September 26

Moral law is expressed equally clearly by true wisdom and true faith.

1

You do not need to be exceptionally profound to understand what you need to do to have good will. As someone with little understanding of the world as a whole, someone incapable of giving an account of the events taking place in it—I ask myself only one thing: do I agree that the motives that guide my actions should become an obligatory universal law? If they are unfit for this, then it is not only because of the harm which they may cause me and others, but because they are unfit to become a foundation for laws that everyone is obligated to follow. And if they are fit, reason compels me to respect such laws, and even though I do not yet understand what this respect is based on, I understand that what I respect in these laws is something the value of which far exceeds all the things that my motives suggest to me, and that to act solely out of respect for moral law is a duty before which all impulses must step aside.

— Kant

2

One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him. “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

— Matthew 22:35–40

3

The universe is subject to one law, and all rational beings possess the same reason. And that is why all rational people have the same notion of perfection.

— Marcus Aurelius

4

Remember that God wants neither praises nor glory from human beings, whom he created in his own image, but wants them to become more like him through their actions, guided by the reason he gave them. After all, a fig tree stays true to its task, and likewise a dog or a bee. Will the human being really not fulfill his calling? But these great, sacred truths are fading in your memory; it is being muffled by the bustle of everyday life, irrational fear, the feebleness of the soul and the habit of being a slave.

— Marcus Aurelius

5

Two things fill my soul with a forever new and growing feeling of wonder and awe the more often and more constantly I contemplate them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

— Kant

6

Therefore, whatever you desire for men to do to you, you shall also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

— Matthew 7:12

Moral law is so clear that people cannot excuse themselves by saying that they do not know it. The only thing left for them to do is to renounce reason; and that is exactly what they are doing.