been seen to cherish, for all that, a quite too great horror of bringing in the will of God to explain moral law, as if such laws could be other than reflect, or do other than harmonise with, His nature. Kant's method is so arbitrary-even though arbitrariness seems to be the bête noire of the Kantian theismas really to expunge rather than explain moral obligation, and to introduce Deity merely in order to effect a reconciliation or adjustment in dealing with the difficult elements that go to make up the summum bonum. It was, in fact, just this desire to determine and maintain the harmony between happiness and morality which led Kant to postulate the actual existence of God-that is to say, between these two in what Kant represented as their real, not their phenomenal, relation or connection. Sounder than the instinct of the Königsberg philosopher was that of the Ayrshire poet who, yielding to no hedonistic tendency, wrote in his "Epistle to a Young Friend".

"Where you feel your honour grip,
Let that aye be your border:
Its slightest touches, instant pause—
Debar a' side pretences,

And resolutely keep its laws,

Uncaring consequences."

Kant, however, has the merit finely to preserve the worth and reality of personality by his postulations for the moral consciousness. But it must be

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said that his is a line of proof that takes us but little into the theoretic sphere, and leaves us in the realm of faith.

As for Wuttke, it should perhaps be said that he took a too theological view of conscience as being the revelation of God given in our rational self-consciousness, thereby setting it too much in relation to exterior authority. It cannot be forgotten that man bears, as Goethe puts it, "a God within the breast." It cannot be said that theism has turned a deaf ear to such voices as that of a Newman saying that, "were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist or a pantheist or a polytheist when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself only, and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society; but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice." Not, of course, that it has taken conscience to be itself the voice of God, or the maker of moral law, but that it has more clearly seen what a vehicle of revelation it is to us in respect of the All-Righteous One, Who is thereby evidenced to us in our moral life. Dr. William G. Ward, in the beginning of his second volume on the Philosophy of Theism,' tells us

that he heartily follows Cardinal Newman in regarding "men's natural sense of right and wrong as by far the strongest of those foundations on which belief in God is reasonably built." What a complex organism conscience is, and how comprehensive are the functions it fulfils, Dorner has set forth with surpassing skill. He has given needful reminder, too, that "if all natural moral knowledge should be denied, the transition to Christian faith could be made only by an act of moral caprice. To reject redemption would be excusable yes, natural."

Theistic philosophy now recognises more fully the power of conscience in determining the ideal, and how far it is from being the simple power it was so often taken to be. But it declines to make conscience come down, without any adequate reason either in fact or in logic, from the pedestal on which it stands, and to treat it as merely the capitalised or consolidated experience of the tribe or race. It sees how this superb faculty of conscience in man has raised him above the animal creation how, but for it, man had but known the

"Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

Or, in his coarsest Satyr-shape,

Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape,

Or basked and battened in the woods."

It perceives that conscience, if it is not to work as

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a mere irrational instinct, calls for a God who is moral as its postulate and support. Yes, these things are so even while it abides true that conscience awaits the enlightenment of reason before it commands. It is, in fact, illumination, and not loyalty, that conscience in us lacks. When what is right has been by the intellect perceived or found, conscience supplies us-we are, of course, speaking ideally-with the moral impulse we need for the carrying of the right into effect. Conscience just represents our ethical energy, and it is an energy that impels us to know the truth and the right as well as to do them-functions whose importance are thus not easily measured. Conscience is not a cognitive faculty, but it is yet able to be a proof to reason of moral law.

May we not say that the philosophy of theism has been striving more earnestly to find whether the universe be not really moral at heart, and capable of evincing a perfect harmony with man's ethical ideals? It has more distinctly proclaimed the worth of this argument to be unaffected by any theories which may have been put forward as to the origin and nature of conscience, since conscience is a unique fact which it sets forth in its eternal distinction of right and wrong—a distinction which, passing beyond the bounds of the individual, it has found so graven on the whole moral life and order of the world, as to feel more

fully warranted in joining with the poet who, addressing Duty, said

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."

Those moral characteristics, which are but the reflections of the Divine image in us, are clearly perceived to have, as their implicate, a Divine Something rather Some One-corresponding in spirituality and moral nature to what we find in ourselves. They tend to conserve for us the personality of Deity. Hence they have been embodied in an argument which has taken this form: "To mark the step of thought which crosses the line into the hemisphere of religion, it is made when we affirm that over us, and in relation to us, the all-perfect Mind exists. Devout faith is a belief of real Being on the strength of what ought to be. If you look at it from the outside, you may call it the apotheosis of moral aspirations; if you name it from the interior, you will say, it is the revelation of God in the conscience. The former expression describes the ascent of my thought to its object; the latter, the descent of its object into my thought."

It must have become more apparent, we imagine, that the very survival of conscience would, from an evolutional point of view, be but a tribute to its transcendent present value. May we not dare to say that theistic philosophy has been gradually perceiving of late that no evolutionary teachings