way to misery. St. Augustine, in his marvel-

lous little book, “The Confessions,” tells of his own

experience in words that are, like the words of the

Bible, outspoken but not offensive. He says:

“I polluted the brook of friendship with the sew-

age of lust, and darkened its clear shining with

smoke from hell. I plunged headlong into love whose

fetters I longed to wear.” But he cries out “0 my

God, My Merciful One, with what gall didst Thou
embitter that cup of sweetness ! For I was beloved

;

I attained my wish, the bondage of clandestine frui-

tion, and proudly riveted round myself the chain of

woe; then was I scourged with the red-hot iron rods

of jealousy, suspicion, fears, anger and quarrels.”

It was well for Augustine that the results of his

sin were not even more tragic. Sins of the flesh

often eventuate in suicide or murder. Charles Bigg in

a beautiful introduction to his edition of the Confes-

sions remarks: “Experience is always the same.”

He quotes from the Latin poet Lucretius : Medio de

fonte le.porum surgit amari aliquid. “Out of the

midst of carnal delights something bitter emerges.”

And “Why,” he asks “does this gall in the honey

make one man a pessimist, another an Epicurean,

while a third concludes that he has fixed his

hopes too low and struggles on upward -in quest of



58 THE MOEAL LAW

purer joys?” There indeed is a psychological and a

theological puzzle, but we have just now no time for

puzzles. What concerns us is the fact, demonstrated

countless times since the days of Adam and Eve,

that sin—especially the sin of impurity—is Dead
Sea fruit, beautiful to the eye, but dust and ashes in

the mouth.

Now here is the first reason, the first and poorest

reason for the avoidance of impurity : Men and wo-

men plunge into it seeking happiness, and they

achieve only anguish. There is evidently something

in human nature, something angelic, something di-

vine, that makes it impossible to find satisfaction in

sins of the fiesh. How this can be, on the theory of

material evolution, so popular nowadays, the evolu-

tionists never seem to explain. They keep telling us

that man is only an animal, but they have no reply

to the problem “Why then can he not take his plea-

sures like an animal and be content?” Disguise, the

loathesome fact with fine phrases as they do, the es-

sence of their doctrine is that we are not only of the

earth earthy, but that we are of the beasts beastly.

And at this moment (or at least until very recently

when both science and philosophy have taken a turn

away from materialism) the theory of our kinship

and our esential equality with the animals, the theory

of evolution, seemed to be about to conquer. But it

cannot be. You may tell man that he is only an ani-

mal and you may overwhelm him with what you are

pleased to call proofs, biological, physiological, anat-

omical, ethnological and what not, but you don’t

really convince him
;
he knows that “a man’s a man

for a’ that,” and one of the reasons he knows is that

when he lives like an animal he makes himself

wretched.



THE MOEAL LAW 59

Walt Whitman, said by some to be the one great

American poet, writes somewhere that he likes ani-

mals because they don’t weep over their sins. But

that’s why they are animals. Man is the odd animal

that does weep over his sins, and perhaps that is the

reason why, if he ever was a mere animal, he is a

mere animal no longer. He is aware of sin, he is un-

happy in sin, and there is no sin that tortures him

more than the sin of animalism.

And here indeed is the great psychological and

moral fact: man is ever at odds with himself. We
love purity, we admire it, we desire it, some of us are

vowed to it. And yet we are drawn with a fierce

attraction and with what seems at times irresistible

force toward impurity. St. Paul confessed that in

spite of his having been exalted into the third heav-

en, where he saw things and heard things “not given

to the tongue of man to utter,” he suffered the sting

of the flesh. He laments again and again that “the

flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against

the flesh,” and he cries “the evil which I will not,

that I do, and the good which I will, that I do not . .

.

I am delighted with the law of God, according to

the inward man. But I see another law in my mem-
bers, fighting against the law of my mind, and cap-
tivating me in the law of sin, that is in my mem-
bers. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me

from the body of this death !”—Romans 7.
Every man who is a man knows that conflict and

that anguish. Some persons may think that a good

man is merely one who experiences no great tempta-

tions, and that a bad man is one who has been cursed

by the inheritance of a particularly passionate na-

ture. But they who imagine such things can never



60 THE MORAL LAW

have read the lives of the saints. St. Paul and St.

Augustine are not exceptions: they are rather the

rule. They happened to be not only saints but psy-

chologists. They were experts in self-analysis and

they had the gift of putting on paper the discoveries

they had made while exploring the depths, shall we

say the dirty depths, of their own nature. But a

thousand canonized saints and some hundreds of

millions whose names will never make the calendar

have felt the same passions, have fought the same

fight, and have won the same victory. Sometimes it

seems to a pure and noble man under temptation

that his brain is on fire. His blood leaps wildly like

a mettlesome horse under the whip of passion. The

thumping of his heart shakes his whole frame, and

worst of all his will seems ready to play traitor to

him. If he were a coward he would surrender,—sin,
and afterwards explan either with bravado or with

a whimper that he “could not stand it,” that “no

man could stand it,” and that he had to do what

other men do. But the hero, the saint, sets his teeth,

stiffens his jaw, calls upon God and, though he sweat

blood, he is not beaten. In the end he wins, and with

a great deep sigh of relief and of thanks he lays his

victory at the feet of his Maker and his Savior.

