Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some pleasures are better than others--such judgements are as much the work of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two and two must make {63} four. We have just as much right to assume that our moral ideas--our ideas of value--must come from God too. For God too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the good; and our judgements of value--judgements that such and such an end is good or worth striving for--in so far as they are true judgements, must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good--the same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God. Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, authority, objective validity of Conscience would lead us too far away into the region of Moral Philosophy for our present subject. I will only attempt very briefly to guard against some possible misunderstandings, and to meet some obvious objections: