Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3036

Carbon of an unidentified typed page, incomplete, clearly not written by Heath. A staple in the corner (now cut away for scanning) indicated there was more.

No date

It is sometimes said, by humane but inexact moralists, that since all obligation rests at bottom on the same foundation, charity is as much a claim on us as justice, and that we violate a right not less when we neglect to fly to the relief of distress, than if we were to steal a neighbor’s purse. The difference, it is contended, goes no deeper than this: that in the latter case it is found practicable to enforce the right by coercion of law; which in the former it is not: but the absence or presence of positive enactments is a mere affair of external machinery, leaving the inner essence of the two duties still the same. The truth and the falsehood contained in this doctrine easily fall asunder at the touch of the principle just laid down [that in our relations to men, “the authoritative measure of duty, in every transaction between different persons, is the mutually understood ideal.] As between man and man, it is not true that the claim to justice and to mercy are of equal validity, discriminated only by the possibility of redress in case of default: no right being established without a common moral sense, or having any social measure except that of mutual understanding, there is a vast interval between the obligation which I have openly incurred in the face of my neighbor’s conscience and that which is only privately revealed to my own. Over and above the intrinsic guilt in both instances, there is in the first the additional enormity of violated good faith; and though, on the one hand, it is the sign of a mean and grudging nature to limit the measure of duty to the positive and authorized expectations of others from us, it would be, on the other, a monstrous paradox to say, that those expectations make no difference to us, and add no intensity to the claim upon us. Were it so, there would be no means of graduating offenses, or deciding between conflicting suggestions of right; and we should lapse into the Stoic fallacy of reducing to one level the most trivial omission and the greatest crime.  . . .

     In proportion then, and only in proportion, as men have come to understand concurrence on matters of right, have they claims inter se. This concurrence is far from being limited to relations of property and contract, though it is there most definite and complete: it extends over an indeterminate field beyond, of obligation prevailingly acknowledged, but differently construed, and unsusceptible, from its shifting complexity of conditions, of reduction to precise general enactment. The right of my neighbor, measured from the simply human and social point of view, addresses me with every variety of distinctness and force throughout this scale; with unmistakable emphasis in case of explicit engagement; with clearness perfectly adequate in cases of implicit trust; with evanescent faintness in cases of simply spontaneous whispers within my own conscience, with nothing corresponding in his presumed feeling and expectation. This very whisper, however, which involves no understanding with others, is itself an understanding between myself and God, and constitutes therefore an articulate obligation in relation to Him, not one whit less religiously binding on me than the most palpable debt of integrity. Its simple presence in the soul with its authoritative look is sufficient to establish it as a Divine claim upon me. In this aspect, it is quite true that all duty stands upon the same footing; and that all transgressions are offenses against the same law. But it is not every unfaithfulness to God that constitutes a violation of the rights of man, and gives them a title to reproach us. In forgetfulness of this distinction, the satirist frequently taunts religious persons with confessing before God sins which they would have been very angry to have charged upon them by men; and evidently regards this a proof of insincerity or self-deception. But surely there is here no real, scarcely even any apparent, inconsistency. The claims of God upon us, coextensive with our own ideal, go far beyond the claims of man,