ter speaks of ethical
religion, the same implication is there. Religion signifies a living
and personal relationship between the worshipper and the object of his
worship: we can stand in such a relationship to a living, personal God,
in harmony with whose will alone we are able to find our true
happiness; we cannot stand in such a relationship to an impersonal
power or a universal order. Mr. Salter speaks of man "bending hushed
and subdued, as he thinks of those mighty laws on which the health and
safety of the race depends," and calls that a religion; we submit that
so far as such an emotion is religious, it means that behind those
mighty laws there stands a mighty Lawgiver, whom we worship and seek to
obey because He is good. We can keep a law, we can conform to it so as
to escape hurt, but we cannot worship it except when we conceive of it
as the manifestation of a good Will; neither can we derive moral
stimulus from an abstract ideal. It is when the ideal speaks in us and
to us as the behest of the Living God--above all, when it stands before
us incarnated, made actual in the Son of God--that it becomes dynamic,
drawing and uplifting and transforming men into the Divine likeness.
We are not greatly helped by such a statement as that the bare idea of
morality, {187} quite apart from faith in God, "may be the supreme
passion to a man"; we have to deal with things as they are, and in
actual life we well know that the most commonplace presentation of the
Gospel has been more of a force in the making of character and as an
inspiration to righteousness than the most refined philosophical
Ethicism.

And now let us show, from yet another point of view, as we think may be
done quite simply and cogently, that it is impossible rationally to get
away from the theistic position if we are in earnest about morality,
viewed as the pursuit of the ideal. In order to engage in such a
pursuit, we must in the first place be free agents, able to choose
between conflicting motives and to follow the right. If our actions
are necessitated, then to speak of our "pursuing" this or that course,
choosing and rejecting, is of course a mere contradiction in terms.
But if the universe, including ourselves, is simply the resultant
outcome of the interaction of unconscious mechanical forces, freewill
is an absolute illusion, and Determinism the only true theory; and
again, if Determinism is true, we cannot choose, we cannot strive--in a
word,