rights would not
necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed
by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank
as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the
Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished--indeed, as
Lecky points out,[5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle,
and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was
positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in
the _Self-Tormentor_ of Terence the very character who expresses the
noble sentiment, "I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from
me," giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him
should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an
enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without
reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, "Suffer the
little children to come unto Me," that put a stop to these barbarities.

The point which we wish to establish is this: that while "evolutional
ethics" and natural {183} sanctions will carry us a certain way, they
will certainly not carry us all the way; indeed, the moment we come to
the higher reaches of character, these sanctions are seen to be quite
inadequate. Why, _e.g._, should the conviction be born in man, and
become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances
commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous,
and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of
the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above
self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical
phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on
them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an _Ought-to-be_,
which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when
this authority is properly interpreted, it reveals a Righteous and
Sovereign Will to which we owe unconditional obedience.

And here we may quote in support some significant words of Mr.
Salter's--words whose full significance, we venture to think, that able
and distinguished writer hardly realised when he penned them: "_The
whole meaning of ethics is in the sense of an invisible authority; to
bow to custom, to public opinion or to law, is moral idolatry._" [6]
"Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty--that
there is a right and a w