The broad fact on which a system of natural ethics must be based, if it is to have any ethical quality at all, is that _the individual life finds its goal in the cosmic life_, not in pleasure, or any other term by which we may choose to express a sensation of personal enjoyment. The distinction between the _bonum honestum_ and the _bonum delectabile_ is really a valid one—it is no invention of moralists “suckled in a creed outworn,” but is revealed by a study of life and its manifestations to have been deeply rooted in nature from a period far anterior to the advent of man upon the earth. In man, the _bonum honestum_ takes the form mainly of what Epictetus calls the sense of “natural fellowship” among men, and what Christ expressed in the word which gave to the ideas of Stoicism the penetrating power they had lacked, the great and divine word, Love. But we must never forget that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal, eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part, whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws and inter-relations, would never have come into being. It is the “city of God,” builded without hands, the Universal Polity whose “troubled image,” as Plato says, we discern in the polity we know. When Socrates, after his sentence, lay in prison awaiting the summons to die, his friends gathered round him entreating him to make his escape, and explaining to him the safe and easy means they had provided for that end. Freely and cheerfully as was his wont, delighting in the play of dialectical fence, he debated the matter with them. Then he laid dialectics aside, and spoke to them from the heights of vision. Rightly or wrongly, he declared, the laws of his mother-city, to which he owed all he had and all he was, had bidden him die. Whatever happened now, there could be no escape in the end. Some day he must face death, and stand before the Laws of the Underworld. What answer should he make to Them when they demanded how he had dealt in life by their brethren in the world above? This grand impersonation of the eternal Laws in their kinship with the laws of the visible world illumines a whole region of thought, extending far beyond the limits of the particular moral question which evoked it. It strikes the note of all high thinking on man’s duty to man. The laws, written or unwritten, that govern societies of men can claim no reverence from the individual who does not feel that they are the shadows or copies of laws belonging to the sphere of the eternal.