St. Paul himself does not conclude with that cry of

desperation : “who will deliver me from the body of

this death.” He answers his own question trium-

phantly, “The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our

Lord.”

He spoke not from a book nor from theological

theory, but from actual experience. When he felt

the sting of the flesh, he cried thrice to the Lord to

be delivered from temptation. But he received the

reply “My grace is sufficient for thee. Thy virtue



THE MORAL LAW 61

shall be made perfect through this infirmity.” And

God, as always, made good His promise.

Also St. Augustine, after that forever famous

victory over himself in the garden of the country

house of Verecundus, sings a song of praise that I

love to call Augustine’s Magnificat. It commences

the ninth book of the Confessions: “0 Lord I am

thy servant: I am thy servant and the son of thy

handmaid. Thou hast burst my bonds in sunder, to

Thee will I offer the sacrifice of praise. Let my

heart and my tongue praise Thee and let all my

bones say ‘0 Lord who is like unto Thee?’ Let them

speak and do Thou answer and say unto my soul

T am thy salvation.’
”

Now, this struggle against temptation is as old

as human nature. For human nature is a com-

posite. We are part animal and part angel. The

beast is in us, and God is in us. One or the other

has to dominate. If the flesh dominates there is hell

in the heart. If the spirit dominates there is peace

and salvation. That, in Brief, is the religious view

of human nature and of the moral life.

But in very recent times, with the advent of

Freudianism, we have heard much of a new theory.

Freud has invented a new name for the instincts

and passions that lie deep down at the roots of our

nature. He calls them the “urges.” And he has in-

vented also the idea of a “censor” who keeps these

“urges” out of sight, guarding the gate that separ-

ates the conscious from the unconscious. The “cen-

sor” prevents the “urge” or passion from breaking

through into our conscious life. He is like a lion tam-

er. He cracks his whip over the “urges” and they

cower. He Keeps them back, out of sight, so that the

master in whose nature they lie lurking doesn’t



62 THE MORAL LAW

know they are there. But the master suffers from

the suppression of passion. He becomes nervous,

irritable, perhaps even hysterical or insane. Such

is the price he pays for decency, for civilization.

[ cannot stop now to discuss that theory. But

1 may remark that the majority of followers of

Freud take him to mean that the “censor” guards

us- only too zealously and that if we are to be healthy

and happy we should get rid of the censor and let

the “urges” or passions come trooping out into the

light of day. If that popular interpretation of the

Freudian theory prevails, and the people become

convinced that the only way to cure passion is to

let it have its way, then we may as well say here

and now goodbye to morality, goodbye to decency,

and farewell, a long farewell, to civilization.

The better way, the moral way, and as a matter

of fact, the only healthy way is for a man himself

to open that gate to the underworld of his own

nature, boldly go down into the den of his passions,

grapple with them, throttle them, and then come

back into the light of day, bloody perhaps, but un-

bowed, master of his own soul, dictator to his own

body. This is dirty work indeed, but necessary,

like the work of a soldier who goes to battle through

blood and mud, beats his way to victory, sticking

his bayonet into the belly of this man, crashing

the butt of his rifle into the skull of that one, doing

a hundred things that are disgusting and loathsome

but things that must be done if victory is to be

gained.

I noticed that those who advocate what is called

in the Freudian jargon the “release of the inhibi-

tions” generally illustrate their doctrine by refer-

ence to the passion of lust. But if we are to re-



THE MORAL LAW 63

lease lust, why not also anger, and avarice and

greed and gluttony? If you release one passion all

the seven deadly sins will swarm upon you, and up-

on society. After that the deluge, after that chaos.

Whether or not we came out of the jungle, we shall

surely go back to the jungle if this popular Freud-

ianism prevails.

But after all that is not the real reason why

we cultivate purity. The truly religious idea is that

although we may be kin to the beasts physically

we are none the less children of God spiritually.*

The body is indeed animal, but it is the soul that

makes the man. And it is the soul that makes man

like a God upon the earth, master of his own life,

dictator of his own destiny. Under God, he is a kind

of God. Jesus quotes the Scripture: “Have I not

said ye are gods ?” A god does not go crying and
cowering, he holds his head high. A god does not
go lusting about, a victim to the passions of the

body. Like a god he says to passion “Thou shalt

not.” And by that godly domination over the lower

nature he becomes fit to be a companion of the One

Great God, the only True God in heavem



64 THE MORAL LAW

HONESTY IN BUSINESS AND

POLITICS

(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P., in the
Catholic Hour, December 21, 1930)

I am sure I may take it for granted that no one

within reach of my voice, even though that voice be
amplified to reach some scores of millions, needs

any explanation of the more obvious meaning of the

. Seventh Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Steal
!”

