Moral System
Section 3 - V.
The religious principle renders knowledge of moral duties easy for human beings
211. We will consider only a few of the great services that the religious principle renders morality still on its way to perfection. Let us see first of all how much the concept of a supreme Being and legislator helps the mind to develop moral knowledge in the most sure and enlightened way.
Human beings have difficulty in applying the principle of morality to particular cases and deducing specific duties. The difficulty increases as the importance of the object to which the principle is applied decreases. Because the application of the moral law is made through a judgment about the excellence of objects, greater grades of excellence in an object make their acknowledgement easier. Equally, their disavowal, even when wilful, is more difficult. Because the error in question is greater and more obvious in these circumstances, we would have to do further violence to ourselves in order to make a false judgment. But once we have established the principle that the certainty and ease of application of the law depend on the greatness of the objects to which the principle is applied, it follows that our judgment, in the case of an object endowed with infinite dignity, will be very clear and unassailable
212. God is such an object. For this reason there is no human being so ignorant or people so primitive whose minds are not enlightened by the resplendent duty of honouring their supreme Maker. For the same reason some moralists posit the first law in Gods will. According to them, our judgment about the respect due to the divine will contains the clearest possible evidence; there could be no clearer principle. But they do not reflect that the problem lies at the level of scientific knowledge. Our problem is not whether another principle is necessary, but simply whether there is an anterior principle in the order of ideas. The moralists of whom we are speaking have erred by not reflecting on this aspect of the question.
213. But when we have known the supreme Being, applied the law to the supreme legislator and deduced our duty of conforming our will to his, we have discovered a very sure, easy means of knowing all other moral duties, which can be reduced to positive cognition of the supreme will. Consequently, the way of knowing what God wills is beyond dispute for all who recognise a positive revelation made by the supreme Being to humankind and to a Church with infallible magisterium. Such people are relieved from the heavy and sometimes unbearable burden of endless, uncertain, fallacious reasonings in which passions always propose some compromise with truth. In Christianity therefore a single moral judgment acknowledging the supreme Being and his word sometimes exempts us from the necessity of other judgments, or of applying the principle of morality to their actions. The easiest, most secure, clearest and universal way of applying the first law is acknowledgement of the divine legislator.