had not its binding virtue in respect of God himself, who has always the full and unrestrained liberty of his cwn essence that it cannot bind itself" (Liffht of Nat- ure). Hence a knowledge of good and evil, some sense of responsibility to God, and some capacity for practical virtue, may be possessed even by persons not Christians ; those of them at least who have not been brought with- in reach of the Church, with its revelation of truth and its sacraments of grace. Of such St. Paul speaks in Kom. ii, 1-1 ; or at least his words respecting the Gen- tiles who had not the Jewish "law" may be fairly in- terpreted as extending also to those who have not the Christian law. They may do by nature some of those duties which are extended and heightened by grace, and may thus be " not far from the kingdom of God." To what extent such natural morality now exists (after eighteen centuries of Christianity) it is impossible to say ; probably to a very small extent. In his epistle to the Romans, St. Paul clearly distinguishes between that conformity with the letter of the law springing from a Christian heart, and that external conformity prompted simply by a desire to evade the odium or punishment of the transgressor. The latter the apostle does not recognise as true morality; the SiKciioauvr] vof-uKi'i is in its simple legality, and for want of a real inwardness of a moral or better spiritual life, only an apparent morality. The tpya vojmv are not by any means the tpya uya^d which the spirit of Christianity elicits; they want that life-giving spirit which is none other than the spirit of divine love, of the fullest, in- most, and truly unconditional surrender to God and his most holy purposes. The germ, the life or essence, of Chrisfian morality is love, itself the principle of union in and with Ciod, the fountain and original of all good. It is to Christian moralit\% then, that the highest stand- ard and the noblest place must be assigned; indeed, it is Christian morality which must not only precede, but supersede, all other systems of morality. " What the duties of morality are," says Coleridge, " the apostle in- structs the believer in full, comprising them under the two heads of negative and positive : negative, to keep himself pure from the world ; and positive, beneficence from loving-kindness — that is, love of his fellow-men (his kind) as himself. Last and highest come the spir- itual, comprising all the truths, acts, and duties that have an especial reference to the timeless, the perma- nent, the eternal, to the sincere love of the true as truth, of the good as good, and of God as both in one. It comprehends the whole ascent from uprightness (moral- ity, virtue, inward rectitude) to godlikeness, with all the acts, exercises, and disciplines of mind, will, and aifec- tions that are requisite or conducive to the great de- sign of our redemption from the form of the evil one, and of our second creation or birth in the divine image. It may be an additional aid to reflection to distinguish the three kinds severally, according to the faculty to which each corresponds, the part of our human nature which is more particularly its organ. Thus, the pru- dential corresponds to the sense and the understanding; the moral to the heart and the conscience ; the spiritual to the will and the reason, that is, to the finite will re- duced to harmony with and in subordination to the reason, as a ray from that true light which is both rea- son and will, universal reason and will absolute" {A ids to Reflection, i, 265, also 22, 23). On the near coincidence of this scriptural division with the Platonic, see Pru- dence. See Bishop Horsley's Charge (1790) ; Paley's and (Jrove's Moral Philosophy ; Beattie's Elements of Moral Science ; Evans's Sermons on Christian Temper ; Watts's Sermons on Christian Morals ; Mason's Chris- tian Morals ; More's Hints, ii, 245 ; Gisborne's Sermons designed to illustrate and enforce Christian Morality ; Meysenburg, De Christiana religionis vi et effectu in jus civile (Gott. 1828, 8vo); Hoffbauer, Das allgem. Oder Naturrecht u. die Moral (Halle, 1816) ; Schleier- macher, Gruivllinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sitten- lehre (Berl. 1813), p. 465 ; Bread, Difference between the
Morality of Jesus and that of the Jews ; Ensor, Princi- ples of Morality ; Hildreth, Theory of Morals ; Kames, Principles of Morality ; Whewell, Morality, § 76 ; 'Msm- XKQ, Lectures on Social Morality (1873); Smith, Char- acteristics of Christian 3forality (Bampton Lects. 1873) ; Contemp. Rev. April, 1872, art. vi and viii ; March, 1872, art. V ; Westminster Rev. April, 1871 , p. 243, 260, 261 ; and literature in Malcom, Theol. Index, s. v. (J. H.W.)
Morals, a term usually employed to designate the aggregate of the moral principles of an individual or a community as evinced in its conduct in comparison with the acknowledged rules of morality. The various gen- eral relations of this subject are so fully discussed'in the articles Ethics, IVIoual Law, etc., that we here bring together only some special distinctions under the head of duty, the fulfilment of which is the ultimate cri- terion of public and private morals.