In other lands and under a different civilization,

downright theft may have been considered pardon-

able, or even laudable. Even now, a particularly

clever pickpocket, like the one who lifted a watch

from a policeman’s pocket unobserved, even though

the eyes of the policeman, of the judge and of all

in the court room were upon him, has a certain re-

nown in the underworld. He would have gladdened

the heart of Fagin in Oliver Twist. Also, I sup-

pose, a bank robber who does a job quickly and

smoothly and' gets away, acquires a certain stand-

ing in his own set. They say there is honor among

thieves. I doubt it. But I am sure there is fame

among thieves. Jesse James was considered a

genius in his line, though under our more exacting

contemporary standards he might be called a

“piker.” In Chicago, or Cicero, or wherever it is

that famous racketeers are buried under $25,000

worth of roses, it would seem there are those who

consider an assassinated thief a greater hero than

Lincoln or Garfield or McKinley.

But putting aside these more or less picturesque

perversions of moral opinion, the sneak-thief, the

porch-climber, the robber (train robber, bank rob-



THE MORAL LAW 65

ber, highway robber), the yegg, the racketeer, the

hijacker and all the other members of the hier-

archy of thieves are reprobated by all good citizens.

And so we are free to drop all discussion of the

cruder forms of theft and to* consider some of the

subtle and surreptitious violations of the Com-

mand, “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

And first a word about transactions on the stock

market. I confess that I have no expert knowledge

of the tricks of bulls and bears, though I have

heard of late a great deal of the wailing and bleat-

ing of lambs. Recognizing my limitations, there-

fore, I shall not attempt to discuss the question as

to what is speculation or gambling. The Stock Mar-

ket is of course a necessity of modern business.

When properly conducted. Stock Market operations

are as legitimate as those on the cotton or grain or

produce exchange, or any other business. But

there is a specific danger concerning stocks which

I may perhaps be permitted to describe in the

words of a recognized authority in ethics. Rev.

Thomas Slater, S. J., who writes in a volume en-

titled “Questions in Moral Theology,” as follows:

“When large gains or losses depend on future

market prices, there is a very great temptation for

all whose fortunes are at stake to take means to in-

fluence the market in their own favor. Great finan-

ciers, ... or combinations of smaller moneyed men

have means at their disposal by which they can

raise or lower the market price of a commodity to

suit their own interest. This process has been re-

duced to a fine art, and by this art dealers in

futures strive to influence the future event in their

own favor. This is against the rules whose observ-

ance is necessary if betting is to be an honest trans-



66 THE MORAL LAW

action. It is like backing my horse against yours
in a race, and then bribing your jockey to hold your

horse, or to drug him when the race becomes due.

It is a dishonest trick and against the fundamental

laws of the game.”

Consequently the men, be they few or many,

who operate dishonestly in the stock market, are

thieves quite as truly as the pickpocket, the burglar

or the bandit.

Recently, as all the world knows, in the crash,

or series of successive crashes, in the Stock Market,

a vast number of poor people suffered tragically. I

shall not venture to enumerate and discuss the

varied causes of that catastrophe. But if amongst

those causes there was dishonest manipulation of

the market by certain powerful and unscrupulous

operators, it seems to me that they have committed

one of the sins which according to the Scriptures

calls to heaven for vengeance, “depriving the lab-

orer of his wages.” Those poor people were to all

intents laborers and what they lost was their

wages.

But I must hurry on. I allow myself, however,

one more word for the benefit of simple, honest

people. I would like to pass on to them a warning

which I first received from an intimate friend who

was, so to speak, brought up in Wall Street, being

the son of a prominent operator, and for several

years himself a stock broker. He used to say with

great force, “Don’t let poor people speculate. Warn

them against gambling. If they cannot go into the

street without succumbing to the temptation to

speculate, keep them out of Wall Street entirely.” I

have preached that doctrine to thousands in the



THE MORAL LAW 6;

past twenty years. I hope now it reaches hundreds

of thousands.

So we drop the stock market and come to the

business world. I should not be surprised if some

one should declare petulantly that modern business

as a whole is not one whit more honest than stock

market speculation. But I have not said that all

stock market transactions are dishonest. Nor is all

business dishonest. It would be absurd to say so.

David the Psalmist said : “All men are liars.” But

if you read the preceding clause in that psalm you

find, “I said in my excess—my anger.” So if one
says “all men are crooked,” I add, “Says you,—in
your anger.” But we must not be angry when we

are trying to solve delicate ethical problems.

Doubtless there is a great deal of dishonesty in

business. It is justified by those who indulge in it

with some sweeping phrase such as “Business is

business,” or “I am not in business for my health,”

or “Everybody’s doing it,” just as ten thousand

wicked things in warfare were justified with the

easy phrase, spoken with a raising of the eyebrows

and a shrug of the shoulders, French fashion,

“C’est la guerre,” which means the same thing as

our own English phrase, “All’s fair in love and

war.” Of course that phrase is untrue, and like-

wise if the phrase, “Business is business,” bears

with it the connotation that “all’s fair in business,”

it is equally untrue.

