The principal happiness or misery of man consists in the settled state of his own heart, and not in the outward conditions of his daily life. All human plaudits are as naught compared with the approval of one's own conscience; and no penal inflictions can compare with the anguish of remorse. The inward peace of the righteous soul, the disquietude and misery of the sinful soul, are the blossom and the fruitage of the seed which has been sown, and the stem and branches which have been nurtured by the voluntary choices and acts of man. "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting." The connection between sin and punishment is no arbitrary or accidental connection. It is just as much a relation between cause and effect as the relation between sowing and reaping in the physical world. "To cause the mind to punish itself, to work a retribution out of ourselves, to secure it by fixed nature, to inflict it by inflexible necessity, to convert the capacity of sin into the instrument of suffering, is the prerogative of Divine rule."[561]
IV. The end of moral government.—We have said that the end of government, in general, is the maintenance of order. The end of moral government is the maintenance of moral order in the realm of free self-determined powers. The moral order must consist in conformity to the idea of the absolute good. The personality of God (the essential momenta of which are reason and freedom, holiness and love) is per se, in its totality, the absolute good. Infinite Personality is but another name for Absolute Perfection.
The highest good for a created dependent personality is "to resemble God" in all those attributes or perfections which constitute personality. It is to be fully established in harmony with God's moral character, unified with Him in will, glorified with Him in holiness, and perfected with Him in the blessedness of love. The highest perfection of personal being is moral order, and therefore human personality, conceived in its purity and perfection, is the end of the Divine government.[562]
This we have called "the ideal order of moral life," because it is not yet realized in the world. We must believe, however, that the final triumph of goodness is a part of the great world-plan. We must not only believe, but know, that the great design of creation, the reason for which the world exists at all, is that in it goodness may come to its final realization. And this conviction is grounded on the fact that the moral life of humanity has its source in the same Being who called the world into existence, and who is conducting this present dispensation to a glorious consummation, in which He shall "reconcile all things unto Himself,... whether they be things in earth or things in heaven," and "gather together in one all things in Christ," that "God may be all in all."
Christianity bases all the obligations and sanctions of morality on the great truths that God is near to man, that He sustains him every moment in life, that He is the Father of the human spirit, and that He governs man in order to perfect his nature and bring him into an everlasting fellowship with Himself. Christianity knows nothing of "a science of morals" which is not based upon the correlations between man and God, nor of a morality which forgets God and disregards the most sacred and fundamental of all duties, namely, the duties we owe to God. A morality based solely upon the relations in which we stand to our fellow-men is at best but secular and utilitarian. A morality which is grounded upon the relation of volition to the state of the sensibility, and regards "happiness as our being's end and aim," is egoistic and selfish. A morality which rests upon our relation to God, the absolute good, and which looks backward rather than forward for its motive, is unselfish and Christian.