Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CONTRADICTIONS.
I see no reason why progress in the moral world should be so slow, or the return for moral efforts so pitifully small. If the Church would address her efforts, not in persuading men to adopt a certain set of opinions, but to adopt certain habits of life, she would find the work of conversion easy and rapid. ?W. H. H. Murray. 16. I quote the above words not in approval but as a warning. As we shall see in other chapters, and have already partly seen, there is ample reason why
progress in the moral world is so slow. What, however, we are here concerned with is the assumption that habits of life are independent of, and can be divorced from opinions. This is a great, a very grave blunder. That our Freewill may properly co-operate with the Universal Order, it is, precisely, imperatively necessary that it be governed, moved by correct opinions, by right reason. When a gardener takes charge of a young plant, the first thing he considers is the atmospheric conditions which its nature demands: whether it can stand the open air or must be placed inside a hot-house, whether it does or does not crave sunshine; we may even imagine plants that thrive by getting sunshine through a red or a blue glass. Our intellect acts as the atmospheric medium to morality. True, no development of intellect makes a man moral. Morality has to do with appetites, passions, feelings, but it makes all the difference in the world, whether the facts of our environment act on our feelings through an intellect that interprets them correctly or falsely. Many a warm-hearted man has had his benevolence stifled by looking on misery through Malthusian spectacles?being confused by the sophistries of Mai thus. Man has not yet, as Huxley says, discovered his true place in Nat…