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

The primitive love of man to God and his works becomes moral only, when, with consciousness and free recognition, it is confirmed by the self-loving spirit, and when the love to God is made to control the love of self, that is, when this twofold love becomes a striving of the self-love to put itself into harmony with all love, through free self-subordination to the love for God. Love as moral, and as consciously striving toward its object, becomes disposition. Hence for all further development of the moral life, a moral disposition is the necessary antecedent condition; and it is such in its twofold form, as the affirming disposition of love, and, with reference to evil, as the negating disposition of hatred. It is only as disposition, but not as ante-moral natural lobe, that love is an object of the divine law, a moral requirement, whereas the ante-moral love is simply an element of the good that is conferred in creation itself. Hence, as moral motive, love is also the basis of the moral in the fullest sense of the word, the life-inspiring germ of all other moral activity.

By the fact that love becomes a moral duty, it does not cease to be a moral motive. Man, as, awakened to moral consciousness, is to have no other motive of his moral activity than one which he has himself morally constituted,—not a merely natural ante-moral love, but love as a disposition. Many are led to deny that love is at all an object of the divine law, from the simple fact that they reduce it to a mere involuntary feeling. Also Rothe affirms that we cannot command to love, but only to learn to love. This is very nearly a distinction without a difference; for if we can command to learn, and this learning has a necessary result, then evidently in commanding the learning we also command the result. The notion that man is per se, and irrespective of his moral , not master of his own heart,—that he cannot dominate his proclivities. his love or his repugnance,—simply destroys his moral responsibility. If man cannot control his love and his hatred, and bring about in himself moral love, but must allow himself to be ruled by blind inclinations, then is he no longer a moral creature, but simply a dangerous sort of animal. If marriages are contracted only from “irresistible inclination” and dissolved because of “irresistible aversion,” then they lie outside of the sphere of morality. Christian morality does not indeed require that marriages shall continue to exist despite the pretended “irresistible aversion;” on the contrary, it denies fundamentally that the notion of such an ungovernable aversion is to be admitted, inasmuch as it makes man morally responsible for his love and his hatred. It would not only be a monstrous but also an absurd theory of morals which should admit, on the one hand, that we are not at all master of our love and our aversion,—that love cannot be commanded as a duty,—and yet, on the other hand, should require that man should not act according to his love or aversion, but according to requirements of the moral law that have no connection therewith; he who has not love cannot practice love without hypocrisy; but that he has it not is his own fault. Christian ethics requires not to proclaim love in our deeds where there is no love, for it cannot require falseness; but it requires us to have love for all, and, for that reason also to practice it. The Scriptures declare unequivocally that love, the motive of all moral action, is also a duty commanded by the moral law; the law “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” [Lev. xix, 18; Matt, xxii, 39; Mark xii, 31] is called a “royal law,” that is, a law that dominates all others [James ii, 8; comp. Gal. v, 14; Col, iii, 14; 1 Tim. i, 5; 1 John iii, 11 sqq.; iv, 7 sqq.].