motives, necessarily and voluntarily abandons much, both of pleasure and prosperity. Nature cannot have so bungled her work. The highest possible exercise of the powers which she has given us must necessarily lead to the highest possible good. It does not matter to the argument whether conscience and your other moral faculties be natural or acquired. If nature endowed an ascidian with the power of acquiring moral faculties, it was bound to use them as soon as it had got them. The question whether you are bound to use your mental faculties does not depend in the least upon the question whether man is an improved monkey. You are bound to use them simply because you have them. So you are bound to live as a responsible being simply because you have the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong. You know, too, that you act yourselves upon this principle. If any one were to push one of you out of your seat and take it himself, not only would you be angry, but our chairman would call in a policeman to expel the disturber, and give you your seat back again. Why? Because the man would have been doing wrong, and need not have done it; and because it was wrong you are angry and punish him. But can you stop there? There are things which we know to be wrong, but which hurt none but ourselves; things we know to be wrong, but which benefit society. A man may liberally support useful institutions from motives of ostentation, or as a bribe, if he is a candidate, let us say, for a seat in parliament. An act may be apparently right, but the inner motive wrong. Now, conscience judges of things absolutely; it condemns or approves of things, not as they seem, but as they really are: not by results, but by their intrinsic character. What is there which answers to this outside of man? Must there not be a judge who also judges men absolutely? You can find no such judge but God. Either, then, nature is a sham, and her laws not universal, and this present state of things a delusion, or there is a universal judge, and a future state in which reward and punishment will be meted out in strict accordance with the rightness and wrongness of human action. A being omniscient and almighty can alone judge actions absolutely in the same way as conscience judges us, both for our thoughts, words, and deeds.