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Fairness, are not distinct qualities added to being, but are, ontologically considered, being itself in its unity, simplicity, and fulness. He who says Being, says all he says who says Truth, Goodness, Fairness, as we are taught, in fact, by God himself, who reveals his name to Moses, as I AM THAT AM, SUM QUI SUM. Either the good in itself is being, therefore God, or it is nothing. Good, if good there be, is not a quality or attribute of being, but is being itself; and creatures are good, because through the creative act they participate in being. Hence, God saw the things he had made, and behold they were good, very good.

The author, we have said, holds, as well as we, that to ask, if God be good, is absurd; but to ask, if our Creator be good, is not absurd, for it is imaginable, though false, that an evil and malignant being might have created us. Imaginable, perhaps but supposable, no; because it implies a contradiction in terms. Only being can create, for only being can act from its own energy alone, and all being is, by the fact that it is being, good. To create, is to produce from nothing by the sole power or energy of the creator. Then, no creature can create, because no creature can act without the concurrent action of being on which it is dependent. All that is and is not creature is being. To suppose, then, that our creator might have been evil and malignant is a contradiction, for it were to suppose being to be both being and not-being. Our author by not discriminating between good and moral good, or good and virtue, fails to perceive that good is in being, and evil in the privation of being; that good is positive; that evil, like falsehood, is negative; and seems to imagine that there is a positive principle of evil, as well as a positive principle of good, which is Manichæism, or Oriental Dualism. But there cannot be two eternal beings, one good and one evil; for, as good and being are identical, the idea of evil is repugnant to the idea of being, precisely as it is repugnant to the idea of good.

If the distinguished author had really understood and accepted our doctrine in the passage he cites from the "Conversations of Our Club," of the identity of good and God, as he professes to do, he would have spared us his elaborate and ingenious criticism. In those Conversations we are discussing the grounds of our obligation to obey God. Our obligation to obey God, or our duty to obey him, is simply the correlative to his right to command us. Whence, then, his right to command us? This right is in his sovereignty.

His sovereignty is in his dominion; his dominion is in his right of property in us; and his right of property is founded on his creative act, on the fact that he has created us, on the principle that the thing made belongs to the maker; for it is the maker mediante his own act. God's right to command us, then, rests in the last analysis, on his creative act, and we are bound to obey him because he is our creator, and therefore our proprietor. "Then," says one of the interlocutors, "if the devil were our creator, we should be bound to him." The author agrees with us, if, per impossibile, God were not our creator, he would not have the right to command us, but denies if, per impossibile, the devil were our creator, we should be bound to obey the devil; for it is not in the fact that "God is holy, but in his being our holy creator, that his full claims on our allegiance are founded." We can assure him that we are as far as he from maintaining the proposition that if the devil, per impossibile, were our creator, we should be bound to obey his commands. And we had supposed that no reader could imagine for a moment that the proposition was introduced for any purpose but to show that it could not be entertained, because it implies a contradiction in terms. To suppose the devil to create, is to suppose the devil to be real and necessary being, therefore God, and no devil at all. The proposition, then, is absurd, and therefore an impossible proposition. The other proposition is supposable; because God is a free creator, and the creative act is not necessary to his being; and to suppose him not to be creator, does in no sense suppose him not to be, or not to be what and all he is, even being creator. The supposition that he is not our creator is impossible to be made by us, for he only can be our creator; and if he did not create us, we should not exist, and therefore could make no supposition; but, in regard to God himself, the supposition is possible, and involves no contradiction in terms.

We maintain, simply, that God's right to command, or his sovereignty, rests on his creative act, from which it no doubt follows that our creator, whoever he might be, would have the sovereign right to command us. Any being we can suppose as our creator, we may suppose to have the right of sovereignty over us; but we cannot suppose the devil our creator, because the terms, devil and creator, mutually exclude each other. The author concedes that only our creator can have the right to command us, but main

tains that even our creator has that right only by virtue of his sanctity; and therefore unless our creator proves himself holy creator (p. 86) we are not bound to obey him. He does not seem to see that, as Father John explains to him, the term holy is included in the term creator, precisely as is the term being. He labors to prove, as the basis of moral obligation, that God is holy. But what does he understand by proving that God is holy? That holiness or sanctity is distinguishable from real and necessary being, or that it is included in it? He must understand the latter, or that real and necessary being is necessarily sanctity. The judgment, God is holy, is analytic, not synthetic, for the predicate is contained in, not added to the subject, and is therefore included in the term creator. To say God is our holy creator, is to say in reality no more than to say God is our creator. The author is misled by his psychology, and does not see that the distinction he makes between the essence of God and his attributes is only a distinction ex parte subjecti, to which there is no corresponding distinction ex parte objecti; or, in other words, that God is ens simplicissimum. The judgment, God is creator, or God is sovereign, is synthetic, for the predicate is something joined to, not contained in the subject; but God is being, is selfexistent, is necessary, is eternal, is immutable, is intelligent, is wise, is powerful, is good, or is holy, is an analytic judgment, for the predicate explains the subject, but adds nothing to it. Who says ens, or being, says all of God considered in himself that can be said. SUM QUI SUM is all that God can say of his own nature to us through natural reason; and all we say of him, however we multiply our words or vary our forms of expression, is simply QUI EST. Adjectives and qualifying terms add nothing to simple ens, or being, and are necessary only because our faculties cannot take in at one view all of being that is intelligible to us, or because it is necessary to guard against the false meanings an erroneous philosophy has attached to the

word.

