136 REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 
bility of such a transformation and elevation of morality is 
dependent on the question of the truth of the Christian 
revelation; and that, as is often urged by the school of 
writers to whom I am referring is not evident to everyone. 
It is quite true, as has been said more than once, that it 
would be at once incorrect and unjust to treat all morality as 
depending on such a belief. But the highest morality may 
be dependent on it; and those who disbelieve it may con- 
sequently shut themselves out from the highest form of 
moral development. That belief, moreover, may itself, in some 
respects, be the highest moral test to which human nature 
can be put, and its acceptance may be a primary moral act 
of the most vital significance. The only point it is requisite 
for the present purpose to urge is that if the belief be true, 
and if the moral relation it declares to a divine and human 
Lord be duly recognized, it adds to morality a supreme 
grace and power. The due recognition of our relation to 
such a Being, and the due fulfilment of that relation in love 
to Him, must, in fact, by its very nature, become the first of 
moral duties, in which all others find their support and their 
glory. 
We may, perhaps, in conclusion, take an illustration from 
natural science of the influence upon morality of these 
Christian truths. The greatest, probably, of all discoveries in 
the realm of natural science was that which established the 
law of gravitation as the governing force of the whole 
universe; so that, in the most distant stars and suns, we 
behold vast worlds held in mutual relations by mutual 
attractions, and those attractions precisely the same in 
character as that by which the smallest elements of the 
physical life around us are controlled. We look into 
the distant heavens at night, and are overpowered by the 
thought that one and the same law of mutual attraction, 
according to a fixed proportion, maintains those orbs in their 
order; and then onr eyes and thoughts are recalled to the 
little forces and atoms of our daily experience, and we are 
the more sensible of the supremacy and universality of the 
laws by which the circumstances of our daily life are 
regulated. So it was with the Apostle of Love as his eye 
ranged from those depths of divine life, which it had been 
his privilege to witness, to the daily and ordinary relations 
of men and women. One and the same law, the law of love, 
controls alike the most divine and the most human relations, 
keeping them in harmony, peace and beauty, if it be obeyed, 
