that the key to the difficulty lay in the conclusion "the Infinite must be believed in." For this conclusion must be either mediate or immediate. By hypothesis it is not mediate, it is therefore immediate; and since it is immediate, and yet forms no part of our knowledge, this curious result is reached, that our intuitive or immediate belief in the axioms of geometry, and therefore of geometry itself, forms no part of our knowledge! But this doctrine of Hamilton has long since crumbled under criticism.

No close observer of the trend of thought in morals and in religion can fail to observe the naturalistic tendency. The impatience with which recent writers on morals treat the ideals of Christian ethics is amazing. And this tendency seems to have grown to a passion since the theory of evolution came to be a factor in the explanation of man in his moral consciousness. Since it has been discovered, under the stress of the evolutionary hypothesis, that morality has no absolute a priori principle, and that man is simply the product of material conditions shared alike with the brute, ethical writers have vied with each other in their efforts to reduce morality to the methods of natural science. Before proceeding further, I desire to call attention to two outstanding facts verifiable in history: that every form of morality independent of God has degenerated into (a), gloomy pessimism; (b), or philosophical egoism:

1. In reference to the first fact I am concerned with what philosophers call intuitional, or formal, or idealistic, ethics. Here it is not necessary to trace the ethical spirit in the ancient Greeks, or the later Platonists, or the Brahman, or the Buddhist, in the view that life is an illusion and burdensome, or to dwell upon the stoical philosophy, or to follow the reasoning of Hume, that from the consolidated good and evil of this world no beneficent First Cause can be predicated; but it will be sufficient to take a classical example from modern philosophy to show that the whole ethical process, even under the inspiration of one of the most wonderful of men, is but a continuous repetition, and forever remains essentially the same. I refer to Kant. I am greatly disinclined to attempt any criticism of his great work on the Practical Reason; but it is well known that he falls into antinomy. He confesses it.

Perpetual self-
Logical sym-

There is no thoroughfare in absolute formalism. legislation ends in perpetual and useless conflict. metry must be marred, or moral autonomy without content must be surrendered. The absolute opposition between reason and nature, virtue and happiness, with which he set out, can be overcome by no further dialectic, but only by invoking the datum, God; and hence, when he advances the postulate that virtue is a form of causality in the sensible world, the dualism between virtue and happiness is reconciled, the attainment is no longer impossible, and his system is carried over into the domain of Christian ethics; but the inner harmony of his metaphysic has so far lost tone that no hand has been able to restore it. Kant founds by his postulate a causal connection between virtue and happiness through the Author of nature. This assumption, which liberates his system from the category of infidel ethics, condemns it at once in the eyes of those who are content to follow him only to the extent of his rigorous formalism. With such, the conflict of reason and nature could not be compromised. To such, also, the postulate with which Kant had resolved his antinomy was but a weak concession to the endæmonistic spirit which at first, they said, he had put out at the door only to bring back again at last at the window. Among those who took offence at Kant's final position, Schopenhauer, the misanthropic philosopher of Frankfort, easily stands first. The apparently logical consequence of

this man's doctrine would be universal suicide. To him the world was the worst possible-an unmitigated horror. He claimed that the idea of duty should be eliminated from ethics. How far Hartmann, Frauenstädt and others have relieved or promoted this doctrine, or how far their influence has extended among English-speaking people, are questions which must end only in pure conjecture. Suffice it to say, the repulsive features of their pessimism do not appear to lessen its popularity.

2. The other fact referred to is no less saddening. Objective or empirical ethics is naturalistic, and finds its logical expression in a bald egoism, and is itself a tacit declaration of war between the species, bellum omnium contra omnes. Of this evil tendency in ethics, Ludwig Feuerbach may be taken as the classic repre

