d 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:

(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the assertion of the existence
of the Moral Consciousness is not in the slightest degree inconsistent
with recognising its gradual growth and development. The {64} moral
faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or activity of the human
soul, has grown gradually. No rational man doubts the validity--no
Idealist doubts the _a priori_ character--of our mathematical
judgements because probably monkeys and possibly primitive men cannot
count, and certainly cannot perform more than the very simplest
arithmetical operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of
mathematical reasoning because not only children and savages, but
sometimes even distinguished classical scholars--a Macaulay, a Matthew
Arnold, a T. S. Evans,--were wholly incapable of understanding very
simple mathematical arguments. Equally little do we deny a real
difference between harmony and discord because people may be found who
see no difference between 'God save the King' and 'Pop goes the
Weasel.' Self-evident truth does not mean truth which is evident to
everybody.

(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral
ideas--our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular
cases--has been largely influenced by education, environment,
association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural
selection--in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists
try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euc