under moral obligation, or call me to an account for my acts, or any use I see proper to make of myself. The moral judgment, then, implies God as my owner, or the judg ment, I owe myself, and therefore my acts to God. God owns me and my acts, and I owe all I am, all I have, all I can do to him. Whence this divine ownership, the principle of all moral obligation? It certainly is not identifiable with the divine being, or in other words, the divine ownership in which is founded all moral obligation, is not inherent in or identical with the divine nature or essence, and therefore the distinctively moral truth is not, and cannot be identically God himself.

This divine ownership can be founded only in the creative act of God, by which he, by his sole energy, creates me from nothing. As the author himself concedes, when he says of God, "It is not on his being holy, but on his being our holy creator, that his full claims on our allegiance are founded." He owns us because he has made us, for the thing made belongs to the maker. The distinctively moral judgment, then, is not, in all its terms, a necessary judgment, or necessary truth, as the author asserts, for the obligation depends immediately on the copula, or creative act of God. The ideal or necessary term of the judgment is God, as it is in every judgment, but the predicate and copula are distinguishable from him as the act and its product are distinguishable from the actor; are, as in the divine judgment or primitive intuition itself, contingent, since, as we constantly repeat, creation ex parte Dei is a free and not a necessary act. The principle that the thing made is the maker's is a necessary and eternal truth, but that any thing is made, or that the occasion is created for the application of the principle, is a contingent fact, dependent on the will of God to create or not to create. Hence the eternal law, of which all just laws are transcripts, is eternal only ex parte Dei, not in its subjects, save in the sense that God's free purpose and decree to create them is eternal, or, as is more commonly said, from eternity. We cannot, then, accept, without important qualifications, the author's assertion that the moral judgment is simple and necessary, that is, simple necessary truth. Simple necessary truth is God, we grant; but the moral judgment is not the judgment God is, but the judgment God is our owner, or we owe to God our existence, and therefore our actions. We owe and can owe ourselves and actions to him, only because he is our maker.

The owing depends on creation, and connects us morally, as the creative act connects us physically, with God.

The author seems at one time to be an exclusive psychologist, and at another an exclusive ontologist, and we find him nowhere recollecting that the primitive judgment is the synthesis of the primum ontologicum and the primum psychologicum. In declaring the moral judgment necessary, or, as he understands it, necessary truth, therefore God, he makes the judgment analytic, not synthetic, and therefore exclusively ontological. He confounds good with moral good, or the good in itself with the moral obligation of creatures to seek good as their Final Cause; as he confounds the good as Final Cause, or Beatitude, with the good as First Cause. The good in both cases is ontologically the same, indeed, but not the same in respect of moral truth. Moral science, or the science of ethics, is founded on the two-fold relation of creatures to God; their relation to him as First Cause, and their relation to him as Final Cause. Creatures have a double movement, that of procession by his creative act from God as First Cause, and their return to him, without absorption in him, as their Final Cause, their last end, or Beatitude. God is the terminus à quo and the terminus ad quem of all existences. Creation, since it is the free act of God, the free act of reason, intelligence, wisdom, love, as well as power,-must be an act propter finem, for some end and for some good end, and therefore for an end inseparable from being. But as God only is being, and is all being, or being in its plenitude, QUI EST, the end for which he creates must be himself. As he is the end for which he creates and creatures exist,-"all things are by him and for him," he is our end, and our good is in our return to him as our Final Cause. Our good, or the good for which creatures exist, is in his being or eternal essence. But our moral good is not in simply returning or attaining to him as our last end, but in doing so voluntarily, by our own free act; for we are created with free will. Our obligation to return to God is imposed by the creative act, which, as a free act, is the act of the divine will. The obligation is, then, imposed by the will of God, and consequently has the essential characteristic of law; since, as Suarez tells us, there is no law without some will commanding. It connects us in the moral, as the creative act connects us in the physical order with God, and is the copula between being and existences, the subject and predicate of

the ideal judgment; only in the moral order the subject and predicate change sides, and existences attain to being as the product of their free activity.

