The argument from conscience, I may add, rests on the general and distinctive characteristics of our moral nature; not on the truth of particular moral judgments or the purity of particular moral affections. It cannot, therefore, be affected by the fact that moral perceptions and emotions admit of variation and development, and are sometimes false and depraved. However important in other respects may be the circumstance that men's thoughts and sentiments as to right and wrong are not always identical or even accordant, it is plainly irrelevant as an objection to any of the forms in which the argument for the Divine existence from the constitution of our moral nature has just been stated. It cannot be necessary to do more than merely indicate this, although some who maintain the wholly derivative nature of conscience appear to believe that the moral differences to be traced among men disprove all inferences from the moral faculty which they feel disinclined to accept. II. Is the testimony which conscience gives to the existence and character of God confirmed when we look out into the moral world? No one will say that all is clear and unambiguous in that world--that it is nowhere shrouded in unpenetrated, if not impenetrable, darkness--that it contains no perplexing anomalies. There is an enormous mass of sin on earth, and the mere existence of sin is a mystery under the government of an omnipotent God who hates sin. There is a vast amount of apparently prosperous sin, and a vast amount of temporarily suffering virtue, and these are often severe trials of faith in the justice and holiness of God. Pessimism may exaggerate the emptiness and the sadness of life, but it has done service by exposing and discrediting the optimism which ignores the dark features and tragic elements of existence. Can an unprejudiced mind, however, even with all the sins and sufferings of the world before its view, and although consciously unable to resolve the difficulties which they suggest, refuse to acknowledge that the general testimony rendered by the moral world to the being and righteousness of its Author is ample and unmistakable? I think not. The conclusion which we have drawn from the character of the sentiments inevitably excited by the contemplation of virtue and vice, is also that which follows from the natural tendencies and issues of good and evil affections and actions. Virtue does not always meet with its due reward, nor vice with its due punishment, in any obvious outward shape; if they did, earth would cease to be a scene of moral discipline; but internal moral laws of an essentially retributive nature are in incessant operation, and show not obscurely or doubtfully what is the judgment of God both on character and conduct. Virtue is self-rewarding and vice is self-punishing. Virtue tends of its very nature to honour and life, vice to dishonour and death. There are outward bonds between virtue and happiness, vice and