There are rules to every game, even in the

bloody game of war (though I hope no one will

challenge me to say which one of the rules of the

game of warfare was observed during the World

War) and if business be a o-ame, one must play the

game.



68 THE MORAL LAW

Business lies, for example, are immoral and not

only immoral but sometimes also unjust. One who

tells a business lie simply to persuade the customer

to buy, but gives him fair value for his money is a

liar indeed, but not a thief. He is bound to repent

of his lie and amend his methods, but he is not

bound to restitution. But if he lies and at the same

time cheats, he commits two sins and is bound to

restitution. Now the old simple way of telling a busi-

ness lie was to buttonhole the customer and beguile

him with a fairy tale about the value of the goods.

The modern way is to reiterate a deceptive slogan

in the advertising pages of a newspaper or maga-

zine, or to flash a dubious statement on an electric

sign intermittently, until it gets into a man’s sub-

conscious self. But a lie is a lie whether it comes

out of the mouth, or off the page, or flash from an

illuminated sign. A lie is a lie whether it concerns
a $4.79 overcoat in a second-hand store in the

ghetto, or a $15,000 fur coat in a frightfully swag-

ger Fifth Avenue shop. And if to the lie is added

fraud, restitution must be made. Otherwise in the

Catholic system, absolution for the sin cannot be

obtained.

Again; dishonest business may consist of sub-

stitution. A salesman shows a certain grade of
goods, gets an order and delivers a cheaper grade;

a contractor specifies in his contract a certain

weight of pipe for plumbing fixtures, or a certain

grade of window glass or wood flooring, or cement,

or brick, or stone trimming, or what not, and sup-

plies a lower grade, collecting the price of the grade

promised but not provided. I have been told that

such substitutions are so common that contractors

have been known to stop work rather than be



THE MORAL LAW 69

watched, and one owner who had been something

of a builder himself, told me that a contractor with

whom he had dealings would substitute cheaper

grades of building material, as he said, “Under

your very eyes with the skill of a Houdini.”

These slippery dodges are said to have been

particularly prevalent during the war. In the rush

and excitement of manufacturing all sorts of ma-

terial, from blankets and tooth-brushes to gas

bombs, tractors, aeroplanes and sixteen-inch guns,

there was fraud such as never could have been in

times of peace and in the ordinary dealings of one

business man with another.

Here is a particularly nefarious kind of dis-

honesty, and yet one which seems to cause the least

compunction—defrauding the Government. There
is many a citizen who boasts loudly of his patriot-

ism (by the way, watch closely and judge shrewdly

the loud-mouthed patriot) who would presumably

blush with shame at the very thought of picking a

man’s pocket in a crowd, but who picks Uncle Sam’s

pocket whenever he gets a chance. Please notice

that important word “presumably.” “Presumably”

he would be ashamed to pick a man’s pocket, but I

cannot deny myself the suspicion that a man who

robs the Government would rob you or me. As a

matter of fact, if he robs the Government he does

rob you and me. •

Now as far as Catholic moral theology is con-
cerned, or for that matter, according to any repu-

table ethics, a man who steals from the Government

commits a sin and is bound to restitution just as

surely as if he stole from an individual. Thieving

is thieving whether it be from the United States

Government, the Standard Oil Company, General



70 THE MORAL LAW

Motors, the Pennsylvania Railroad or from John

Doe or Richard Roe. Of course, it is a bigger sin

to steal five dollars from a poor man who has only

five dollars, than to steal five dollars from a multi-

millionaire. Nevertheless it will not do to say, “I

stole money from a huge corporation that couldn’t

possibly miss it, and that cannot even know that it

is gone.” I repeat, sin is sin, theft is theft and where

there has been theft, restitution must be made.

And now a hurried word about that specific

form of dishonesty called “graft.” We may say of
grafting schemes what the devils cast out of the

Gadarene demoniac said of themselves
—
“Our name

is legion.” The forms and ramifications of graft

are infinite, and if any one could come and cast out

that legion of devils from American life, he would

be a Savior indeed.

In public life—political life, particularly

—

graft is enormously prevalent. But not only public

cfficials,—such persons as policemen (of high rank
and low) and politicians (federal, state and muni-

cipal) but men in private business, buyers and

sellers, builders and contractors and architects,

chauffeurs, cooks, club stewards, tradesmen, all

manner of agents in all sorts of business receive

what is called a “rake-off” : not an honest commis-

sion, but a secret and illicit compensation. In old-

fashioned days it was called bribery, or plain

thieving, or dishonorable business. But now that

comfortable word, that not-too-evil-sounding word

“graft,” used -sometimes with the adjective “hon-

est,” covers a multitude of sins.

But since no man can number the forms of graft

any more than he can count the sands of the sea-

shore, let me make the simple outright statement:



THE MORAL LAW 71

there is no honest graft. All graft is dishonest.

