ituted or placed under
different circumstances: but the principles which, in the view of a
perfect intelligence, would determine what is the right course for
different beings in different circumstances will be always the same.
The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, _e.g._ that love is
better than hate, are just as applicable to God as they are to us. Our
conception of the highest good may be inadequate; but we certainly
shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a nearer approach to ultimate
truth, by flatly contradicting our own moral judgements. It would be
just as reasonable to argue that because the law of gravitation might
be proved, from the point of view of the highest knowledge, to be an
inadequate statement of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some
error, therefore we had better assume that from the point of view of
God there is no difference whatever {69} between attraction and
repulsion. All arguments for what is called a 'super-moral' Deity or a
'super-moral' Absolute are open to this fatal objection: moral
judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything but the moral
consciousness, and yet these doctrines contradict the moral
consciousness. The idea of good is derived from the moral
consciousness. When a man declares that from the point of view of the
Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea of good from his
own moral consciousness, and is assuming the objective validity of its
dictates. His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as mine when I
say that to me some things in this world appear very bad. If he is not
entitled to assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his
proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled to assume their
validity, why should he distrust that same moral consciousness when it
affirms (as it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever bad,
and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists suggest) additional artistic
touches which only add to the aesthetic effect of the whole?

I shall now proceed to develop some of the consequences which (as it
appears to me) flow from the doctrine that our belief in the goodness
of God is an inference from our own moral consciousness:

(1) It throws light on the relations between Religion and Morality.
The champions of ethical {70} education as a substitute for Religion
and of ethical societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of
assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, but actually
dest