To Mr. Norton.

Cambridge, Aug. 18, 1867.

. . . Since our talk last summer on what religion is, and the subsequent development of our ideas on this subject, I have meditated more and more, impelled by a dissatisfaction with the state in which we left the distinction between moral and religious duties. The idea that the one consists of the obligations of the highest expediency, while the other is concerned with absolute obligations, has come to seem quite trivial, and inadequate to distinguish the objects of feelings so different as our religious and moral sentiments. But I think that the true distinction is discoverable in the classification of duties which Mill adopts from the Catholic casuists.

The Calvinist, regarding this life and the next as all one and part of a grand moral scheme, in which obligations, duties, rights, and sanctions are completely balanced and mutually fitted to each other, conceives three different classes of virtues as essentially one, — as all on the type of legal duties, that is, of duties of “perfect obligation,” with corresponding rights either in human beings or in the Divine Being. This identification of religious and all other obligations with legality is the characteristic of the extreme Protestant or Calvinistic creed. But such an identification confounds these distinct elements: namely, 1. The truly legal duties, which have corresponding rights in other human beings and real sanctions in the punitive powers of the State, — such as duties of refraining from various forms of violence, for example; or paying one’s debts, and keeping other legally sanctioned contracts; 2. The positively moral duties, which are without legal sanctions, and are not enforced except by depriving the delinquent of voluntarily, or freely rendered benefits, and by the consequent evils of such deprivation; 3. Those duties which are above the sanctions of fear or favor, and have their rewards and their sanctions

either in another life or in themselves, — or in the evils of the absence of the requisite motive to them.

These last seem to me to be the strictly religious duties, as distinguished from legal and merely moral ones. Over and above what society requires and enforces by its power, and beyond what individual consciences demand of others and obtain by the power of opinion, or by moral means, there are other duties, in the modern religious sense of the word, which the individual conscience recognizes, and to which the individual conscience is constrained by sanctions either wholly self-subsisting, or sustained by a superstitious faith in another life. From doing a religious duty there are no visible benefits to the agent, and from neglecting to do it no visible evils, evident to any but himself. If his imagination of a future reward or punishment determines this invisible restraint, his religion is superstitious. But if immediate happiness in doing his duty, or misery in not doing it, is the ultimate sanction, then his religion is real, or a part of his character.

The earliest recognition of this idea, the intrinsic happiness of duty, is the Socratic doctrine, — that to suffer injustice is better than to do it. The later Stoic doctrine, that virtue is its own reward, is an affirmation of the same essential principle. This is the religious idea of duty, as distinguished from those acts whose sanctions are external, either in the legal exercise of power or in the free exercise of opinion and favor. Neither force nor favor, neither negative nor positive external sanctions, are the adequate grounds of action to the truly religious soul. Whether the doctrine of a future life (rewarding by external benefits and punishing by external evils) is true or not, the true idea of religious duty is independent of it. This idea rests wholly on the value of the act, per se, to the agent, — on the happiness it gives him, or the misery he suffers from omitting to do it.

This, according to Mr. Grote, was a novel idea in the

time of Socrates. Up to that time, the pagan world had no feeling of duty other than to deserve exemption from punishment or else the favor of other men or of the gods. The invisible restraints and sanctions of superstitious beliefs were the only ones which deserved the name of religious motives. The most enviable man — the happiest man — was he who possessed the most power to secure the visible goods of life, without fear or favor. In our time, the religious idea of duty has grown so prominent, through the influence of Christianity, that the novelty of it to the childish mind of the Greeks can hardly be realized.

With this change in the moral feelings of the world, the distribution of duties into the three classes has also changed, and is progressively changing as the world moves on. Moral duties become legal ones, or are peremptorily required by law. Religious duties become moral ones, or are demanded of us by the consciences of other men; and with intellectual progress (which is the fundamental one), duties of which men were ignorant become known, and the extent of what good we can do (ideally meritorious, without being either morally or legally binding on us) is constantly growing.

But nothing is properly called a duty which has not some sanction; that is, some real motive, in fact, to do it; and it is by their actual sanctions that duties are distributed into the three classes. Religious duties are not a merely negative class, a class without sanctions, or real motives to do them. The peculiarity of this class is that their sanctions, not being external or independent of the religious character, cannot directly produce this character. Men may take on trust the fact of the superior happiness of a supremely virtuous life over a merely moral one, or may be persuaded by external and non-religious motives, such as a superstitious respect for superior authority, or a belief in future rewards and punishments; but the true religious sanction is the real superiority

of disinterested rational actions as a source of happiness to the agent himself. His actions cannot be disinterested in the absolute sense of the term, — cannot be independent of the happiness of the agent in the widest sense of happiness. He may observe his religious duties, because he is happier in following the authority he respects or in the anticipations of a future happiness, than in following the momentary impulses of his lower nature; but his conduct is strictly religious only when determined by the immediate, peculiar, and supreme happiness, which the acting for universal ends, without fear or favor, causes in the mature religious character. This is the sanction which determines, not, indeed, what really are religious duties, but which of our actions are done in the truly religious spirit.

The whole question of what are our duties in general is dependent on wholly different considerations from those which determine the classification of them under legal, moral, and religious duties. The question is fundamentally a scientific one (the question of Deontology), of what ought to be done, whatever the sanctions may be by which a principle or rule of conduct is enforced. The classification of duties according to their sanctions is not scientific and permanent, but historic and subject to change with the moral and intellectual advance of the race. The science of duty decides what ought to be done, on principles which may or may not be effectively appealed to as the motives to right conduct. But the distinction we are considering is properly one of real sanctions, — the distinction of duties according to such sanctions. From the scientific point of view, there is but one fundamental sanction, to wit, the test of all right conduct (for the test of conduct is fundamentally the warrant of it), namely, the “highest good.” To act from this sanction, from the love of the “highest good,” is to act religiously, disinterestedly, and “on principle.”

The unity which the Calvinist sought by reducing all virtue

to the legal type is an end really to be sought in the philosophic type of utilitarian morality; for this is the only truly philosophic scheme, the only one which does not base itself arbitrarily on opinion, — on the shifting, historic ground of the so-called “moral sense.” There is no other test of what duty is in general, and no higher or more religious motive to it, than that it conduces to the highest good of the greatest number.

I have yielded one point to you by using the words “religion” and “religious” in their unhistoric, though not conventional, sense, against my last summer’s protest. I felt then a prejudice against these words, as falsely uniting the noblest feelings with the meanest ideas; as being of those good words through which one of the subtlest forms of tyranny is exercised over freedom of thought.

The practical lesson of this sermon is that there are many actions which, though they may be recognized as obligatory by the conscience of the one who does them, ought not to be imposed as such on any one by any other human being. But, so far as such actions are really beneficent, and are recognized as such by others, they should be classed as positively meritorious, as works of supererogation. We should not seek to make them obligatory simply on the ground of their positive worth. For, by this reasoning, the more worthy an act is, the more obligatory the act would be, and saintliness would be imperatively demanded of us, — the Calvinist’s paradox. It is not by laws and legal sanctions, nor yet by opinion and moral sanctions, but only by worship, — the positive reverence due to the highest even of human virtues, — that such virtues have a foothold in the world.

But I may be guilty myself of violating the great principle of religious liberty by compelling you to read so long a sermon. A sermon never naturally comes to an end. It is a series of endless evolutions of thoughts and sentiments, with but little

help from art, and no help at all from the great art of making an end. It is necessary to arrest such discourses flagranti delicto, in the very act of starting on another theme, — which I do.