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it. It is “I tliat was an hungered/’ “I that was thirsty/* 
“ Me that ye visited/* 
From what has now been said, I trust I may take leave 
of my subject. The foundation of virtue is placed by Christ 
where the best ethical philosophers have placed it, and I do 
not think that any species of virtue can be said to be wanting 
in the New Testament. Not that it was ever intended to give 
us a complete system of ethics. But ethical principles are 
there, held as it were in solution, to be precipitated and 
gathered up. They are there because sound doctrine can 
only be taught through the moral nature, and exhibited in the 
moral life of man. There are to be found in the Christian*s 
standard of doctrine abundant instances of humility, self- 
denial, gratitude, liberality, justice, mercy, kindness, forgive- 
ness, and love, as the foundation, the mainspring of them all. 
Gratitude used to be said to be wanting ; but the truth is, it 
shines out from every page which teaches man his duty to 
God, for love to God is the sublimest gratitude. 
In conclusion, then, I seem to feel this thought to be 
uppermost, namely, that truth, under different forms, points 
to one author, and wears, in different dress, the same eternal 
character. But we live, some think, in an age of great re- 
search and vast trifling, of profound reverence for the truth 
and a shallow indifference to it — an age when a few are 
anxiously working for whatever the truth itself may reveal ; 
but when many, as ever was the case, thoughtfully study 
nothing, and yet, in a sense peculiar to the times, catch up the 
ephemeral schemes of the hour, laugh at eternal verities, and 
treat religion and all that is real and spiritual as an effete 
thing. Against positivism, materialism, and infidelity, ethical 
science raises its voice. And in its interactions and relations, 
it points to an universal philosophy, where the spiritual and 
the material, the moral and the intellectual, without prejudice 
to each other, shall find a common resting-place. 
As to each man thinking out every moral, social, and reli- 
gious problem for himself, to say nothing of the presumptuous 
rejection of revelation which it implies, it could only end in 
a world of sweat and labour for daily bread, by nine hundred 
and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand, thinking out 
nothing at all, believing nothing at all, and living, to all 
practical purposes, the veriest heathens, amid the full light 
of Truth itself streaming around them. 
I am no enemy to freedom of thought and discussion, but 
I cannot close this paper without observing that while the 
abstract speculations of men who affect to think out all things 
