LAW OF SELF-DENIAL. 75 better for every mental faculty, and for every high and healthful form of affection and emotion. The law requires the restriction or denial of every appetite, desire, propensity, passion, at the point where it would interfere with something higher, and only at that point. This is the natural and original law. But if moral disorder has come in and become habitual, if great interests are at stake in circumstances of temptation and struggle, it may be wise, and even a duty, to ignore and reject many pleasures that might otherwise be indulged in, as the soldier who hastens to defend his country may not stop to enjoy fine scenery by the way. This gives us the difference between the natural law of self-denial and the Christian law. The first would be the law for a man in health, simply requiring that nothing should be done to injure that. But Christianity is wholly a remedial system. "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;" and the law of self-denial as a remedy, or as a condition for the working of other remedies, may be as different from its natural law as the regimen of a sick man should be from that of one who is well. It has been from a consciousness of disorder that difficulties and obscurity have arisen at this point. There has been a feeling that self-denial, as well as self-torture, was compensatory; and then, when the lower powers had gone to excess, it is not strange that there should be a tendency to their undue repression, and even eradication. This has given rise to asceticism, and penances, and to a vast brood of superstitious observances. But precisely what the natural law is in its place, that the Christian law is in its place. Under Christianity self-denial is not a remedy, but the condition for the working of remedies, and its law is that it shall be carried just so far as is necessary for the best working of those great remedies which God has provided for the moral disorders of this world. This may often make self-denial very severe, but only as it is salutary. It may require the cutting off of a right hand, or the plucking out of a right eye, but only on the condition that they "offend," that is, cause you to stumble in your course towards heaven. In what has been said hitherto, the dependence of the higher upon the lower forces and powers has been prominent. So long as these powers remain within the limits of unconsciousness, the right proportion is always preserved; but when they come under the direction of a finite, and especially of a perverted will, that proportion is not preserved. The danger is that the dependence of the higher upon the lower will be ignored, that the lower will in consequence be neglected and deteriorate, and then that the higher itself, the fountain of its sap being dried, will dwindle and wither. So is it always when a short-sighted selfishness would snatch too soon and grasp too much; so always when men would reach their ends by circumventing or evading those laws by which God has appointed that they should be gained. The law — and this is especially true in organic life—is, that that which is highest can increase only through the ministration of the parts that are lower, and hence that the perfection of the highest in its sphere can be reached only as the lower are made perfect in their sphere. In training a child, would any one secure the highest, the best balanced, and the longest continued action of the mind, he can do it only by so attending to the body as to secure the priceless but subordinate blessings of health and a sound physical METHOD APPLIED. 77 constitution. Would you have healthy feeling? Cultivate the intellect, else feeling will be fanatical. So has God constituted every organic being that "if one member suffer all the members suffer with it." Yea, and so that upon "those members of the body which we think to be less honorable we should bestow more abundant honor; since the perfection of the more honorable members that are ministered unto can be attained only through the perfection of the less honorable that minister. Our end may be the perfection of the higher; our method must be to secure it through the perfection of the lower. This method is one of wide application. It teaches us, while we aim at the highest, to care for the lowest; while we aim at the mind, to care for the body; while we aim at a perfect government, to care for the people and to seek to educate and elevate them; while we aim at perfect social organizations, to give woman her true place, not as inferior, but as different. No element of reaction upon progress can be swifter or more fatal than that of degraded mothers. It teaches us to care for children, and servants, and slaves, and criminals. Nature herself seems to cry out to us to do this. All history shows how men have disregarded this method and law, and it shows, too, how the law has avenged itself by bringing down the high and the low together. This is indeed the one great lesson of history. It needs to be pondered, more especially by republics, where the barriers of form and of force are so feeble; but whatever the form of government may be, the law is as pervading and resistless as that of gravitation, and the result is only a question of time. That result no form of heathen civilization has been able to prevent. It can be but one so long as successful men and successful Phil of DIST classes seek with a blind selfishness to elevate themselves so long as men refuse to adopt the models of method which God has set before them, and at the expense of others, thus to bind society together in an organic and a perfect whole. LECTURE IV. RELATION OF INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY.-SPONTANEOUS ENCE. THE nature and limitations of good having been already discussed, we now proceed to consider those powers from the activity of which good results. This brings us to that point both of union and of cleavage between mental and moral science, at which, as we have seen, no little confusion has arisen. Theoretically the line between them is, or may be made, distinct; but practically the treatment of the one will include, in some measure, that of the other. What man ought to do will depend on what he is, and the circumstances in which he is placed. Mental science, or psychology, will, therefore, be conditional for moral science, which will make use of the first, and is the higher of the two. The province of psychology will then be to show what the faculties are; that of moral philosophy to show how they are to be used for the attainment of their end. Both have to do with the faculties of the mind, but in different aspects; as both the botanist and the agriculturist have to do with wheat, and the astronomer and navigator with the heavenly bodies. The botanist classifies wheat; the agriculturist raises it, and cares for a knowledge of its class only as it will ena |