The man who gives or takes graft and soothes his

conscience by calling it honest may have recourse

to one test to prove his honesty. If he is a politi-

cian, let him get up in a public gathering and tell

his fellow-citizens the nature of his transactions, or

if he is a business man, let him write a letter to the

papers signing his name and explaining how he gets

his money. Does he answer, “Nonsense! Absurd!

Impossible!” Then he is very probably a thief.

The acid test that discloses the difference between

the gold of honesty and the base metal of graft is

publicity. The hallmark of graft is secrecy. If

your fellow-citizens do not know and would not be

permitted to know what you make on the side apart

from your salary or your recognized income, then

you have reason for concealment. If you have rea-

son for concealment you have no right to an easy

conscience. You may delude yourself with that

dubious reflex^ principle, “Everybody’s doing it,” or

that other equally dishonest and equally indefen-

sible principle, “If I don’t take it, some one else

will.” But it remains true that graft is theft.

I conclude this part of my talk with a vigorous

protest against that particularly wicked lie “Every-

body’s taking it.” That convenient cowardly excuse

is a libel on the great majority of American citi-

zens. The generality of men and women are honest.

If such a declaration is equivalent to an act of faith

in humanity, then let it stand as my act of faith.
I am sure it is true, because if all men were graft-

ers, business could not be done, and the Government

could not stand. The grafters take refuge behind

a formula which is cruel and unjust because it in-

dicts a whole people. The use of the formula



7-2 THE MORAL LAW

proves nothing except that the thief is also a liar.

In that he is like the profligate who defends himself

with the calumny that “all men are alike.” It is

bad enough to be a thief, a grafter, a bribe-taker

without being a calumniator of a whole nation and

of the human race.



THE MORAL LAW 73

CHRISTMAS
(Address delivered by Rev. James M. Gillis,, C. S. P., in the

Catholic Hour, December 28, 1930)

The center of attraction of the world at Christ-

mas time is a stable—and in the stable a manger,
and in the manger a new-born Child. Ordinarily

great heroes are venerated as they were at the height

of their career, or, in the case of soldiers who die on

the battlefield, as they were at the moment of mag-

nificent death, But of all those who have won and

held the admiration of mankind, there is only One

Who is commemorated as an infant in swaddling

clothes. We have all seen representations, painted
on canvas, or sculptured in marble or bronze, of the

young commander Napoleon leading the assault on

foot at the bridge of Lodi or astride a beautiful

white charger winning his spectacular victory at

Austerlitz or Jena. There are paintings galore of

the Duke of Wellington at the moment of his su-

preme triumph,—Napoleon’s supreme disaster,

—

Waterloo. There is a noble play of Shakespeare’s

that makes us see and realize much better than the

cold unimaginative annals of mere history the trage-

dy of the death of Julius Caesar, “E’en at the base

of Pompey’s statue which all the while ran blood.”

Yes, there are paintings and sculptures and tap-

estries and poems and plays and volumes of brilliant

literature about great men winning battles, addres-

sing parliaments, signing Declarations of Independ-

ence, wresting Magna Charta from a reluctant king,

or on the other hand losing a great cause magnifi-

cently and dramatically, making one last heroic ges-

ture like Robert Emmet in the prisoner’s dock, or

Blessed Thomas More on the scaffold, or St. Joan of



74 THE MORAL LAW

Arc in the midst of the flames, or the heroes of the

Easter uprising facing a firing squad.

But there is only one hero, and He the greatest

of all, who gathers His admirers and His adorers

around His cradle. “I, if I be lifted up,” said Jesus,

“will draw all men unto Me.” And He does, indeed,

draw them to His cross. But I wonder if it be not

even a more surprising miracle to draw men to a

cradle than to a cross. At any rate the wide world

today is in spirit at 'the crib of Bethlehem. Jesus

has power to attract us to a stable at the end of a

dirty oriental lane, to a hole in the rock filled with

peasants, herders of sheep and other poor people.

And here is the miracle of Christmas—

a

moral and spiritual miracle; a world that admires

force and power, drawn to pure helplessness; a

world that worships wealth, venerating poverty; a

world that ordinarily genuflects only to social stand-

ing, noble blood, great fortune, or to intellectual

and artistic distinction, putting away for a few days

at least its pride and snobbery and foolishness; a

world suddenly become human in loving contempla-

tion of a baby lying on an improvised pallet of straw

in a stable.

Christian faith, evidently, is a great leveller of

castes and of social distinctions. In the Catholic

Church we indulge a certain lawful pride in the

fact that we are the church of the poor. The rich

who worship with us must be resigned to touch el-

bows with day laborers, servants, small tradesmen,

mechanics. In the long lines of penitents waiting

their turn at the confessional, and in the great

swarms that come to the Communion rail, the rich

and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the

highly cultured and the uncouth meet in the sub-



THE MORAL LAW 75

lime equality of Christian democracy. And so it

was in Bethlehem
:
peasants and kings, rustics and

Magi met at the crib of the Babe Jesus.