The author maintains, as a vital point, that moral truth, by which he means the morally good or the morally obligatory, is a simple synthetic judgment. As to its sim

plicity, we say nothing, for we are not quite clear as to what the author means by a simple judgment, or in what sense he holds a synthetic judgment is or can be simple. But that the moral judgment is a synthetic judgment, or a

judgment in which the predicate is joined to the subject, not contained in it, we hold to be unquestionable. But if this be so, how can the author hold that it is simple necessary truth, identically God himself? Where, in such case, is the synthesis? Every judgment, the logicians tell us, has three terms subject, predicate, and copula. When the predicate is identical with the subject, or is contained in the subject, the judgment is analytic; when the three terms are distinct, and no one of them can be identified with another, or both of the others, the judgment is a synthetic judgment. The author says moral truth is a synthetic judgment. Then he must find in it a real synthesis of three distinct terms not resolvable one into another. how can he identify it with the single term, as he does when he identifies it with God? Does he not see that when he does so, he contradicts himself, and makes the judgment analytic, not synthetic?

Then

The author has misunderstood us, and those who agree with us, in supposing that we identify moral truth with God. We identify all necessary truth, therefore the good in itself, and therefore the ideal or apodictic term of the moral judgment with God. But we hold that the judgment itself is synthetic, and, like all synthetic judgments, affirms a real synthesis of the subject and predicate, or of the necessary and contingent, or being and existences. The three terms of the judgment cannot be found in Ens, or God as being. They can be found only in three terms of the real synthesis of things, Ens creat existentias, as Gioberti has so fully and so clearly explained. The moral judgment demands as its condition the ideal formula, or the real synthetic judgment à priori, without which, as Kant demonstrates, no synthetic judgments à posteriori are possible. The principle of the moral judgment is in the three terms united of this formula, not in any one of them taken singly. Being alone cannot give us the conception of sovereignty, of law, or obligation, without which there can be no moral judgment; existence alone, or creation alone cannot furnish the principle, for neither is apprehensible or conceivable without ens, the first term of the formula. There can be no moral obligation, unless there are creatures; there can be no creatures without the creative act; and no creative act without ens necessarium et reale, or real and necessary being. The author, however strenuously he insists on the intrinsic nature of good and

evil, does not attempt to deduce analytically the conception of moral obligation from the conception of the being or the attributes of God. "It is not," he says, " on his being holy, but on his being our holy creator, that his full claims on our allegiance are founded." God is not, we repeat, a necessary creator, and the creative act is not included in the conception of the being, or the attributes of God. Therefore the author must modify his assertion, and instead of saying moral truth is God, he must say it is God mediante actu creativo suo, and agree with us, that the principle of moral obligation is in the divine creative

act.

Take the instance once more of the jewel. I am bound to restore my friend's deposit, and am morally wrong if I do not. But this particular judgment depends on the more general judgment. I am bound to render unto every one his own, or his due. This is the principle of justice. Not to render unto every one his own or his due is to be unjust, to violate the demands of justice. The moral judgment in the instance selected is not that the jewel deposited with me by my friend for safe Keeping is still his, but that being his, I ought in justice to restore it on his reclaiming it. The essential and distinctive moral judgment is expressed by this word ought, which is the same as the word owe, and in all languages the judgment is expressed by an equivalent word. In all languages we know any thing of, moral obligation is expressed as debt, something owed, and to be paid. I owe to justice the restoration of my friend's jewel, or its restoration is a debt due to justice. Justice, strictly taken, however, expresses the moral relation between God and his creatures, or the claims of God as creator on them, rather than God, or the Supreme Being himself; though taken absolutely, and as the just in itself, it is, and must be God, identical with his infinite and eternal being. The real moral judgment, then, is, I owe to God the restoration of my friend's deposit, or the restoration of my friend's deposit is a debt due to God. Grant now the owner of the debt is God, the debt itself cannot be God, for it is alike distinguished from him and from me. Whence comes this debt? How comes it that I owe it to the Supreme Being? I owe and can owe it to him only for the reason that he is my owner. If I owned myself, and my actions, I could not owe him the restoration, for being my own owner, neither he nor any one else could place me

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