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juster notions of virtue than ever Plato or Socrates professed. In thinking 
of a philosophical system of ethics, when we remember that our philosophical 
systems of teaching are so powerless with regard to the masses, it would be 
well if we were to confine our attention somewhat to the true philosophical 
method of teaching ethics which we discover in the Bible itself. If any one 
doubts whether there is such a thing as a pure system of ethics in the Bible, 
and the feasibility of teaching it to the masses, we have only to go back for 
eighteen hundred years and see whether the Christians as a body during that 
period had not been producing a continual series of men and women who in 
their lives have set forth the purest examples of morality that the world ever 
saw. On the other hand, if we consider the men in this country who have 
striven to make ethical systems which should be independent of New Testa- 
ment revelation, do we not see that all those men have been signal failures 
in themselves, and have manifested in themselves the utter powerlessness of 
any ethical philosophy whatever to make men good and moral ? And why is 
this ? Because if we reject revelation we are obliged to reject the great 
truth which we learn from revelation, and which is confirmed by human 
nature. When we study ethics as manifested in man’s moral nature, we are 
led to the astounding fact that we have to consider, as it were, a morbid 
anatomy of ethics. Scripture reveals to us that man has fallen from a higher 
state — that his moral nature is diseased, and that sin is that disease. It 
tells us what sin is against God, and what sin is against man ; and it unfolds 
to us, as it were, the whole morbid anatomy of man’s moral being. It is in 
the Bible alone, I contend, that we are taught moral philosophy in the 
manner best adapted to the hearts and consciences of mankind. Go back to 
the Old Testament. Did any ancient philosopher or writer on ethics ever 
bring before men more practically the duty of virtue and chastity than we 
have it in the history of Joseph ? And what moral philosopher ever enun- 
ciated the principle that the Bible enunciates there — that grand principle to 
keep a man from erring, the fact of God’s presence ? Could Joseph do that 
sin against his God ? Dare he do it ? I may here — and that is the reason why 
I have taken the Old Testament for an illustration — refer incidentally to a 
work upon a cognate subject, though one would not think so from its title. 
I have derived considerable benefit from it myself, and so have others to 
whom I have introduced it. It is a work of extreme value. The book I 
refer to is Isaac Taylor’s essay on Hebrew poetry. The author traces there 
the effect of the teaching of the Old Testament upon the Christian world 
who have listened to it for the last eighteen hundred years, and he shows 
how the reading of the Old Testament has, as it were, saturated men con- 
tinually hearing it from their very infancy with some of the profoundest and 
most valuable truths, and has thus done much in making them moral and 
good. He says we are greatly indebted to that Old Testament reading, and 
to the psalms which we constantly hear in our churches, until the words 
become insensibly incorporated with our nature, as it were. We are indebted 
to that old Hebrew literature for the habitual feeling that we have of the 
presence of God about us — of God’s omniscience and God’s omnipotence. 1 
