THE VERY REV. H. WAGE, D.D., ON AUTHORITY. 223 



oe impracticable on this occasion to pursue the full course of 

 reasoning which justifies the conviction, expressed thousands of 

 years ago in the 139th Psalm, that the voice of conscience is 

 the voice of a personal God, a God who is in direct personal 

 relation to us in our inmost souls, and from whose presence 

 we can never escape. Nothiug else, as has been shown with 

 peculiar force by the late Dr. Martineau, will adequately 

 explain the features of our moral consciousness. But, as the 

 ])salmist felt, this apprehension of God as the Lord of our 

 conscience, as speaking to us in tones of authoritative command, 

 involves the immediate recognition of Him as our Creator, and as 

 knowing all the secrets of our frame and of our constitution. 

 If this be the case, we are led to the recognition of there 

 being one only living authority in the world, that authority 

 being God Himself. Our Christian faith, indeed, establishes a 

 supreme authority for us in the person of our Lord Jesus 

 Christ. But that, as He Himself says, is because as the 

 Son of God, and authorized by His Father, He exercises 

 His Father's authority. As St. Paul describes the constitution 

 and course of the world, " Then cometh the end, when 

 he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God, even 

 the Father, when he shall have put down all rule and all 

 authority and power. . . . And when all things shall 

 be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be 

 subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may 

 be all in all." 



Thus the authority of our Christian Faith rests on the 

 personal authority of Jesus Christ, and His authority rests on 

 the personal authority of God the Father, whose voice, by His 

 Spirit, speaks to our consciences. Our Lord accordingly treats 

 our acceptance of His claims as dependent on our antecedent 

 submission to the voice of God. " He that is of God, heareth 

 God's words ; ye therefore hear them not because ye are not of 

 God." The Avhole history of human tliouglit and life thus 

 becomes a continued variation of the narrative of the third 

 chapter of the Book of Genesis. God is perpetually speaking to 

 men and they are either obeying His words, or hiding themselves 

 from Him, or rejecting Him. Even their purely intellectual 

 history is of the same nature if, as Dr. Martineau so impressively 

 urges, N'ature is but the display of His will and His laws within 

 the physical sphere. When the Greek geometers developed the 

 laws of the conic sections, they might seem, for long afterwards, 

 to have been spinning purely speculative webs of little practical 

 import. But when Kepler ascertained that the heavenly bodies 



