Among the most savage tribes, as among the most refined and polished nations, are also to be found the same common principles of morality. Theft, murder, adultery are offenses condemned and punished by every nation under heaven. The high qualities of virtue are the things which win esteem and command respect in every country, however rude. Were proof demanded, we might bring it at once from the darkest corners of the earth. The savage Fijian regards theft, adultery, abduction, incendiarism, and treason as serious crimes.[519] And Dr. Livingstone tells us that, "On questioning intelligent men among the Backwains as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of God, and of a future state, they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects. Respecting their sense of right and wrong, they profess that nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise, except the statement that it was wrong to have more wives than one."[520]
We conclude that the universal consciousness of our race, as revealed in human history, languages, legislations, and sentiments, bears testimony to the fact that the ideas of right, duty, accountability, and moral desert are native to the human mind; and consequently the existence of the first condition of moral government--namely, the possession by its subject of a _conscience_--is an unquestionable fact.
The _second_ condition of moral government is the existence, in the subject, _of free self-determining power_: the agent must be the real cause and the sole cause of his own actions; he must have freedom both _to_ and _from_ the act.
Under a reign of necessity there can be no moral government and no just retribution. It is, at best, a mere physical or natural government; for moral government must be of beings who are free and self-determined, and not of mere machines. To blame a necessitated thing is irrational, to punish it is a cruelty and an injustice. The necessitarian himself is unable to conceal his conscious embarrassment in presence of these difficulties, and to save his theory he becomes reckless in assertions. He affirms that "the whole system of morality--its duties and responsibilities; the whole scheme of moral government, with its rewards and punishments--remains, on his theory, as entire and stable as ever."[521] This affirmation runs athwart all the dictates of common-sense, and collides with the universal conviction of humanity. He is the only consistent necessitarian who rejects the Christian doctrine of sin, denies all accountability and retribution, and reduces the government of God to mere physical impulsion and the management of a universal mechanism. The necessitarian dogma can not be made to quadrate with our primitive convictions; it is out of harmony with all our instinctive beliefs. The innate idea of right, the native sense of duty and accountability, the consciousness of sin, our faith in the justice of God, our religious hopes and fears, all impel us onward to find a rational and valid basis for human responsibility and moral government in the freedom of the will.