138 REV. PREBENDARY WACE, D.D., ON ETHICS AND RELIGION. 
Discussion. 
The Prestpenr.—I will allow anyone who is present to make 
remarks on this subject. 
Dr. Water Kipp, M.D., F.L.S.—It is very important at the 
present time that attention should be called as in Dr. Wace’s valu- 
able paper, to the proposed divorce of Religion and Ethics. There 
is one point in this matter to which I should lke to draw special 
attention. It is that the proposed secularization of ethics, if it 
takes place at all, must be dealt with by science and its methods. 
Mr. Spencer has announced that the old sanctions of religion are 
passing away and a fitter regulative system, to use his own words, 
is the great need of the time. In passing, one may remark that 
this system of Philosophy and Ethics is stated by Mr. Spencer to 
be valid only for optimists. Whether or not the present state of 
the World even in Western and progressive nations justifies this 
optimism, is not very clear. Indeed Prince Hohenlohe in a very 
serious public pronouncement lately spoke in a solemnly differeut 
tone. Butit would seem that science is to regulate conduct. Sir 
Michael Foster hinted the same in his presidential address last 
year at Dover. But what says one of the most prominent scientific 
men of the day ? “ All our knowledge 7s, and remains throughout 
provisional.” Weismann contrasts with this changing body of 
theory and progressive investigation which belongs to Science, and 
which is her glory, with the more glorious semper eadem of 
Christian Ethics, which has survived eighteen centuries of often 
poor performance on the part of its exponents. Here, at any rate, 
we know where we stand. ‘T'he minor differences of Christian sects, 
the divergence in doctrines of secondary or tertiary importance, 
“the minute anise and cummin” which so many mistake for the 
weightier matters of the law, these may vary; but the essential 
and fundamental ethics for Christianity to-day, as eg., in the 
second table of the moral law, are the same as for the primitive 
Christians—no more, no less. 
Are we then to assume that serious danger to national morals 
will come from studying ethics apart from religion? Dr. Wace has 
well shown us how much there may be in the proposed new system 
which agrees with the old, but that the highest forms of morality 
must be in extreme danger from such treatment. Optimism would 
say “no,” the general spread of education, the average good sense of 