Now, therefore, of all the multitudinous thoughts

that throng to the mind at Christmas-time, I select

this idea to be emphasized : the levelling of social and

intellectual barriers, and the abolition of all other ar-

tificial and anti-Christian discrimination among the

worshippers who throng the court of the Babe of

Bethlehem;—^the court that was held in a stable,
with peasants in place of princes, with the ass and

the ox in place of liveried attendants, with straw

scattered over a floor of hardened earth in place of

soft rugs upon marble, and with a little Baby in

swaddling garments in place of a king clad in er-

mine, sceptre in hand and crown on head.

Of all who gathered in that strange throne room

to make obeisance to that strange king, the shep-

herds and the Magi will serve as symbols of the ex-

tremes that still meet after all these centuries to do

honor and to oflter love to Jesus, Son of God and son

of Mary.

Perhaps there is a tendency in the mind of pious

Christians to idealize those Palestinian peasants.

But there is no reason to suppose that they were

different from any other herders of sheep and of

cattle in Judea—or in any other part of the Orient,
I believe it is the common experience of travel-

lers to the Holy Land to be disappointed—if not
scandalized—because the actual peasants in that
part of the world do not resemble the peasants that

we see in art. The shepherds of Corregio, Botticelli

and perhaps especially of Fra Angelico, not to men-

tion the rest of the army of artists who have painted

the Nativity, are idealized, spiritualized shepherds,



76 THE MORAL LAW

the like of which have never been, East or West, in

ancient times or nowadays. They bear the same

resemblance to real peasants as a gentleman farm-

er bears to what is called, I believe, a “dirt farmer."

The peasants who gathered at the crib of Jesus were

“dirt" farmers (as was perhaps too obvious), and

herders who came into actual contact with cattle

(as was also very obvious). The peasants you see

in Palestine today would be a good sample of those

of Jesus’ day. Manners and habits and costumes

don’t change in the Orient. Those who have not

travelled to the Holy Land may perhaps have seen a

motion picture “Grass” taken a few years ago. The

cattlemen in that picture might just as well have

been of Abraham’s day or Christ’s. And they were

not picturesque. Or at least they were not pretty.

Neither were the shepherds who came to the cave

of Jesus and stood about in their awkward, embar-

rassed way
;
they were unkempt, unwashed, illiterate,

uncouth, and if the full truth be told, they were pro-

bably no more pious or virtuous than it behooved

them to be.

I dare say that in Palestine in King Herod’s day

the peasant was much' like the French tiller of the

soil, painted by Millet and described in rhetorical

verse by Edwin Markham:

‘‘Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face
And on his back the burden of the world.”

The poem continues with perhaps an exaggerated

choice of epithets to describe the peasant as one

“Dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not anti that never hopes
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox.”



THE MORAL LAW 77

Whether there was in Millet’s day or Markham’s,

any French peasant of whom it might be said that

he was “dead to rapture and despair,” and whether

in truth and justice, he could be called “a thing that

grieves not and that never hopes” is .a debatable

question, to say the least. Millet’s man with the hoe

was kin to the man and woman of the Angelus. He

was no brother to the ox, because he knew religion

;

he had faith, and where there is faith there is hope.

Of course he wore a dirty smock and wooden shoes

caked with mud, but he went to Mass on Sunday,

he received Holy Communion perhaps side by side

with the grand seigneur and the chatelaine from the

mansion close by, and if you could see him as he

went back to his place with the Sacred Host upon

his tongue I venture to think you would have seen

some slight trace of rapture on his face. Besides,

at Christmas time in his own home he had a tiny

imitation of the creche of Bethlehem, and in the par-

ish church there was a much more gorgeous one

with life-size figures of the Babe and His Mother,

and St. Joseph and the kings and shepherds. And,

just as likely as not, when he went to make his sim-

ple prayers at that wonderful Christmas crib he

found himself again side by side with the grand

seigneur and the chatelaine and I am sure that he
realized in his humble way that historywas repeating
itself

; that he was like the shepherds at the original
crib and his rich neighbors were like the Magi.

But we may admit, no doubt, that in ancient
Palestine conditions were worse than in modern
France. The peasants who gathered about Jesus
were quite innocent of intellectual activity, and their
spiritual development was probably small. Their



78 THE MORAL LAW

morals, let us hope were decent, as the morals of

simple people have always been. They were “poor

people” indeed, but not as Markham, the poet, has

imagined poor people, and not, I may add, “poor

people” like the desperate souls discovered or imag-

ined by Dostoievski. They were poor, simple, guile-

less, but it is impossible to believe that they could

have been totally ignorant of the promise of the

Messiah, and it is probable, to say the least, that

they knew if only by the angels’ song that the long

expected Deliverer was now come and that He would

wash away their sins and in the end fulfill their

hope for rest and peace in paradise.

At the other extreme of those who came to see

the new born Babe in the Stable of Bethlehem were

the Magi. Now we cannot claim to know much

about these mysterious “wise men.” Legend has

made them kings as well as philosophers, saints as

well as scholars. Perhaps we are safe in supposing

that they were acquainted with whatever learning

was current in Egypt and Babylon, and whatever

wisdom there was in India or in the not very far

distant Athens. And that, as all historians and

philosophers know, was considerable.

