n the laws of morality
as arbitrary enactments of the will of God. Virtue is not obligatory
from the sole reason that it is a Divine ordinance; on the contrary, we
only know it to be a law of God because it already commands our inward
assent." This is essential Kantism, the gospel of the _Critique of the
Practical Reason_, and the _Religion within the Boundaries of mere
Reason_. Not ethics, then, from theism, but theism from ethics. Not
morality from God, but God is known from and through morality.

Now, here we may be justified in remarking, by way of a preliminary
indication of the truth, rather than of an argument, that the
preponderant weight of modern philosophical authority is emphatically
in favour of some such interpretation of ethic as Cousin sketches from
Kant. Whatever the cry of "back to Kant" may actually mean, an
idealist ethic is in the air of the schools of this country and
America. I am not oblivious of such names as Spencer and Stephen, nor
of Hoeffding or Gizycki abroad, but I think it undeniable that what we
mean by the metaphysical implications of ethic commands the assent, not
merely of the prophets of the church ethical, such as Emerson, Carlyle
and Ruskin, but also of the rising men amongst us who are carrying on
the philosophical traditions of the country. But passing by the
argument from authority, let us approach the question from the
standpoint of reason.

We may appeal, in the first place, to the truth implied in the very
expression the _Moral Law_. But it must be explained that by the term
moral law we do not mean a code of five, ten, or fifty commandments,
but simply the expression of the ethical "ought," the announcement of
the supreme fact of moral obligation in general, that is, the duty of
unconditionally obeying the right when the right is known to us. It is
no more the duty of the moral law to set about codifying laws than it
is of the conscience to practise casuistry. Conscience is not a
theoretical instructor, but a practical commander. The intelligence,
the reason in man it is to which is allotted the function of
formulating laws and of deciding what is and what is not in conformity
with right. Once that is decided, according to its light, by the
reason, then conscience steps in and authoritatively commands that the
right is to be unconditionally obeyed. And this, of course, solves
that venerable objection that conscience can be no guide because moral
codes have cha