REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 123 
will be honoured by none more than by those who are con- 
vinced that the attempt to treat religion and morality 
separately is equally disastrous to both. If a man loses his 
hold of religious belief, let him by all means cling to his 
convictions of morality. They are the only means by which 
his religious belief can be recovered; and they may at least 
save him from shipwreck. But it is no disparagement to 
them to consider whether in the long run, and on a large 
scale, they can be maintained, or whether they can be 
rendered duly effective, without the support and guidance of 
religious belief; and this is the sole point on which the 
suggestions of this paper are respectfully offered for 
consideration. 
Let it then, in the first place, be distinctly understood 
that no suggestion is here made, such as is sometimes 
deprecated in these lectures, that morality is destitute of all 
support if religious beliefs are withdrawn from it. The 
example of the great ethical teachers of Greece and Rome, 
and of the East, is sufficient to exhibit the unreasonableness 
and injustice of such a supposition. Some of the most vital 
principles of the moral law—such as the golden rule, of 
doing as you would be done by—are so deeply embedded in 
human nature as to be universally acknowledged as a 
general rule of action. The principle on which one of 
the lecturers in this volume lays such stress—*that duty 
binds a man”—is not less generally acknowledged. 
Conscience, and the sense of the supremacy of conscience, 
have been shown by Bishop Butler to be part of the true 
nature of man, and they assert themselves by the mere force 
of nature. The appeal to the obligation of ‘ whatsoever 
things are just, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,” 
comes home to the heart whatever a man’s religious beliefs 
may be. The promoters of the ethical movement hold a 
position in that respect from which no friend of religion 
would wish to dislodge them. But it is in no way incon- 
sistent with respect for that position to inquire whether 
the true interests of ethics do not require an advance 
beyond it—whether, in short, it is not a position enforced 
upon those who rest in it by a temporary necessity, and not 
oue to be adopted as the permanent citadel of ethical forces. 
The view which the following considerations would en- 
deavour to recall is first that the ultimate foundation of 
Ethics must, in great measure, be sought, not so much in 
