Explanation of Catholic Morals | Page 2

and again reiterated, that faith, even were it capable of moving
mountains, without good works is of no avail. The Catholic Church is
convinced that this doctrine is genuine and reliable enough to make it
her own; and sensible enough, too. For faith does not make a man
impeccable; he may believe rightly, and live badly. His knowledge of
what God expects of him will not prevent him from doing just the
contrary; sin is as easy to a believer as to an unbeliever. And he who
pretends to have found religion, holiness, the Holy Ghost, or whatever
else he may call it, and can therefore no longer prevaricate against the
law, is, to common-sense people, nothing but a sanctified humbug or a
pious idiot.
Nor are good works alone sufficient. Men of emancipated intelligence
and becoming breadth of mind, are often heard to proclaim with a
greater flourish of verbosity than of reason and argument, that the
golden rule is religion enough for them, without the trappings of creeds
and dogmas; they respect themselves and respect their neighbors, at
least they say they do, and this, according to them, is the fulfilment of

the law. We submit that this sort of worship was in vogue a good many
centuries before the God-Man came down upon earth; and if it fills the
bill now, as it did in those days, it is difficult to see the utility of
Christ's coming, of His giving of a law of belief and of His founding of
a Church. It is beyond human comprehension that He should have
come for naught, labored for naught and died for naught. And such
must be the case, if the observance of the natural law is a sufficient
worship of the Creator. What reasons Christ may have had for
imposing this or that truth upon our belief, is beside the question; it is
enough that He did reveal truths, the acceptance of which glorifies Him
in the mind of the believer, in order that the mere keeping of the
commandments appear forthwith an insufficient mode of worship.
Besides, morals are based on dogma, or they have no basis at all;
knowledge of the manner of serving God can only proceed from
knowledge of who and what He is; right living is the fruit of right
thinking. Not that all who believe rightly are righteous and walk in the
path of salvation: losing themselves, these are lost in spite of the truths
they know and profess; nor that they who cling to an erroneous belief
and a false creed can perform no deed of true moral worth and are
doomed; they may be righteous in spite of the errors they profess,
thanks alone to the truths in their creeds that are not wholly corrupted.
But the natural order of things demands that our works partake of the
nature of our convictions, that truth or error in mind beget truth or error
correspondingly in deed and that no amount of self-confidence in a man
can make a course right when it is wrong, can make a man's actions
good when they are materially bad. This is the principle of the tree and
its fruit and it is too old-fashioned to be easily denied. True morals
spring from true faith and true dogma; a false creed cannot teach
correct morality, unless accidentally, as the result of a sprinkling of
truth through the mass of false teaching. The only accredited moral
instructor is the true Church. Where there is no dogma, there can
logically be no morals, save such as human instinct and reason devise;
but this is an absurd morality, since there is no recognition of an
authority, of a legislator, to make the moral law binding and to give it a
sanction. He who says he is a law unto himself chooses thus to veil his
proclaiming freedom from all law. His golden rule is a thing too easily

twistable to be of any assured benefit to others than himself; his moral
sense, that is, his sense of right and wrong, is very likely where his
faith is--nowhere.
It goes without saying that the requirements of good morals are a heavy
burden for the natural man, that is, for man left, in the midst of
seductions and allurements, to the purely human resources of his own
unaided wit and strength; so heavy a burden is this, in fact, that
according to Catholic doctrine, it cannot be borne without assistance
from on high, the which assistance we call grace. This supernatural aid
we believe essential to the shaping of a good moral life; for man, being
destined, in preference to all the rest of animal creation, to a
supernatural end, is thereby raised from the natural to a supernatural
order. The requirements of