It would be a narrow mind, and prejudiced, that

would imagine all pagan philosophy to have been

alien or antipathetic to the truth. Fathers of the

Church in the early ages, men like Clement, Cyril

and Justin Martyr, to say nothing of St. Paul in his

speech to the academy in Athens, labored to show

that Christianity is the culmination and not the con-

tradiction of all true philosophy. In the fifth cen-

tury Augustine borrowed heavily from Plato, and

many centuries later St. Thomas Aquinas borrowed



THE MORAL LAW 79

equally from Aristotle, both of them appropriating

to the purposes of Christian theology the philosophic

wisdom of men who lived and pondered the mystery

of the universe 400 years before Christ was born.

The point is that the Magi who came to Bethle-

hem were led not alone by the shining of a star but

by rays of light from the philosophical thought of

their day. And that they brought with them not

merely gold, frankincense and myrrh, material gifts,

but intellectual and spiritual offerings, the fruit of

their mind and their soul to lay at the feet of the

Babe Jesus. Intellectuals we should call them, teach-

ers of wisdom, creators of thought, sages, savants,

compeers perhaps, in their own countries of what

Socrates and Aristotle and Plato had been in Athens,

Zoroaster in Persia, and we may add, of Confucius

and Lao-Tsze in China.

At any rate they were the remote extreme, in in-

telligence and culture from the poor peasants, the

shepherds and stable men whom they found at the

crib of the One they had come from afar to seek.

And the significant fact, important to them at

the time and of even more importance symbolically

for all time is that the illustrious Magi and the illit-

erate shepherds met before Jesus Christ on a basis of

equality. The beauty of the episode of the meeting

of the wise men and the shepherds in Bethlehem is

in this, that they knelt side by side and adored with-

out any sense of condescension on the one side or of

shame on the other.

And here I take it, is an important feature—an
essential feature of of the Christian religion—Chris-
tianity inculcates simplicity, humility, poverty of

spirit in the rich and the wise and the powerful
; and



8C THE MORAL LAW

it lends dignity and nobility and even a touch, of di-

vinity to the unlearned and the lowly.

Today men are discussing the famous and famil-

iar proposition “All men are created equal,” and

there seems to be a general tendency to reject the

phrase as an obvious falsehood, a self-evident ab-

surdity. But whatever be the fact in the political,

or the social, or the intellectual world, in religion, all

men are equal. Let me hasten to explain. I do not

mean that one man makes no more spiritual or moral

progress than another, but that when a man has pro-

gressed even to sainthood, he still counts himself no

better than a sinner, or even a reprobate. As St.

Paul says “What have you that you have not re-

ceived; and if you have received, why do you glory

as if you had not received?”—as if your moral and
spiritual excellence were all your own doing. And

again he says “by the grace of God I am what I am.”

And if I am not what I am by the grace of God, why

should I glory as if I had made myself what I am?

St. Philip Neri, seeing a condemned criminal on his

way to execution, exclaimed “There goes Philip Neri,

save for the grace of God.” The saint associates

himself mentally with sinners. The last thought in

his mind would be self-complacency. The moment

a saint considers himself no sinner, that moment he

is a sinner and no saint.

And as with moral excellence, so with intellec-

tual. The most learned man is always the humblest.

A little learning inclines a man to pride ; more learn-
ing leads him bacft to humility. When a man thinks

he knows much, he knows nothing, and when he ad-

mits that he knows nothing, he knows much. I am
speaking not in parables or riddles, I am not jug-



THE MORAL LAW 81

gling phrases. I am saying what all great philoso-

phers have discovered at the end of the road of wis-

dom; all the wise ones from Socrates down admit

their ignorance. St. Paul says if he must glory he

will glory in his infirmities. And so of the learned

man, if he must glory, he will glory in his ignorance.

In these days when the word relativity is in ev-

eryone’s mouth, it ought not to be difficult to see that

all our knowledge is ignorance. Of course if I com-

pare myself with an imbecile or a ten-year old child,

I may seem to know something. But if I compare

myself with Shakespeare, the myriad-minded, or

Kant, or Goethe, or Thomas Aquinas, or with the

man who made relativity famous, I am a pitiable

ignoramus. And if even these great men compare

what they know with what they do not know, they

will confess with Isaac Newton that they have only

been like children playing on the edge of the ocean

of knowledge, and that the vast expanse still lies un-

explored. Or, to use another simile, if one goes high

enough into the skies, a hut and a mansion, a sub-

way kiosk and the Empire State building seem of

about the same height. And if one goes high enough

in the realm of knowledge, if one could by a miracle

go as high as God above man, the learning of a child

in the grade schools and of a great philosopher

would seem about the same.

