ns are the last things we
take into account when we weigh an action in the scales of justice.
The theory is therefore hopelessly inadequate to our needs; it breaks
in our hands when we attempt to use it, and, consequently, we refuse
our assent to the proposition that because science can _occasionally_
predict results she is therefore entitled to patronise ethics.

The truth is, that ethics need no such patronage. Neither the
theologian nor the scientist is essential to their well-being. Ethics
are beholden to neither of the two claimants who dispute the honour of
their parentage and protection. They rest on that alone on which
everything in this miraculous universe, science itself included,
ultimately rests, the _reason_ which is at the heart of things. The
moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between right and
wrong, a distinction valid before the very whisperings of science, aye,
and of the voice of men were heard upon this earth, is, to the stately
and impressive system of Emerson and Kant, the first-born of the
eternal Reason itself, the very apprehensible nature of the Most High,
which, the more men grow in the moral life, the more they recognise for
his inner-most character and nature. Things are what they are, and
actions are what they are, not because of the ephemeral judgments of a
tribe or nation of men, but because they cannot be otherwise than they
are, good or bad in themselves, judged solely by reference to that
everlasting law of righteousness, the aboriginal enactment of the
Eternal.

Men point to the growth and development of the moral sentiment in man,
they show how he has grown from savagery to civilisation, and think
therein that they have explained everything. They are like the
photographer I spoke of above. They have found out the history of
ethics, and they think there is nothing more to know. Far from it.
Identically the same might be said of music and logic. Man once beat a
tom-tom, and now he writes operas and oratorios. He once rambled, now
he reasons. Will any sane man delude himself into believing that music
and logic are nothing more in themselves but the history of the
successive stages through which they have naturally and inevitably
passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's
creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this
dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway
beyond the uttermost sta