sentative. While claiming fellowship with Fichte and Schleiermacher in theology and philosophy, he inconsistently taught that the individual man, in his sense-intuitions, is the only absolute; that pleasure is the summum bonum, and can be attained alone in society. His writings have given the principal material to all nihilistic and communistic literature. J. S. Mill, in accord with Bentham and other utilitarians, shows that happiness as the ethical principle of morality must resolve itself at last into the supreme desire for one's own happiness. Thus, with Comte and Spencer, while professing altruism, they have become egoists. A comprehensive application of their principles would result in nothing less than systematic and scientific individual selfishness. There are those now living who can remember when these writers first began to break with Christian ethics and to develop their purely naturalistic systems; and this rapid descent into Avernus. has been immensely facilitated by the application of the theory of evolution. Ethical writers have run greedily, and with almost one accord, to this superior fountain of knowledge. All a priori principles were, one by one, discarded. The brutal conditions from which man was evolved would not admit the transcendental authority of duty. The whole conception must be abolished as immoral. Man under the illusion of duty might commit immoral acts. Hence, the average hedonistic writer, while feebly calling for self-renunciation, logically excludes the ideal whose authority he invokes. His humanitarianism has no commanding ground. His appeals for the progressive emancipation of society have no logical basis. Granted that the ideal good makes for righteousness, why should it be recognized if it does not rule the world? If duty is only a fetich, why may I not cast it off? If duty is but the creation of my own thought, why should it rule my conduct? If I have voluntarily adopted it, I may as freely renounce it. If duty is simply an invention of others as selfish as myself, why should I obey it? My own interests are best known to myself. Why should they be overborne by those of other persons equally selfish with myself? If conscience is but the voice of organized society, or the growth of habit, why should I obey it when it opposes itself to my selfishness? What is the inference from

these two facts? If we see that idealistic ethics, unsupported by the eternal good, falls by its own gravity into degrading pessimism, and if empirical ethics finds itself only in naturalism and unrestrained egoism, what is the moral obligation of seeking some transcendental and immutable Standard? Rather, perhaps, I should ask, What is the moral obliquity of that man who rejects at his very door the good which is able to reconcile his natural opposition of reason and will, virtue and happiness?

But it may be said that this good is a mere assumption of Christian ethics, and is based upon it. With the societies for ethical culture, and with many writers, this flimsy answer seems to possess all the virtue of a conclusive argument against the religio-ethical idea. The only duty known to man, it is said, is to be happy, and to keep one's self "healthfully moral."

Leaving the negative view, let us now turn to the positive argument.

What is the human ideal of God? If we could remove from our consideration such terms as the Absolute, the Unconditioned, and the term in which the agnostic finds his favorite refuge, we could simplify our answer. Let us summarily seek to dispose of these terms. For what is the Absolute? An Absolute which does not include humanity self-evidently is no absolute. An Unconditioned which stands in no relations with man possesses no interest for us does not and never can, with our present faculties, enter the sphere of human knowledge. And to affirm something of the Unknowable is a deceptive contradiction. For if I declare God to be the Unknowable, I covertly contradict myself. The man who affirms that God is the UNKNOWABLE is in the same position as the one who denies that there is a God, for in each case there must be an a priori idea of God; each stands self-convicted of his folly. There is then in every rational soul an imperishable ideal of God. Nor is this ideal form only, it has definite content. This content has been delivered to us once for all in the person of Jesus Christ. He is simultaneously our ideal man and our ideal God. There are three ways in which the reason of man exhausts itself in the effort to define concrete reality: 1. In positing a being who can master every form of nature and its mani

festations. 2. In positing a being who never fails to master his own spirit. 3. In positing a being who instantly masters all other spirits; but this reality finds itself efficiently in the person of Jesus Christ, and leaves nothing to be added, nothing to be desired. If in the perilous opposition of reason and nature, virtue and happiness, in our daily life, we wish to supply further material to the content of our ideal, we find inexhaustible resources in his wonderful life. The history which perpetuates his character is so simple, and yet so profoundly wise and wholesome, that the child, as well as the scholar, delightedly adds some new touchfinds some new perspective, as the picture which he is forming grows in unity and completeness. But it is just here men make two difficulties: 1, Is there an infallible record of Jesus Christ; and 2, If the record be true, is Jesus Christ absolute God? These difficulties, whether honest or not, become stones of stumbling and rocks of offence; here men take occasion to avoid the obligation of faith. They exclaim against the coercion of their reason. They desire to see in advance how the opposition of reason and will, virtue and happiness, is to be overcome; and this in turn opens up afresh the whole controversy: 1. Can man know God? 2. Does man know God? The first question is wholly theistic, the second wholly apologetic. As to the former question we may dispose of it quite summarily, after the Anselmic or Cartesian methods, concluding from concept to existence, or we may treat it more discursively, taking a vast array of subjective and objective facts, and thus exhausting the whole theistic field as it is understood to-day. No man can take this course without a feeling of obligation rising like a tide within him; he will feel the will of God unconditionally binding upon him. This is no prophecy. It is abundantly borne out in the experiences of multitudes of individuals. Compare the earlier writings of many of the disciples and opponents of Kant, Fichte and Schiller, Jacobi and Hamann, and we find a growing conviction of the need of a religious morality, of a Divine ideal in humanity. While their faith was by no means churchly, and while they held themselves apart from creed, they were in all essentials at one with Christian ethics.

The latter question is answered at once affirmatively, and then