The Law of Causes and Consequences – Sunday, May 18, 1980
Robert Ingersoll wrote, “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.”1 One of the best known of nature’s consequences is the law of the harvest. As we sow so shall we reap. For some reason we as people are more willing to accept this law as it applies to plants and animals than to human nature. We spend time trying to beat the system rather than succeed within it.
Too often we hope for good health without following the lifestyle that can bring it. We pray for prosperity but practice poor money management. We envy great talent but forget the years of training that developed it.
Perhaps we don’t believe that natural laws operate in human affairs. It is easy to become cynical today when we see and read of people breaking laws apparently with impunity, laws which most of mankind have held as natural and needed for civilized society.
But, as Jacques Maritain wrote, “All this proves nothing against natural law any more than a mistake in addition proves anything against arithmetic.”2
Natural and divinely enunciated laws do exist, and as Cecil B. DeMille said, “We cannot break the Ten Commandments, we can only break ourselves against them.”3
Perhaps nowhere is the law of cause and effect more misunderstood and misapplied than in our pursuit of happiness. So often we forget that happiness is not a cause, it is an effect, the result of selfless service to others. And the unhappiest people are those who demand that the world give them power and pleasure. They may temporarily satisfy their self-centered needs, but the natural law decrees that they will thus corrode their character and lose the very happiness they seek.
The peacemakers and the pure in heart, however, may be buffeted by the world, but if they endure it well, they will develop godlike characteristics which will bring them love and joy in this life and happiness in the eternities yet to come.
1 Ingersoll’s Lectures, Complete Edition, Detroit Publishing Company, Detroit, 1878
2 The Rights of Man and Natural Law, Jacques Maritain, Robert Maclehose and Co. Ltd. The University Press, Glasgow, 1958, p 36
3 Speech at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 1954
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May 18, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,648