e define as an ordination of reason. From first to last it is so.
From the laws which we daily obey to the everlasting laws holding the
spheres together--can we account of them as other than the expression
of reason? So do we account of the moral law, with this essential
difference, that while the rules of man, the laws of man, may be
arbitrary, the moral law is no arbitrary enactment, but essential
righteousness; it is the Supreme Mind and Will in actual
manifestation--the moral law _is_ God. I mean thereby that it could
not be otherwise. It is beyond the power of omnipotence to dispense
with it. Right recognised as right could never be other than right, it
could never become wrong, any more than two and three could become
interchangeable ideas. One may say now that this definite act is
right, and a century later that it is wrong; but for all that, for all
the imperfection, the limitation, of our intelligence, as much in the
moral as in the mental spheres, one thing is certain, that the right
does exist and is eternally dissevered from the wrong, and that this
"quite infinite distinction" is the instant revelation of Supreme Mind.

Now, if to bar this conclusion it were argued that so far from the
moral law being an expression of mind, supreme or otherwise, it was
merely the generalised experience of mankind which had discovered that
certain acts were attended by pleasurable or useful results, and
certain other acts by painful and mischievous consequences, which had
led men to describe the first class as good and the second as evil, one
might reply that herein we have stated a truth but not the whole truth.
To us the fact that good living and well-being are so intimately
associated, and that "the way of the transgressor is hard," is only one
more evidence of the main contention of our school. Surely, if man
awakes to the discovery that the laws, neither of nature, health, nor
of private or public life, can be violated with impunity, more than
ever is he convinced that the universe is, in Emerson's singularly
expressive phrase, "so magically woven" that man must come to ruin if
he sets himself to systematically disregard them. The word "woven" is
an illumination in itself, showing how the warp of constant nature and
life and the woof of man's conduct are meant to work and must work
harmoniously together. And if this be indeed so, if we adopt Bentham's
language and call "pleasure and pain our sovereign masters,"