REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 137 
and avenging itself in terrible convulsions aud wrecks if 
it be neglected. The law of love is the law of gravitation 
of the moral world; with this only difference, that itis in the 
power of human beings to violate it, and thus to bring on 
their nature that destruction, that moral, and ultimately 
physical, disorder which is its curse. 
Such is the intimate connection between Ethics and 
Theology, and it has been conspicuously illustrated in 
history. Whenever, and in whatever religion or civilization, 
the personal life and love within the Godhead has been ob- 
scured, there you find the principle of love similarly obscured. 
When, as in Mohammedanism, God is regarded, so to say, 
as a solitary despot, simply as the absolute Lord of all 
His creatures, human beings apprehend their relation to 
each other in a similar manner. There you have govern- 
ment assuming the form of a pure despotism, and the 
relations of men to one another, and of men to women, 
become relations of power and possession, and not of mutual 
love and devotion. Slavery, the absolute possession of one 
human being by another, is a natural institution under such a 
religion, for 1t is but the reproduction of the relations which 
God is regarded as holding to men. The woman is similarly 
regarded as the mere possession of the man, and the son is 
under the absolute power of the father. The ultimate 
connection between Ethics and Theology, in short, les in 
the fact that the highest ideal of men is always represented 
by their conception of God, and where the idea of God is 
that of power and dominion, there the highest developments 
of human relations take a similar character. But the 
Christian conception, of a personal life of love within the 
Godhead, has established among Christian nations the idea of 
mutual love, and consequently of mutual rights and mutual 
devotion, as the highest form of the relation between human 
beings. If that theology could not be maintained, it would, 
indeed, be unworthy of human nature to say that all morality 
must go with it. But it would be true that the highest 
glory of movrality, and its profoundest source, would be 
removed, 
