REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 135 
superadds to them all, without exception, the obligation of 
one supreme personal relation, Sufficient attention, , perhaps, 
has not yet been paid to that view of morality w hich treats 
it primarily as a matter of personal relations. The Aristo- 
telian Ethics reflected too strongly the individualism of the 
Greek mind, and treated virtue mainly as the perfection of 
the individual nature. The Roman mind, in accordance with 
the whole bent of the Roman character, regarded it rather 
from the point of view of mutual duties, as is indicated in 
the title of Cicero’s treatise De Officiis ; but the Jewish, and 
above all, the Christian mind, rose to a still higher point of 
view, when it resolved all moral and religious excellence 
into love—into the true relation of persons to persons. ‘The 
late Mr. Maurice, when he held the Chair of Moral Philosophy 
at Cambridge, treated the subject under the same point of 
view in his lectures on Social Morality. Ordinary virtues 
are best defined, indeed they can only be satisfactorily 
defined, in terms of the relation which one person holds to 
others. The self-respecting virtues, as they have been 
termed, have sometimes been excepted from this rule; but 
under Christian Philosophy they fall within it, as resulting 
from the relation of a man or woman to their Divine Lord; 
and it is upon this basis that St. Paul treats, for example, 
the virtue of purity. 
It would take us far beyond the limits of a paper to 
develop this view in detail. But for our present purpose it 
may be sufficient to point out how every moral excellence 
becomes, under this view, animated and illuminated by the 
spirit of personai loyalty and devotion. I venture to think 
it is a high point of excellence in this consideration that it 
enables the idea of self to be everywhere suppressed or super-- 
seded. *If virtues are self-regarding, that chord of self, of 
which Tennyson speaks, is still heard vibrating, and there is 
no little danger in this survival of self, even in our best 
achievements. But when every virtue becomes an act of 
homage and of love to another, all thought of self is absorbed 
in an unselfish devotion. It will be universally acknow- 
ledged that moral excellence consists in the due realiza- 
tion of our personal relations as children, as parents, as 
citizens, as friends. Is it not a still higher, and the highest 
privilege, to add to all these one further stage of personal 
relation—the eterna] relation of the heart to a perfect Being, 
towards whom every emotion of love and of gratitude can 
be indulged to the highest degree. Of course, the possi- 
