we cannot help being what we are. Hence, if morality in any
intelligible sense is to exist at all, we must be free; and only a
personal and transcendent God could have conferred on us the faculty of
freewill.

{188}

We pass on to one or two final considerations. One of our ethicists,
who genially informs us that "theology is discredited . . . and the
world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says," writes
as follows: "The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an
imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity."
[11] As against this statement we have no hesitation in affirming that
only religion, in the accepted sense of the term, can give us the
absolute conviction of the absolute supremacy of moral claims--the
assurance that it were better to suffer, to hunger, to be despised and
rejected of men, to die on a cross, than to violate one of these.
Grant that the good life is of supreme worth for humanity; yet
supposing a man is sorely tempted to obtain some immense advantage or
to gratify some consuming passion, at the cost of injuring someone
else--suppose he can do so with safety and success--why should he
prefer humanity's interests to his own? Why, indeed? We make bold to
say that no one in the throes of conflict between duty and desire, at
the moment of moral crisis, has ever been influenced by the worth of
his action for humanity. The ultimate sanction of right conduct must
be drawn from a Source beyond humanity, which enjoins the right at all
costs--from Him who is humanity's Maker and Ruler.

{189}

And the same fact is borne witness to by the experience which waits
upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can
never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into
conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of
having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and
falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the
man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin,
experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation--the sensation,
not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is
God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling
finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee
only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."

The truth is, those who claim to set up morality