Happiness is dependent solely on moral virtue, which involves practical intelligence and so can be taught, partly from a study of the names of things and definitions. However, the good people also require strength of mind and character. The achievement of virtue necessitates a mental and physical effort to toil through opposing difficulties, suffering, and pain. It may be appropriate to consider first whether American philosophical thought is distinguished by any special characteristics. An examination of American thought of the past and present shows that it has been pluralistic and that no single generation can describe it accurately. The United States has been receptive to a variety of intellectual themes and movements, from Puritanism and idealism to naturalism and positivism. Any formula designed to reduce these diverse elements to a uniform tradition is bound to involve overs implication. It is true that Americans have made extensive use of foreign ideas, but these have been transformed to meet American needs. The successive waves of immigration and the divergent philosophies and ideas that accompanied them were a continuing challenge to American intellectual development but only in recent times can it be said that America has made a contribution to philosophy proper. 

The British, more than any other people, influenced the formation of American institutions; and the New England colonists, especially the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay area, appear to have left an indelible make on the American character. They believed that God is absolutely sovereign and that human being, beset with original sin, is totally dependent upon God. Salvation cannot be earned by virtuous works; God has foreordained who shall be elected to the “Society of Saints,” although presumably the performance of good work predisposes man’s soul to receive God’s grace. The Puritans, therefore, were deeply involved in the conflict between the doctrines of free will and determinism. However, in general it was agreed that life was a moral process, and certain moral virtues such as discipline, devotion, honesty, moderation, temperance, frugality, industry, and simplicity were typically praised. True virtue is the beauty of the heart, and religious love of being in general is a love of God. Humans who are sinful and corrupt, are naturally incapable of true virtue; yet there is a grace of God that is given to those who are elected for salvation. 

A sign of having received this grace of God is an individual’s religious affections and a sense of beauty. Belief in God has its source in the affections of religious love and joy, but these are not to be comprehended by the natural senses and are transmitted from a supernatural source. God is first cause, designed the Universe, and all events are determined by natural laws. Therefore, nature (including humans) are a manifestation of the goodness of God. As rational beings, humans are capable of achieving good life on Earth and do not need to wait for the Heavenly Kingdom to come. Humanistic aims and goals are happiness, not faith, provided that standard of choice. The Enlightenment manifested an optimistic faith in science, reason, and education as the instruments of human progress. There is a general conviction that if one improved the social environment, one might improve humans and thereby achieve social justice. National rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and constitute the foundation of social justice. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6

Governments are artificial contracts designed to protect inalienable rights: if they fail to fulfill their original purpose, their claim to rightful authority is void, and they may justly be altered or dissolved. There is not, however, unanimity concerning the form of the new government to be established. We have truth only when our ideas conform to things, which means mist employ the inductive method and pay close attention to the facts. God’s existence, and the immortality of the soul is natural, mental, and moral. The Highest Being is taken to be entirely simple, immutable, and this essentially beyond our fragmentary concepts but, at the same time, to be the supreme source of an all intelligibility and, consequently, the one supremely knowable reality. Thank God for being able to see all that you have not yet been. You have had the vision, but you are not yet to the reality of it just yet. We are not quite prepared for the devastation that may come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to be battered into the shape of the vision to be used by God? 

A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious—it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has head me.” God’s silence is the very proof that He has. If Jesus Christ is brining you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give you the first sign of Hid intimacy—silence. The Universe is totally dependent on God’s creative power, and its nature and purpose are determined by his nature and reason. The essential reality of every creature is measured by its conformity to God, the supreme and creative Truth. Insofar as creatures reflects the divine reason and will, they realize the authentic order of creaturely existence, truth, and rightness. The rational creature is capable of thought, of choice, and action, and all three capacities are subject to the same ultimate standard. The criterion of the sound mind, the good will, and the right action is its truth, its intelligible rightness, its order grounded in the divine Being itself. The fundamental form of spiritual order is truth, the rightness of intelligence. Unless the mind is informed by the inherent rational order of God’s World, right choice and action are impossible. Furthermore, it is evident that for a rational understanding of the real order of things is in itself a spiritual good. 

The quality of personal life is decisively determined, however, by will and action, rather than by thought. The rational creature, whose mind can apprehend the order of God’s truth and whose will can accept that order for its own decisions and actions, is obligated to maintain moral rightness or righteousness (iustitia) in the exercise of its freedom, which was bestowed on it for that very purpose. When it freely conforms will, word, and deed to the order of righteousness, the rational creature is right and just. To live righteously is to subordinate all creaturely loves and relationships to love for God and the quest for communication with him. It is because righteousness is essentially an orientation to the supreme and transcendent Good that one can see in it the supreme value of creaturely life, to be cherished for its own sake, and the gift of God, rather than human achievement. By Christ’s death man is restored to that righteousness which one had lost by one’s own fault, yet no violence is done to the justice and order of God’s treatment of His creatures.