蜜芽传媒

Good morning. After 32 years in parliament Gordon Brown announced his retirement this week. He did so in his constituency of Kirkaldy, in the shadow of the church where his father had once been a Church of Scotland minister. He said 鈥淚 still hold to the belief in something bigger than ourselves. I still hold to a belief in the moral purpose of public service, something I learnt from my father and which I hope to inspire in my children.鈥� Earlier in his career you may remember he once talked about the 鈥渕oral compass鈥� which his father had given him, and it is a good phrase. I am sure he is right also in pointing to our families as the place where we first find that moral compass and later pass it on to our children. However, as life goes on that moral compass can be deepened or corrected by role models we come to know or read about. It is perhaps worth reflecting from time to time on who it is that has most influenced out lives for good and the values we admire in them.

There was a time when it was assumed people got their moral compass from their religious beliefs. However, sometimes if they did turn away from religion this had the paradoxical effect of making their sense of moral obligation even stronger.The great Victorian novelist George Eliot, for example, was once walking with a friend, who later recorded that with great intensity she said she had now lost her Christian faith but the concept of duty remained as she put it 鈥減eremptory and absolute鈥�. The difference now is that there are people growing up whose family for several generations have had no real religious formation either to practise or react against. As Seamus Heaney once put it 鈥淪ome kind of metaphysic has disappeared from the common life鈥� we are running on an unconscious that is informed by religious values but I think my youngsters won鈥檛 have that.鈥�

It鈥檚 a sobering thought, but I am not totally pessimistic because I believe that if we dig deep enough into ourselves we can all find a moral compass. Indeed St Paul wrote that we all have a moral law inscribed in our hearts and our conscience bears witness to this. (Romans 2, 15). It belongs to our nature as human beings. That how God made us in the first place. So what then is the relationship between ethics and religion?

When I look at a compass I see not only the signs North, South, East and West which help to position where I am, I see a hand which points to magnetic North. As a religious believer I am conscious of something similar about my moral compass: something that draws, that pull us, beyond ourselves to an ultimate reality in whom all our values are grounded. In the life of faith this is what illuminates, guides and strengthens our moral sense.

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