1€4 W. l. COURTNEY, M:Ac, oii. D.. ON 
courses of action, there is one path which he must follow, 
that if he refuses, he has in some fashion given up his true 
position in nature, and that this infraction of the law of 
obligation will brmg him under the terrible punishment of 
remorse. Some of us in a modern age are fond of whittling 
away the meaning of obligation and remorse. Remorse, we 
are told, is disappointment that we have made a mistake, 
that we have miscalculated, misinterpreted, our main interests. 
Remorse has nothing to do with either disappointment or 
miscalculation, it is not a recognition of mistakes, it is the 
agonised feeling that we have committed a crime. That is 
the imperative sanction of all morality—not an external 
sanction, not legal punishment, not social ostracism, but the 
voice, alternately pleading and threatening, of our inner 
moral nature. It appears then that we live under a law of 
obligation, and obligation implies at least two terms, the 
obliged, and the obhger. We understand at once who the 
obliged are; it is ourselves; it is we on whom is laid the 
dificult burden of a duty to fulfil. But it 1s nonsense to 
speak of an obliged unless the other term is equally explicit; 
who or what is the obliger? Is 1t not the Divine Spirit who 
rules the universe, and holds up to man the ideal at which 
he is, in whatever hesitating or halting fashion, forced to 
alm ? 
Turn finally to the last conception, the meaning of good. 
What is good? It is the attainment of happiness, says one 
class of thinkers. It is the subservience to the greatest 
interests of mankind, says another class. But good is 
neither happiness nor utility. If we only avail ourselves of 
explanations like these, we cannot unlock the secrets of 
man’s action in the past, or read aright the historic pages 
which tell of many of his noblest deeds. The martyr, the 
leader of the forlorn hope, the preacher of a crusade, the 
Man who died on the cross, ask these whether good means 
utility or happiness, and the answer is not difficult to antici- 
pate. But observe what follows. If good is not happiness 
or utility or welfare, how are we going to define it? Is ita 
tautological term? Are we going to: say that good is that 
which is good? Are we to content ourselves with so vacant, 
so meaningless an ideal? We shall have to content ourselves 
with so vacant, so meaningless an ideal, if there be no God. 
Once grant the existence of Divinity, once grant the reality 
of a moral order, which is slowly being executed in all the 
developing series of natural existence and all the pages of the 
