The Old Theory and the New Practice of Religious Loyalty

Abstract

WHEN at the turn of the Century Josiah Royce was preaching his of he was consciously engaged in making the stern doctrine of for duty's sake palatable for American consumption. The Kantian morality was being generally repudiated in America as smelling of German authoritarianism if not of feudalism. Royce hoped that by translating the gospel of duty into the good old Anglo-Saxon concept of he might show that rational moral philosophy can have a religious aspect and appeal to man's sentiments. Many Christian preachers were enticed by this sugarcoated pill and welcomed not only Royce but philosophical idealism in general to their theological fold. Few stopped to ask Royce, to what? and few had the patience to follow Royce's labored and rhetorical argument. The majority of both preachers and laymen took for granted that any philosophy of loyalty could not mean loyalty to novelty! Loyalty by its very nature must have as its object the of our fathers. Imagine the dismay, therefore, when the few who looked more critically into Royce's philosophy of loyalty found him preaching loyalty to loyalty! Royce took this highly dialectical faith very literally and seriously. It is, to be sure, of the very nature of conscience that it command loyalty: a conscience that is not followed is either a bad conscience or no conscience at all. Hence the immediate object of any moral man's loyalty is his own conscience, his own sense of what is right and good,