It is not difficult, now, to clear up the mystery and solve the problems which come up as to the principles of morality, the first part of natural moral theology, or speculative ethics. Are we asked what is good? We answer, God. Are we asked what is our good? We answer again, God. Are we asked why is he our good? We answer, because he is the good in itself. Why is he the good in itself? Because he is being, being in itself, and all good is in being, or rather is being. If you ask us what is moral good? we answer, in voluntarily returning to God, without absorption in him, as our Final Cause or last end. If you ask why we are morally obliged to return to God as our last end, or, in other words, to seek our own good, we answer, because it is the will of God, as he himself declares in the very act of creating us for that end. If it is asked, why are we bound. to obey the will of God? we answer, because he has made us, and we are his; he is our owner, and the owner may do what he pleases with his own. We may go behind the will of God to find the reason of the law, for the reason of the law is in his own eternal reason; but we cannot go behind the will itself to find the reason of our obedience. God wills, is always the sufficient reason of man's obedience, because his will is the will of man's sovereign. To this last answer only does our author try to frame an objection, but he does not succeed. If God were not holy, he reasons, even though our creator, we should not be bound to obey him; and yet he does not found the obligation to obedience on the divine sanctity, for he says expressly, "It is not on his being holy, but on his being our holy creator, that lis full clafins on our allegiance are founded." What he means is, that the obligation is imposed neither by the sanctity alone, nor by the creative act alone, but by both conjointly; so that if we could conceive an unholy creator, we should not be bound to obey him. We are bound to do the will of him whose we are, and we are his who creates us, for we are the creator mediante the creative act, which act is his. If we could suppose the devil to be our creator, and devil still, we should be bound to do the devil's bidding-no question of that. But, as we have sufficiently shown, we cannot suppose the devil to be our creator, because only being can create, and no evil or malignant being is supposa

ble, conceivable, or imaginable, since the idea of being and the idea of good are identical; or all being, by the fact that it is being, is good. The difficulty of the author grows out of the fact that he confounds ens with existens, and as existences or creatures are evil or malignant in a greater or less degree, it implies, in his mind, no contradiction in terms to suppose or imagine an evil and malignant being, therefore an evil or malignant creator. In loose popular lan. guage we may and do call existences or creatures, beings; but philosophers should use language more strictly, and with more exactness and precision. The distinction Gioberti makes between being and existence or creature, ens and existens, is important and valid, and would save us much needless perplexity and much unmeaning speculation, if observed. The practice of the schools, of using the term ens indiscriminately for being and existence, real being and possible being, necessary being and contingent being,—as if the contingent and the necessary, the possible and the real, the creature and creator, could be put in the same category, -is as unphilosophical as any thing well can be, and seldom fails to have a most injurious effect on our speculations. To suppose the devil creator, is to suppose the devil being, therefore good and holy, as we have said, and no devil at all. Has the author ever undertaken the refutation of Manichæism? If he has, will he tell us what, in his view, is the principle of that refutation? If he supposes it possible that there should be an evil and malignant being, how can he demonstrate the falsity, or logically refute the doctrine of two original and eternal principles-the one good, and the other evil?

Indeed, the author seems to us to go farther in the Manichæan direction than he suspects. He maks evil a positive quality of actions. This he expressly maintains. Then it must be a positive quality of actors. Then it must have a positive original principle opposed to the principle of good, for good cannot create evil. Then he must suppose two eternal principles; therefore two eternal self-existent beings, two Gods, the one good, the other evil. He teaches us that morally good and inorally evil are both positive. But St. Thomas holds, and so do most theologians, that good alone is the object of the will; consequently, that malice or evil will is privative, not positive, which must be the fact if, as we maintain, good and being are identical. But the author, though he asserts the identity of God and good, does not recognize the

identity of good and being, for he conceives, and even speaks of an evil and malignant being, as implying no contradiction in terms. The good, in his conception, is not being, but a quality, attribute, or accident of being. Accidentally, or as a fact, being is good, but not necessarily good in that it is being. That good, however, is an accident of being, in the scholastic sense, he cannot hold, for he holds that the good is a necessary truth. He can, then, hold it as an attribute of being only in the sense that the scholastics distinguish attributes from accidents,—that is, as an essential and necessary attribute, indistinguishable from the essence of the subject, attribute only in our mode of conceiving, but in reality no attribute at all, but the subject itself. Substance stands under and supports accidents, but does not stand under and support essential attributes, for they are the substance itself. The author labors at great length and with much earnestness to show that good is identical neither with the free command nor with the necessary command of God, that is, with the act of God; then, in identifying God and good as he does, he must identify good with the eternal being of God, and holds, if he understands himself, that the good and real and necessary being are identical, and that evil being is as much a contradiction in terms as an evil good, or a good evil. If so, he must concede that evil is not positive, but negative, not being, but privation of being; consequently, that we cannot will evil, because evil being nothing in itself, to will evil would be to will nothing, and to will nothing is simply not to will.

Assuming, now, good and being to be identical, and our good to be from and in being, we can understand why the love of God imposes on us the obligation of returning to him as our Final Cause. The law, though imposed by the will of God, is yet not an arbitrary law, for it is the expression of his eternal reason, or his intrinsic wisdom, goodness, love. He enjoins us to return to him, because it is only in him that there is or can be any good or beatitude for us. Our good, as the good itself, is in being, and there is and can be no being but God; for he only can say SUM QUI SUM. As without him as First Cause we could not exist, so without him as Final Cause we can have no beatitude, cannot exist as blest; without him as First Cause we should be nothing in the order of physical existence, so without him as Final Cause we should be nothing in the moral order or order of beatitude. All movement toward God as our last end is a