116 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



Cardinal Newman, '* Conscience not only teaches that God is, 

 but what he is," as he says in his " Grammar of Assent." 



To some, the God-belief would be regarded as a kind of 

 efflorescence of the moral sense. To others, like D'Arcy, 

 conscience practically has no meaning unless linked with a 

 belief in God. And likewise the statement of Ladd, of Yale : 

 ** The practical insufficiency of morality to sustain and 

 elevate its own principles without support and help from 

 religion, can be shown by an appeal to almost all the human 

 experience which illustrates this subject." We have, how- 

 ever, in the other direction, the emphatic declaration of Green : 

 *'It is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed by man 

 on himself." Hence we see that a man's opinion as to the 

 actual linkage here, in the problem as to whether the moral 

 law comes directly out of one's self or from God, does not 

 necessarily depend on whether he is or is not a theist. On 

 the other hand, a scholar like Wundt may turn the problem 

 around by giving a broader definition to religion, as we see 

 from his words : * ' Religion preaches to every mind that truth 

 beyond which science can never go, namely, that the individ- 

 ual lives not for himself alone, but that his individual exist- 

 ence belongs to a universal psychical commonwealth, that his 

 finite ends serve infinite ends whose ultimate f ullfiUment is 

 hidden from his eyes." And in this sense he will find no dif- 

 ficulty as a man of science in recognizing an intimate relation 

 between ethics and religion. In a writer like Royce, of Har- 

 vard, there is a disposition fairly to revel in the language of 

 an exalted theism, and to fuse the religious and the ethical 

 elements in a most striking way ; while, however, the God-con- 

 ception here becomes so vague as to convey scarcely more than 

 a feeling or sentiment, to any one incapable of mastering the 

 subtle abstractions of metaphysics. 



On the whole we see an extreme reluctance on the part of 

 most of these scholars to confess themselves as dealing with 

 anything '* transcendental," and yet with a preponderance 

 of opinion that a cosmic relationship is linked with ethical 

 motives. We see the term '' ethical religion " gradually com- 

 ing in, and it is a title of one of the books in the list which I 

 have given you, by Mr. Salter, of Chicago. 



