Universal Reason, without a belief, in some form or other, that the moral order which we see imperfectly realised in this actual world is yet actually perfect. If we reject this belief, the cosmos of duty is thus really reduced to a chaos; and the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have been foredoomed to inevitable failure." The considerations that inspired the writing of these words abide, and make the truth they contain not less real and binding to-day.

We accept the fine delineation of Dorner, in his 'Ethics,' of the self-deification that should result from the failure of morality to include in the love of goodness also the love of the primal source of goodness, the personal God. We take it that theistic philosophy welcomes ethical law as a principle of life and love rather than as a mere imperative, with what Darwin styled its "imperious word 'ought.'" We believe that, with more open vision, it recognises the spiritual source and authority of that spiritual law by which man rules himself and directs the natural forces within him, which spiritual source and authority it finds again in the personal God. And so we think it safe to say that recent theistic philosophy of religion has found fruitful advance in its enlarged recognition alike of the authority of ethical law, and of the amazing multiplicity of its applications, calling, as these do, for the deepest insight in endeavours

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to reconcile religious truth with ethical conception and law. For we cannot but think that it has more clearly discerned the capabilities of these two as destined to dwell together in perfect reconciliation, while it has become more quick to perceive their constant need of mutual adjustment. On the side of ethical law, of which we are here speaking, it has, for example, found itself in perfect accord with what Kant, in the Vorrede of his 'Religion within the Limits of pure Reason,' was able to urge, that "ethic issues inevitably (unumgänglich) in religion, by extending itself to the idea of a sovereign moral Lawgiver, in Whose will that is the end of creation which at the same time can and ought to be the end of man.”

Recent theistic philosophy has not suffered itself to share the Spencerian forgetfulness of the great and distinguishing feature of rational, as opposed to animal, life-namely, the adjustment of conflicting principles, in the mighty endeavour after character and self- originated excellence, to inward ethical law. Does it not more clearly perceive such law of life and of growth to be

"Mirror of Earth, and Guide

To the Holies from sense withheld "?

Frank has been at pains to show what conflict there is; as Wuttke said, it amounts to insoluble contradiction, the higher and more distinctly the moral consciousness is developed. We may not

forget, however, that the law of duty, to which we are to be subject, is really so glad and joyous a thing that Wordsworth was able rightly to say of it

"Flowers laugh before thee in their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads."

May we not say that it is just the crowning work of that Christian personality, which Christianity has come to develop in us, to call forth what perhaps can only be termed an ethical tact or wisdom that shall guide us aright amid the pressures and confusions and complications that so often make the way and knowledge of present duty difficult and uncertain? The theistic philosophy has, we believe, felt the wisdom of the Wordsworthian saying that—

"to the solid ground

Of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye,"

and hence it has sought to put its religious representations on stronger, because more natural, grounds. But it has not allowed man's judgments and choices to be robbed of their ethical character by reducing his life to automatic movement within the sphere of natural law, but has more successfully vindicated his powers of rational self-direction under inspiration of the law of duty, "stern daughter of the voice of God," as against the force of impulsive principles or the stimulus of entourage or environment. It has looked upon the solidarity

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of the universe, has found the moral law rooted in its very structure, and has met the idea of right as something undecomposable, sovereign, unique in man. But this idea of obligation-as something in us, though not of us-it seems to find spring up within the human mind itself, even though it has its ground in God, so truly has it declared man to participate in the Divine Nature.

This implication of a Supreme Governor in the notions of duty and obligation is already found in the Ethics of Theism' of Leitch and in other British writers, but it has since been greatly elaborated and strengthened in the mode of its presentation. Nor have Gass and others in Germany neglected to emphasise the process of culture required in respect of conscience. Martensen has shown the dependence of this process of conscience development on Knowledge and on Will, and Hofmann has given expression to its need of the revelation given in Scripture as its norm, regulator, corrective, and co-efficient. We find an

advance to have been made in the vindication of the validity of conscience, under the rigorous handling of Dr Martineau, in view of evolutionary inquiry into its origin. Theistic philosophy feels the significance of what he says, in the second volume of his 'Study of Religion,' to the effect that "the moral law first reaches its integral meaning, when seen as impersonated in a Perfect Mind, which communicates it to us, and lends it power over our affec

tions sufficient to draw us into Divine Communion." Hence the intimate relation with Ultimate Reality into which it has found the moral consciousness bring us with the poet we are brought, in our growing harmony with Divine Law, at length to say

"Our wills are ours, to make them Thine."

Yes, we will say that conscience still summons men, in this late age, to repentance because of their evil courses and their shortcomings in respect of the moral ideal. May we not, then, say that our late theistic philosophy has yielded, in accordance with the spirit of its time, nobler recognition to the presence and working in man of "the inward sovereign spirit of the universe that has ever moved onward from chaos to cosmos, from lifelessness to life, from the outer to the inner"? May we not say it has passed out of the sphere of those contradictions, in which the conceptions of mere absolute law are so apt to be overtaken, into the higher region where law seems a self-imposed or self-originated thing, and the ethical is apprehended as love? May we not say it has found, for science and for faith, for religion and for knowledge, a reign of spiritual laws in the natural world, so real, that each and all of these are led up to higher life in "that God which ever lives and loves"? May we not say that this presence of spiritual law in man carries within itself the promise and the potency of immortality?