Ethics and Maxims

As I continued my readings on Holiness, by J. C. Ryle, I understood a philisophical problem that I had been musing for over a year now. There was one particular line that caught my attention: Holiness is incumbent upon the happiness of a person. That hit like a ton of bricks. Those vices which cumber themselves upon the faithful inveighs the honesty and virtue of a Christian. Sin qua sin is the great cumber of all detriment and folly, granted. What could be more expected from the virus that causes us to deafen to the call of a great divine—the great divine of all true rationality and cogency, i.e., God over all. Amen. "May our years be holy years with our souls, and then they will be happy ones!" (Ryle 61) This is all due to the importance of the Grace and statutes of God. "The Law is good, converting the soul." Its use (the Law) shows the ethic of God, and there we meet our human conscience with the divine sense (L. sensus divinitatus). God tells us what to think, how to think, what to think, when to think it, etc. When we fail to comport to God's Law, we despair. There, then, can one hope in the love of true cogency. God is the true cogency. All philanthropy and humaneness is derived from the source of holiness and truth. Who can reply against the Lord and succeed? There is a fine line here philosophically between true philosophy and vain axioms of the "intellectual." It is the ethic of the thinker that he submits firstly to the authority and morale of God, for therein lies what true ethics are. Then the endeavor to understand the world in which we live will be sensible and rational. A simple deduction is necessary: If God created the world, then all therein is his creation; if all that is God's creation is rational, then God, too, is rational. This is God's world; to conjecture (and I would add, accede true rationality) a plausible and sensible interpretation of the world and experience, then we must postulate God's existence. Therein lays the next possibility: that he is sovereign over all. And here is what makes sense to the rational person—that holiness is not an end but a means to an end, the happiness of mankind, and God's sovereign control over his creation a substantive corollary to the tenor of all scripture.