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person endowed with high ethical instincts, and intelligence, and conscience, 
prior to the fact of that revelation which we rejoice in. Now here is a truth 
perpetually coming out when we study the Scriptures closely, and that is, 
that we must remember that before the first book of Scripture there was a 
prior, anterior, primitive revelation without which we should have had no 
revelation at all. All these things combined have produced a large amount 
and degree of morality or of moral consciousness, and when we come to the 
New Testament and to Christian ethics, we come to a sort of concrete body 
of conceptions and of moral intuitions, which consist in part of that which 
was common to all the best and most thoughtful of all the moralists, and 
those most amenable to moral influences in the world, and in part of that 
which belongs to Christianity, and which being added to and connected 
with the other, makes the total amount of illumination with which we, as 
Christians, have to deal. We have been told that one reason why there is no 
moral philosophy in Oxford is because Oxford has no logic. But that only 
gives a reason for the fact that is previously stated — it does not at all 
diminish or mitigate the force of the fact itself, that we are without 
any complete system of ethics at our universities. But what does this 
statement concerning the want of a logic imply ? It implies that we 
cannot get ethics in their completeness ; that we cannot have them fully 
articulated, and developed, and made applicable to every case of life and 
conscience, unless the whole matter be thoroughly worked out by means of 
an applied logic. That is really the implication which underlies the state- 
ment, and it leads us to a conclusion of some importance. I believe it is 
of the utmost importance, even to the mass of the people, that we should 
have a complete and perfectly developed system of Christian ethics. We 
have been told often, and told here again to-night, that the morality of the 
New Testament is higher, and better, and more perfect than that of the 
ancient Greek philosophers. Undoubtedly that is true ; but yet no one 
can have seen much of the effects of religion upon untutored minds, without 
admitting another truth, that where the mind is so untutored, morality itself 
suffers in the hands of those who are unquestionably true and fervent 
Christians, for want of a complete intellectual character and development. 
On the other hand, the effect of Christian morality upon the tutored 
mind, even when the Christian faith is to a large extent abandoned, is most 
marked. I have learnt something of this from some families who, for 
several generations, have not been orthodox. I refer to that body who 
have chosen to'call themselves Unitarian. In the moralities and amenities 
of social life they are often pre- eminent ; in matters of honour and fair 
dealing between man and man they often put to shame those who have 
more fervent religion, and, as I think, truer and more orthodox Christian 
views than themselves. What is the meaning of this ? Why, from genera- 
tion to generation they have represented a highly cultivated strain of 
Christian ethics. They are derived from good Presbyterian families of the 
time of the Commonwealth, and from that origin they have derived a good 
basis and substratum of Christian truth and morals. That has never been 
