294 THE REV. H. J. CLARKE ON 
intellects from the control of custom and tradition. Relatively 
to the exigencies of the sort of work they undertook, what 
light they had within them was but darkness. They perceived, 
indeed, that such relations between man and man as seemed 
to have their ground in nature, or to find their warrant in 
imperious necessities, implied a reciprocity of obligations, 
and that to fulfil such expectations as might thus become 
legitimate was to discharge a duty. Their sense of rectitude 
required subordination of all private aims to public interests, 
conformity to practices prescribed by law or custom, and, in 
the adjustment of disputed claims, fair distribution and 
equivalence. The conduct of the individual, regarded in its 
reflex aspects, they certainly did not ignore; for they were 
fully sensible of the advantages of temperance, and culture, 
and psychic equilibrium. Nevertheless, the crudeness of 
their teaching in respect to duty under both these heads is 
ample proof that, in the absence of a knowledge of the true 
God, and with moral tastes unsharpened by a vigorous sense 
and by a clear perception of what constitutes man’s proper 
duty, all endeavours to establish or expound a science which 
shall fitly bear the title Deontology are fore-ordained to 
failure. 
Modern Utilitarianism, in elaborating and applying its 
ethical conceptions, has not failed to profit by those dis- 
coveries of truth and those corrections of error, throughout 
the range of secular investigation, which have largely bene- 
fited all civilized nations in these latter days. The requisite 
conditions, psychic and material, of human happiness, so far 
as they can be discovered from its point of view. it specifies 
with scientific clearness and incisiveness. But now is it 
adapted to repress that spirit of licentiousness which has 
infused itself into the human mind through the knowledge of 
good and evil, and, as a deadly poison, vitiates the springs of 
human life? Not only is it ineffectual as a remedy for moral 
evil of the kind that lurks in deeds of darkness which Divorce 
Courts, for example, bring to light and blaze abroad, but the 
facility with which it lends its aid to specious pleas for the 
removal of restrictions that have been established onreligious 
grounds betrays an ever threatening readiness to sanction 
fresh developments of animalism, and to claim liberty tor new 
departures in the direction of its most debasing forms. 
Utilitarianism cannot but discountenance the madness of 
such expectations as the possibility of winning stakes and 
ventures simply by good luck excites in fools. But failing to 
exhibit truly in their moral character the acts which evidence 
