THE MORAL SENSE 147 



But speaking as a religionist, we love to think 

 of it as God's voice and man's voice God's voice 

 in man's voice, and adopt the language of Kant. 

 He says : ' ' There are two things that fill my mind, 

 the oftener and longer I dwell upon them, with 

 ever-fresh and ever-growing admiration and awe : 

 the starry heavens above me and the moral law 

 within me. Neither is veiled in mystery or lost 

 in immensity so that I need to seek them beyond 

 the sphere of vision and merely surmise that they 

 are there. I see them before me and link them 

 immediately with the consciousness of my exist- 

 ence. . . . The second begins from my invisible 

 self, my personality, and exhibits me in a world 

 which has true infinity, but which is traceable only 

 by the understanding." (Eucken: "Problem of 

 Human Life," 445.) Goethe must have had a 

 similar faculty in mind when he speaks of that 

 sentiment " which none brings with him into the 

 world, but on which it entirely depends whether 

 or not a man shall be in all respects a man the 

 sentiment of reverence." (do., 474.) But, how- 

 ever mysterious its origin or inexplicable its na- 

 ture, the conscience never speaks more authori- 

 tatively than in the first years after its manifes- 

 tation. W. E. Gladstone has told a beautiful story 

 of it when it spoke to him as a stranger whom 

 he did not recognize. It was when he was a lit- 

 tle boy in his fourth year. He lifted a stick to 

 kill a tortoise. ' ' But all at once, ' ' he says, * ' some- 

 thing checked my arm, and at once a voice within 

 me said, clear and loud, 'It is wrong.' I held 



