r, valid in infinity and eternity, at this
hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and
knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation,
religion and progress are built.

"This is," says Burke in his magnificent language, "that great
immutable pre-existent law, prior to our devices, and prior to all our
sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and
connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot
stir." And not only Burke, but centuries before him, the great Roman
orator, in language equally sublime, professed his enthusiastic belief
in that same law, which "no nation can overthrow or annul; neither a
senate nor a whole people can relieve us from its injunctions. It is
the same in Athens and in Rome, the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever."

III.

ETHICS AND THEISM.

In the present chapter we propose to discuss the gravest of all the
grave problems which gather round the central conception of ethic as
the basis of religion. There are, it may be said, two great schools
which hold respectively the doctrines which may be not unfitly
described as the significance and the insignificance, or rather,
non-significance of ethics. The latter school, which is that of
Bentham, Mill and Spencer, is content to take ethic as a set of
formulae of utility which man has, in the course of his varied
experience, discovered to be serviceable guides of life. There is no
binding force in them; the idea of a conscience "trembling like a
guilty thing surprised" because it has broken one of these laws, the
hot flush of shame which seems to redden the very soul at the sense of
guilt, the agony of remorse so powerful as sometimes to send the
criminal self-confessed and self-condemned to his doom, is all said to
be part of an obsolete form of speculation. There is merely "a
_feeling_ of obligation," such as an animal may experience which is
harnessed to a waggon or a load, but any real obligation,
authoritatively binding on the conscience of man, is repudiated in
terms.

Now this teaching I venture to describe as the insignificant ethic, the
ethic which connotes nothing beyond the "feeling of obligation," and
refuses to recognise in morality anything but a series of hints
casually picked up, as to how mankind should behave in order to score
in the game of life.

The significant ethic, on the other hand, discerns in the law of
morality