Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · SECTION CLI.

As single persons unite themselves into a family and develop in it a vitally organic life in common, so in turn society unites itself into a higher-organized copy of the family, into a society-family, into a homogeneous moral organism,—organizes itself into a real unitary life; social custom rises from being primarily a purely spiritual, impersonal power, and becomes a real personally-represented and actually self executing power,—that is, it becomes social right as expressed in law, in which form morality becomes for and over the individual an objective reality and power, and is not a mere formula but is in fact embodied in and tested and executed by moral personalities. There is no law without a personal representative and executor of the same.

If at first view society appears as a mere falling apart of the family, as a loosening of the narrower bond of love and duties as existing in the family itself, as a dissolution of the family-generated collective spirit into mere independent individual spirits, as a freer-making of the single individuals,—and if it is nevertheless, at the same time, a necessary progress beyond the mere family-life,—still there can be no resting at mere society and social custom, but society must in turn in its further development return back to the fundamental character of the family,—must exalt itself to the ideal of the family and of its moral organism, even as the plant, when unfolded out of the seed into branches and leaves, in turn generates again in the fruit the original seed. This return of society to the family takes place not merely through the fact that society itself becomes the occasion to constantly new unitings of families, but essentially by the fact that it itself takes on the character of a family of a higher grade,—that custom itself (which rules in society only as a bodiless spirit) assumes full objective reality, attains to flesh and blood and vital force, so as to vindicate and execute itself against whatever individual will may oppose it. Social custom depends for its realization entirely on its favorable recognition on the part of individuals; it falls away powerless where it meets with extended resistance; but when raised to the state of social right or law, it Can itself compel recognition in the face of such resistance,—can force its opposers to submit themselves to general rationality as incarnated in the law. Just as mere custom is society-virtue as sentiment, so is law society-character,—with firm will-force for carrying itself out. Custom is, as it were, the heart-rich idealistic bride-state of public morality; right as enunciated in law is its marriage-state with the full earnestness of obligation; the former rests on the discretion of the individual; the latter binds the individual unconditionally and with the power of active compulsion. That is surely a very bad legal condition of society where right is accomplished only by coercion and fear; and the normal condition of society is that where the law is inscribed in, and a vital force of, every individual heart, and that, too, as law and not as a mere and, as it were, simply custom; and where it does not find free recognition, there it should not bow its head and suffer in silence, but it has been intrusted by God with the sword for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well [1 Pet. ii, 14; Rom. xiii, 1-4]. That would be a bad-ordered family where the father, as against his disobedient children, merely be, wailed in inactivity,—where he should not virtualize his true moral love by palpable chastisement; and organized society has, as the higher-developed family, also the love-duty of coercion and penal chastisement. Morality cannot and ought not to have a merely subjective form; it should attain also to objective reality,—should become a power above the individual person, and that, too, not as merely conceived, but as having full reality; and this condition is realized only in the fact that right or objective morality is not a mere thought, a mere written code, but that it has its personal upholders and executors; this is not merely human order, it is divine order.—As the highest form of the moral community-life, positively-organized society cannot do away with the earlier stages, the family and society in the larger sense of the word,—but as it is itself based upon them, it must necessarily contain them within itself, and foster and promote them. A state which, as was the case with Plato’s, swallows up the family is totally illegitimate and in utter conflict with the moral idea. That unlimited autocracy of the state which assumes to be the sole and absolute source of right is a notion, and, within the Christian world, anti-moral.