e at present freely
criticising, it can be indicated in a moment. The most ordinary
induction has satisfied men that, in the long run, the Hebrew singer is
right when he says, "The way of transgressors is hard". Wrong-doing
and calamity are inseparably connected. Those laws, through which the
voice of the Supreme is ever heard, are so intertwined in their action,
that the infraction of one leads to the infliction of retributive
punishment by the other. We break a moral law, the physical law will
take up its cause, and we suffer. We have come, I say, to see the
universal validity of this rule, the absolute irresistibility of the
laws under which we live. Hence, a shallow judgment has been hastily
framed that you may always judge of the morality of an act by the
consequences it produces. If the results are good, then the action is
good; if evil, then the action is adjudged bad. This is, in substance,
the Benthamite or utilitarian ethic, Bentham roundly maintaining that
crime is nothing but a miscalculation, an error in arithmetic. It is
the failure of a man to count the cost, to weigh the results of what he
is about to do. That being the case, the scientist being persuaded
that utility and pleasure make an action good, and uselessness and pain
make it bad, he was able to conclude at a stroke that one action
differs only from another in the results it produces, and that since
science was admirably equipped to take stock of results through its
statistical bureau, she, and not the hideous old shrews, theology and
philosophy, was the rightful protectress of morality.

But we, who believe with Immanuel Kant, that the "_All's well that ends
well theory_" has no place in morality, refuse to recognise that the
character of an action is determined solely by the results it produces.
We believe that some actions are intrinsically good, and others
intrinsically bad, totally irrespective of the good or evil they may
effect. We believe with the Stoics and with Jesus that evil may be
consummated in the heart without any evil results appearing at all. We
believe that thoughts of envy, hatred, malice, are in themselves bad,
irrespective of results, that such a thing as slander is _ipso facto_
stamped as irredeemably bad long before any of its evil consequences
may be manifest. We look not so much to consequence, but to the
intention of the doer, and the intrinsic nature of the action
performed. Pleasure and pain consideratio