which the Eternal Moral Law imposes on us as a supreme command, are
identical in essential substance in our minds and in His. Indeed, the
more we keep before us the true character of that law, the more clearly
do we see that the Moral Law is not His command but His nature. He does
not make that law. He is that law. Almighty God and the Moral Law are
different aspects of what is in itself one and the same. To hold fast to
this is the fullest form of Faith. To live by duty is in itself
rudimentary religion. To believe that the rule of duty is supreme over
all the universe, is the first stage of Faith. To believe in Almighty
God is the last and highest.

It will be seen at once by those who have followed me that I am in this
Lecture only working out to its logical conclusion what was said long
ago by Bishop Butler in England and by Kant in Germany. Butler calls the
spiritual faculty whose commands to us I have been examining by the name
of conscience: Kant calls it the practical reason. But both alike insist
on the ultimate basis of morality being found in the voice within the
soul and not in the phenomena observed by the senses. Science by
searching cannot find out God. To reduce all the phenomena of the
universe to order will not, even if it could ever be completely done,
tell us the highest truth that we can attain to concerning spiritual
things.

Science may examine all the phases through which religions have passed
and treating human beliefs as it treats all other phenomena it can give
us a history of religion or of religions. But there is something
underlying them all which it cannot treat, and which perpetually evades
all attempts to bring it under physical laws. For just as all attempts
to explain away our conviction of our own personal identity have
invariably failed and will for ever fail to satisfy human consciousness,
so too the strictly spiritual element in all religion cannot be got out
of phenomena at all. No analysis succeeds in obliterating the
fundamental distinction between moral and physical law; or in enabling
us to escape the ever increasing sense of the dignity of the former, or
in shutting our ears to the still small voice which is totally unlike
every other voice within or without. To bring the Moral Law under the
dominion of Science and to treat the belief in it as nothing more than
one of the phenomena of human nature, it is necessary to treat the
sentiment of reverence which it excites, the rem