]82 REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 
co-operation of philosophers whose conceptions of the 
ultimate end of right actions ‘* seem to be so widely divergent, 
that the utmost efforts of mutual criticism are hardly sufficient 
to enable them even to understand each other.” And while 
these gentlemen are trying to understand each other, the 
great problems of human civilization and of human society 
have to be dealt with day by day ; men and women, and 
the young men and women whom such a professor addresses, 
have to live some sort of family life, and to decide for them- 
selves how much of the old sacred ideal they will pursue as 
“belonging to the indestructible conditions of the well-being 
of life.” 
What wonder if, when such vague speculation on the 
primary principles of morality are let loose at the fountain- 
heads of Enghsh thought, another honoured writer in this 
series of lectures, Sir John Seeley, should say (p. 11) that 
‘“‘never surely was the English mind so confused, so want- 
ing in fixed moral principles as at present . . . The scepti- 
cism which undermmes and enfeebles us now is partly, indeed, 
but only partly, a scepticism about religion. It extends to 
everything else. We have misgivings about morality; we 
suspect law itself to be a pedant, government to be a 
tyrant, justice and honesty to be Philistine virtues . . . 
And the old national character seems to have disappeared 
with the old principles . . . We have everything 
except decided views and steadfast purpose—everything in 
short except character. We have emotion, sentiment, 
thought, knowledge, in abundance, only not character!” 
What wonder that the fiction of the day has for some 
time past exhibited precisely that practical perplexity 
as to the permanent elements in the ideal of family life 
which Professor Sidgwick confesses from the speculative 
side? Are we not reminded of that pathetic passage 
in an ancient moral poem, in which the patriarch ex- 
claims, “ Where shall wisdom be found and where is the 
place of understanding?” And when his eye has ranged 
nature in vain for an answer, he falls back upon the old 
solution, “ God understandeth the way thereof, and He 
knoweth the place thereof; for He looketh to the ends 
of the earth and seeth under the whole heaven .. . 
and unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord, 
that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.” 
The ends of morality, about which the philosophers, some 
thousands of years after Job, are still perplexed, can only 
