should have no reference to merit or demerit, the govern ment could not be moral.

Thus do we find, in immediate connection with the choice of a supreme end, the ideas of obligation and of moral law, of merit and demerit, of reward and punishment, and of responsibility. We find also the ideas of right and wrong. Properly these are always relative, expressing either fitness or unfitness, and having reference to an end. As such they are secondary; but they imply a moral quality when they indicate the fitness or unfitness of specific moral acts, or of the fundamental position of the heart with reference to the true and supreme end.

As the ideas and feelings just mentioned arise in our minds, a tribunal will be erected within us by which we shall be compelled to judge ourselves, and by which we shall also judge others in accordance with what we suppose to be the character of their radical choices. Without such a tribunal, and power and necessity of judgment, our moral nature would not be complete. There would be no answering of face to face, and we should not be linked in sympathy with the one great community of moral beings.

As illustrating the gradation and classification of ideas heretofore referred to, it may be well to say, at this point, that the highest forms and ideas of beauty and sublimity are also evolved as subsidiary, in connection with the choice of a supreme end and its results. In all working of unconscious and involuntary powers towards their end, and the facile mastery by them of the material to be used and the obstacles to be overcome, there is beauty. Virtue is the same thing when the powers are conscious and voluntary. Hence their deep affinity. There is no beauty of a ship with every sail set, speeding its way over the subject element to its haven, that can be compared with that of

the organized powers of man acting in harmony, — those ruling that ought to rule, and those serving that ought to serve, and all conspiring to their destined end; nor is any storm in nature so sublime as the conflicts that may arise when temptation and opposition come between a truehearted man and the attainment of his end.

It is somewhere in connection with the central act of choice now spoken of that conscience must be found. Of the discrepancy there is in the views respecting conscience, I spoke in the first lecture. This discrepancy cannot be removed at once, if at all. It arises from the intimate blending there is in this higher nature of the powers of knowing and of feeling, so that we may and do call the product indifferently an idea or a feeling. Thus we say, the idea of obligation, and the feeling of obligation. Hence some have regarded, and probably will continue to regard, conscience as comprising the whole moral nature. "The moral nature of man," says Dr. Alexander, of Edinburgh, in a learned article recently published in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "the moral nature of man is summed up in the word conscience. Moral nature and conscience are two names of the same thing. The analysis of conscience, therefore, will unfold man's moral nature." I prefer a view which makes the operation of our moral nature more analogous to those of the other departments of our complex being. In all of them there was original provision for the right performance of their work; for a recognition of the character of that performance as normal or otherwise; and in that recognition for a sense of satisfaction or the reverse, which may be regarded as reward or punishment. So with the moral nature. It was intended that it, or rather the person, should work in accordance with his law. If he does so,

there is in it a testifying state that is not only recognition, but approbation and reward. If he does not, there is also a testifying state that is disapprobation and punishment. Conscience, then, will involve a recognition by the person of the moral quality of his own acts or states, and the feelings consequent upon such recognition. It may be defined as that function of the moral reason by which it affirms obligation before the act, by which it approves or disapproves after the act, and by which it indicates future reward or punishment. Here, high as it is, we still see in it an analogy to appetite. In that, as in hunger, there is both impulse and discrimination, and there is subsequent pleasure or the reverse. To the prophetic power of conscience, however, appetite has nothing analogous. Conscience will then reveal itself as, 1st. Obligatory. 2d. Judicial. 3d. Prophetic. There will be, first, the affirmation of obligation before the act; second, the excusing or accusing by one another of the thoughts after the act; and, third, a promise or threat that becomes, on the one hand, a hope of eternal life, or, on the other, "a certain fearful looking for of judgment."

By many, by most, conscience is regarded as a separate faculty, and, as has been said, the whole of the moral nature. I prefer to say, as above, that it is a function of the moral reason. Besides affirming obligation to choose the true supreme end, the moral reason is that in the light of which it is chosen. It is that by which that end is recognized as supreme. The affirmation of obligation, as above stated, is what many mean by the apprehension of an ultimate right.

On this subject writers generally begin by assuming that there are actions having a moral quality, and regard the conscience or moral nature as that by which we perceive

and become affected by that quality. But whence came the moral act? From a moral being certainly; and we should naturally suppose that those capacities by which a being could originate an act having a moral quality would be the leading part of his moral nature, rather than that by which he should perceive and become affected by the moral quality after it was originated. Is our moral nature that only by which we approve and condemn? Or is it that also by which we originate and do the things that we approve and condemn? We love God. By an act of our moral nature we approve ourselves in so doing. Is it by an act of our moral nature that we love him? I suppose it is. We do not love God because we are under obligation to, except as his worth and worthiness impose the obligation. We love him impartially because of his worth, and complacently because of his worthiness; and such love is from our moral nature, but not from conscience. If the states or forms of activity judged did not have a moral quality they could not be approved or condemned, and they belong to our moral nature in virtue of their having a moral quality. That also by which we judge belongs to our moral nature because it judges of moral quality.

In the order of nature there must be a moral being before there can be a moral act. But, as we have seen, a moral being is a person having moral reason and the moral ideas and affections necessarily originated by that, together with free will, which is implied as a condition for the formation of those ideas. In these is personality and a moral nature—the capacity of doing a moral act. But these are not conscience. That becomes possible only when there is a question respecting the conformity, future or past, of a being, already moral, to what either is, or is supposed to be his law.

A moral act is one that respects the supreme end. Any act which a man may either do or leave undone, and still stand in precisely the same relation to his supreme end, is not a moral act; and the moral nature will comprise, as I have said, all that is ultimately directive - the moral reason, the will, the personality, the man himself, that which does the moral act, as well as that which judges of it.

We may, then, regard the whole moral nature as consisting of those powers whose activity gives the moral quality, and also of those which judge of the moral quality and are affected by it; and it would conduce to perspicuity if the term conscience could be confined to the latter.

Of the moral quality itself which conscience presupposes, our notion is simple, as of color or extension. We perceive it immediately as belonging to certain states of mind, as selfishness, envy, malignity, on the one hand, and benevolence, generosity, and kindness, on the other. Relations may be needed to evolve the acts, but it is from no perception of them. It is from no sense, but is an immediate knowledge, by the spirit, of the quality of its own states and acts. We know a moral act as moral precisely as we know an intellectual act as intellectual. We know an intellectual act to be intellectual because it is an act of the intellect; and what an act of the intellect is, and that it is intellectual, every being having an intellect must know intuitively on the exercise of his intellect, and he could know it in no other way. Here is primitive knowledge, without which no definition could give the first elements of the knowledge of anything. It is in the same way that a moral act presupposes a moral constitution, and is known to have a moral quality.