marked out by the Ethical Theism of Kant, while seeking to avoid certain defects in Kant's treatment to which we shall have to refer in the sequel. In Dr Temple's Bampton Lectures (1884) the moral argument is made of primary importance. The value of a combination of the two lines of thought-the argument from Cause and Design, and the argument from Moral Obligation had long before been shown by Hooker as a theologian and Berkeley as a philosopher; and in recent times they have frequently been treated together. In his Study of Religion Dr Martineau sets the two arguments side by side as together constituting a sufficient basis for rational Theism. We have seen the modification that is required in the first of these two arguments. Our question now is-In what form may the Argument from Moral Obligation be stated?

Dr Martineau bases it on the fundamental ethical fact of Obligation. In a conflict of springs of action, where we recognise a higher and a lower course, we have no right to dispose of ourselves as we please: we

I

are bidden to follow the higher, by a law over us not of our own making,—a command not to be canvassed but obeyed. What is Dr Martineau's interpretation of this great fact?

If the sense of authority means anything at all, it means the discernment of something higher than we, having claims on our self,-therefore no mere part of it; hovering over and transcending our personality, though also mingling with our consciousness and manifested in its intimations. If I rightly interpret this sentiment, I cannot therefore stop within my own limits, but am irresistibly carried on to the recognition of another than I. Nor does that other remain without further witness the predicate "higher than I" takes me yet a step beyond; for what am I? A person: higher than whom no "thing" assuredly,-no mere phenomenon, can be; but only another Person, greater and higher, and of deeper insight.1

It is claimed, then, that we may pass by a process of inference from man's conscience to God. On this point we must concentrate our attention. Let us take a case in which this inference is not made-and it is not usually made by men in their ordinary lifethe consciousness of moral authority is there all the same. But does it apart from the inference-contain any sort of direct appre

1 Types of Ethical Theory (2nd edition), vol. ii. p. 104. The italics are in the original.

hension or experience of the Divine? If it does not, then our moral consciousness is complete in itself, and there seems no ground for a logical passage to a divine cause outside it. Dr Martineau asks " whether an insulated nature can be a seat of authority at all." It is indeed hard to understand how a being, who is conceived to exist as Dr Martineau in this argument conceives man to exist, could ever be conscious of imperfection and an obligation to be better. For God and Man are conceived to be separate beings, just as we are separate from each other; and if God, the Infinite Person, is strictly other than man, the finite person, then the latter must be capable of existing as a selfsufficient being, even if there were no God. One might well ask, how could such a being be conscious of himself as imperfect, and, as it were, "rise above himself" as he does in comparing himself with others and passing judgment on himself. But the difficulty is not in the least solved by assuming that "another Person" is perfect. We have God and man confronting each other as separate beings, divided in their existence; and man

is really a seat of authority to himself, except when his reflective faculty wakes up sufficiently to make the inference to God; and the inference appears to be simply groundless.

Cardinal Newman has an interesting passage which, as he uses it, to enforce the need of reliance on the Church of Rome,contains a subtle petitio principii, but which will serve to illustrate our point. He supposes the case of a man thinking himself out from Catholicism to Atheism. "First, he would protest against the sacrifice of the Mass; next, he gave up baptismal regeneration and the sacramental principle; then he asked himself whether dogmas were not a restraint on Christian liberty as well as sacraments; then came the question, What, after all, was the use of teachers of religion? Why should any one stand between him and his Maker? After a time it struck him that this obvious question had to be answered by the Apostles as well as by the Anglican clergy; so he came to the conclusion that the true and only revelation of God to Man is that which is written in the heart. This did for a time, and he remained · a

Deist. But then it occurred to him that this inward moral law was there within the breast, whether there were a God or not, and that it was a roundabout way of enforcing that law to say that it came from God, and simply unnecessary, seeing that it carried with it its own sacred and sovereign authority, as our feelings instinctively testified; and when he turned to look at the physical world around him, he really did not see what scientific proof there was of the Being of God at all; and it seemed to him that all things would go on quite as well as at present, without that hypothesis as with it." 1 If the soul of man is separate in existence from God, and is yet capable of having a moral consciousness as its crown and completion, man would be capable of having the moral consciousness if there were nothing divine outside himself. Hence it

would seem that if there can only be a logical passage from man to God, if the knowledge of God is nothing more than an hypothesis to account for facts of consciousness with which He is in no real or

1 Grammar of Assent, ch. vii. § 2.