one of the Collects of the English
Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect
freedom"; that is to say, when you obey God, you find perfect freedom
because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I
want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human
nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose
they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that
happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even
to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion
has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the
law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we
hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That
is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why,
as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.

Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide
what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what
is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they
think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do
anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on
the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all, _human nature being
what it is_, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and
immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based
on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the
wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were
true, because I believe it is true.

What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is
not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He
cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature,
because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his
actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot
act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone
to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; nobody knows; it concerns
only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you
live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take
it for granted that your standard will affe