ON HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY. 43 
ground of responsibility, but that he has not also discussed the 
question for what actions we are responsible, and what are the 
duties we have to perform, as well as the reasons why we should 
perform them. With regard to what has been said about Paley. 
Dr. Paley has been very much criticised because he has made 
expediency the rule of conduct, and some have gone even so far as 
to say, like the Dean of a certain college at Cambridge at the 
present day, that he was not a Christian. Unfortunately, Paley 
adopts a tenet which I think is not based on responsibility or 
on Christianity; it is that a person is to obey the law because 
it is expedient that he should; and that is far inferior to the 
tenet of Bishop Butler, that right and wrong are independent 
of the individual, and the individual is to obey the dictates of his 
conscience. Paley’s mistake was in making what may be the 
measure of legislation for any State the measure by which an 
individual might act, now expediency is not the proper motive of 
conduct in an individual. 
Rev. Prebendary Wace, D.D,—I think Lord Grimthorpe has 
said all that is necessary on this occasion; the last speaker seemed 
to make some complaint that his Lordship had not discussed the 
whole moral law—as I understood him to say; but I fear that could 
hardly be done in an evening :—but, perhaps you will allow me 
to offer one or two short observations on the general spirit of 
what his lordship has advanced. JI am disposed to put rather 
higher than Lord Grimthorpe put it in one or two places, the general 
conviction of mankind respecting permanent responsibility both 
here and hereafter. The most extraordinary phenomenon in that 
respect is, perhaps, the ancient Egyptian religion. We have old 
documents, particularly the ‘“ Ritual of the Dead,” which contain 
the most minute descriptions of the judgment passed on all souls 
in the other world, a complete account of a sort of judicial 
tribunal to which they were all subject. Whether these were partly, 
as the late Canon Cook used to think, the remains of primeval 
revelation or not, it is certainly a very striking phenomenon. 
There can be again no question at all that tle very motive, so 
to say, of some of the most interesting and most momentous 
of the writings of the Greek poets, for example, is the sense of 
responsibility hereafter; the very reason that Antigone gives, for 
instance, for burying her brother against the express law of Creon 
is that she will have to live with the members of her family and 
