"Paley's law," he concludes, "would obviously be the destruction of all confidence. How much nobler and safer is the doctrine of the Scriptures, and of the unsophisticated language of man's moral constitution, that truth is obligatory on its own account, and that he who undertakes to signify to another, no matter in what form, and no matter what may be the right in the case to know the truth, is bound to signify according to the convictions of his own mind! He is not always bound to speak, but whenever he does speak he is solemnly bound to speak nothing but the truth. The universal application of this principle would be the diffusion of universal confidence. It would banish deceit and suspicion from the world, and restrict the use of signs to their legitimate offices." A later work on Christian Ethics, which acquires special prominence through its place in "The International Theological Library," edited by Drs. Briggs and Salmond, is by Dr. Newman Smyth. It shows signs of strength in the premises assumed by the writer, in accordance with the teachings of Scripture and of the best moral sense of mankind; and signs of weakness in his processes of reasoning, and in his final conclusion, according to the mental methods of those who have wavered on this subject, from John Chrysostom to Richard Rothe and Charles Hodge. Dr. Smyth rightly bases Christian ethics on the nature and will of God, as illustrated in the life and teachings of the divine-human Son of God. "A thoroughly scientific ethics must not only be adequate to the common moral sense of men, but prove true also to the moral consciousness of the Son of man. No ethics has right to claim to be thoroughly scientific, or to offer itself as the only science of ethics possible to us in our present experience, until it has sought to enter into the spirit of Christ, and has brought all its, analysis and theories of man's moral life to the light of the luminous ethical personality of Jesus Christ."[1] [Footnote 1: Smyth's _Christian Ethics_, p. 6.]