So when the Magi came close to God, it would

have been absurd for them to be puffed up because

they were acquainted with some philosophies that

were hidden from the little ones, the peasants at

their side. Furthermore, it is possible that they

knew the Hebrew Bible and that they had read in
the prophet Ezechiel “Thus sayeth the Lord God:



82 THE MORAL LAW

Remove the diadem, take off the crown . . . Exalt

him that is low and abase him that is high.” Indeed

it is not incredible that on their visit to the new-born

Babe they learned of His Mother’s Magnificat, in

which occur the words so familiar to all who attend

the Catholic vespers, Deposuit potentes de sede et

exaltavit humiles. “He hath put down the mighty

from their seat, and hath exalted the humble, . . .

He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their

heart.”

I hope I may be pardoned if I apply this lesson

of Christian humility and Christian equality to con-

ditions in my own, my native land America, which

I love instinctively with a love of predilection, though

I try to love all men in every land. I am confident

that it is not mere fancy on my part to see in the
primitive and authentic American ideal a similarity

with that of the Gospel. Equality of all men in the

sight of God is taught in the Gospel, and equality of

all men before the law is the keynote of our Consti-

tution. So it is a fact that where the Christian re-

ligion loses influence, the spirit of democracy is en-

dangered. And there are not wanting in America

today indications that the old simplicity of life and

democracy of manners are waning. Time was when

the fundamental social principle in our country was

simplicity, and equality. But now there seems to be a

deplorable hankering for class distinctions, the bane

of the old world, the ancient curse both of Asia and

of Europe. Aristocracy is the unnatural, artificial,

un-Christian system based upon the lie that one man

is better than another because his blood comes from

a slightly different source, because his family is, or

has been prominent, because his traceable pedigree

is longer, his genealogy prouder, or because—and



THE MORAL LAW

this is the lowest and ugliest type of aristocratic

theory—^because he has more money than another.
Democracy, like Christianity, maintains that all

such distinctions are arbitrary and altogether damn-

able. And it would take no great parade of argu-

ment to show that democracy is true and aristocracy

false. There are plenty of scions of noble families

who have in their veins the “noblest blood” in Eu-

rope, who are none the less mentally insignificant,

and indeed in not a few cases imbeciles. There

are both here and abroad a disproportionate number

of aristocratic scapegraces, and it is almost the rule

that the children of excessively rich parents are of

no use to themselves, their families or to society;

there is a superabundance of prodigal sons, and must

I add, prodigal daughters of distinguished parents.

Furthermore—I say it with profound regret

—

there are too many Americans who were born of

simple people, brought up from childhood to believe

in the essential equality of rich and poor who, com-

ing into money, have turned traitor to their early

principles and have thrown away their birthright of

democracy to take up the manners, the pride, the

haughtiness and the insufferable self-satisfaction of

the aristocracy. There are too many pedigree hunt-

ers amongst us, too many American newspapers con-

ducting genealogical departments; too many chil-

dren of shop-keepers, of farmers, of miners, of me-

chanics, looking up escutcheons and coats of arms;

too many liveried lackeys; too many uniformed ser-

vant girls and serving men in American homes;

there are too many marriages—loveless and often
tragically unhappy—of clean-blooded American
girls to decadent foreign noblemen, because

of the silly ambition of title-hunting mothers

;



84 THE MORAL LAW

too many American women madly desirous of being

presented at some European court; too many rich

Americans childishly proud of the permission to

wear a medal, a sword, a cocked hat and breeches

conferred upon them by some court in Europe. Such

things may be in certain instances only foolish, but

I fear that there often goes with them a haughti-

ness, a superciliousness, a ridiculous delusion of

superiority.

I wonder if that sort of thing can find place in

the cave of Bethlehem. I wonder if one would go

sword in hand, cocked and plumed hat on head and

trailing long silk robes on that earthen floor, to

salute the poor little helpless Babe in the straw. The

incongruity is not only ridiculous, it would be sacri-

legious.

I hope I shall not be misunderstood to mean that

the worship of Jesus Christ the Son of God should

never be accompanied by beauty and splendor of rit-

ual. He was born indeed in a stable, but we are not

content to leave Him in that sordid place. We take
Him from the proximity of cattle, place Him upon

the altar and there we give Him, with all the magnifi-

cence we can muster, the adoration that is His due.

But if a grand ceremonial involves the use of beauti-

ful vestments by Christ’s ministers, we expect them

to remember that the splendor and the glory are not

for them, but for their Master.

Indeed in the Catholic service we chant again and

again: Wow Nobis Domine, Non Nobis, “Not to us 0

Lord, not to us but to Thy Name be Glory.” If a

minister at the altar should be proud or vain he

would be like a color bearer in a parade who would

imagine that when men doff the hat as he passes by

the reverence is to him and not to the flag he carries.



THE MORAL LAW

God grant, then, that we learn these lessons of

Christmas: humility, simplicity, democracy of man-

ner, and the spirit of poverty. For it seems to me

that these sweet virtues are not only exemplified but

are commanded to us by the fact that Jesus Christ

Son of David and what is infinitely more, Son of the

Most High God, Incarnate in a human body, chose

for His appearance upon earth the humblest and

lowliest imaginable circumstances.



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