Moral conduct issues from our general basic direction to God; in its concrete singularity, it expresses our response to some definite value or negation of value, or accordingly, to some (positive or negative) commandment of God. In our moral conduct we must concentrate entirely upon this concrete aim prescribed by God, and be guided solely by our interest in honoring the obligation it entails for us. Suppose a man is in danger of death and we hasten to succor him; obviously, in so doing, our interest must be absorbed by the peril that threatens him and we must not by any means act with a view to promoting our inner growth. We must follow the call of God that engages us to avert that evil, without any regard whatsoever to enhancing our own perfection.

Performed as a means of our transformation, our action would be, morally speaking, untruthful and in a sense invalid. For it derives its moral valuableness precisely from the fact of our being interested in the realization of an objective good (or, correlatively, the frustration of an objective evil). Our glance must be kept fixed on the object in question, and through the medium of that object on God, and not be diverted to the sanctification of our person. We owe this response to the object as such; hence, by instrumentalizing it, we deprive it of weight and validity.

Good deeds should be seen as a consequence, not a means

In the context now under discussion, the subject of our transformation cannot be thematic even in the secondary forms we have been describing above. The good works are fruits of our essential nexus with God; they must not be treated as means of its acquisition. It is to them that St, James refers when he says, “Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation” (James 1:27).

Nay, good works in this adequate sense of the term themselves belong essentially to the new man in Christ, so much so that they are included (as consequences) in one’s intention to become a new man. That intention must actualize itself after our daily examination of conscience, in various concrete resolutions expressing our determination to better obey the call of God according to the diverse situations that confront us and no longer to offend God by any definite action subject to our will power.