*Right and wrong are not contingent on the knowledge of the moral agent.* Unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less intrinsically wrong, because it is the result of ignorance. It is out of harmony with the fitness of things. It deprives an object of its due use. It perverts to pernicious results what is salutary in its purpose. It lessens for the agent his aggregate of good and of happiness, and increases for him his aggregate of evil and of misery. In this sense—far more significant than that of arbitrary infliction—the well-known maxim of jurisprudence, “Ignorance of the law excuses no one,”(2) is a fundamental law of nature. There is, however, an important distinction between *absolute and relative right*. In action, the absolute right is conduct in entire conformity with beings and objects as they are; the relative right is conduct in accordance with beings and objects as, with the best means of knowledge within our reach, we believe them to be. The Omniscient Being alone can have perfect knowledge of all beings and things as they are. This knowledge is possessed by men in different degrees, corresponding to their respective measures of intelligence, sagacity, culture, and personal or traditional experience. In the ruder conditions of society, acts that seem to us atrociously wrong, often proceed from honest and inevitable misapprehension, are right in their intention, and are therefore proper objects of moral approbation. In an advanced condition of intelligence, and especially under high religious culture, though the realm of things unknown far exceeds that of things known, there is a sufficiently clear understanding of the objects and relations of ordinary life to secure men against sins of ignorance, and to leave in their wrong-doing no semblance or vestige of right.