If this be a correct account of the nature, origin, and grounds of our actual consciousness of obligation, we are now in a position to inquire whether, as moralists generally assume, the abstract sense of obligation is of a higher order than the concrete, whether it is the ultimate goal of moral development. One merit may at once be conceded to this consciousness. In so far as it emphasizes the supreme worth of goodness, it is a nobler feeling than the merely sentient pleasures and pains which the concrete sense of obligation sometimes accentuates. We hold that man worthy of reverence who makes goodness the law of his being; but we think him merely respectable who does right that he may escape the punishments of Heaven and earth. But this is not the only or the more common aspect of the concrete sense of obligation. It often impels to duty because of sympathy or love for our fellow-men. And these feelings are as noble as any in our nature. But it is especially with the religious elements in our concrete sense of obligation that the advocates of duty for duty's sake are at war. Now on that point it must be observed that if men feel they ought to be good, because in the life of goodness they are fellow-workers with God, their reason is the strongest and most exalted we are able to conceive. Of course many devout persons fall short of this attainment; and the number of those is probably large who can conceive theoretically no other ground of obligation than the arbitrary will of God, and no other reason for heeding it than the rewards and penalties of the future state. That a virtue so callow should be sustained by a theology so crude is better than that it should perish altogether. And as the religious consciousness is at the outset the nursing-mother of morality, so in its maturity it feeds it with spiritual food which at once fortifies and glorifies it. On its lower, as on its higher levels, therefore, religion is the indispensable ally of morality. And wise men cannot survey without anxiety and alarm the demand for secular, as opposed to religious, moral instruction in our schools. As though children could be influenced by abstractions like the categorical imperative! As though the body of divine commands and sanctions were not schoolmasters to
