the pathway into the transcendental world, the realm of reason
beyond the boundaries of the sense. It sees in morality the basis of
religion; it discovers the fact of man's freedom to conform or not to
conform to the eternal law; it unveils the reality of life beyond this
earth-stage of existence, and last and chiefest of all, it discerns, in
the words of Immanuel Kant, "a natural idea of pure theism" in the
unmistakable reality of the moral law, from the very obvious fact that
laws do not make themselves, but are enactments of reason or
intelligence.

We propose, therefore, to address ourselves to the fundamental
question--the question of questions--the being of a subsistent
intelligence and a supreme moral will, responsible for man and all
things, whom we in our own tongue name God, though it were more
reverent to think and speak of the awful truth with Emerson, as the
"Nameless Thought, the Super-personal Heart". We are to treat of
theism, the philosophical, _not the theological_, term to designate the
truth that the universe owes its existence to infinite Power and
infinite Mind, and that morality is a fact because that Power is moral
also. To quote Whittier's well-known lines, which express the
essential truth of theism in words of exceeding simplicity combined
with philosophic depth:--

By all that He requires of me
I know what He Himself must be;

or, to quote the more vigorous, but equally common-sense statement of
the facts by Carlyle: "It was flatly inconceivable to him (Frederick
the Great) that moral emotion could have been put into him by an entity
which had none of its own". And finally, we propose to speak of
theism, thus defined, in its relations to ethics or moral science, the
discipline which treats of human conduct and its conformity with a
recognised law of life, the systematising of those principles of life
which man has learned by reason and experience during the course of his
sojourn in this sphere of existence.

Let us begin by some attempt at a definition of our terms. Ethics, I
take it, we are agreed to consider as the science concerned with
conduct; that is, with the actions of man in so far as they conform or
do not conform with a standard of right, whatever that standard may be.
Ethical, moral, morally good, right, we take to be synonymous terms.
The word metaphysical _male olet_, no doubt. It is unpalatable, and is
suggestive of, if not synonymous with, the unreal. However,