n. In Mrs. Austen's
drawing-room, with "Sidney Smith guffawing," and "other people
prating, jargoning, to me through these thin cobwebs Death and
Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he
asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age
challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"--(it is
curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea,
on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore--apparently, if
their thought has any consequence--are as good one as another)--Who
will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God
Almighty will be the judge now and always." There is a gulf between
good and evil, and each is inexorably fertile of consequence. There
is no escaping the issue of moral choice. That is the conclusion of
men who have handled human experience in a serious spirit. As
physical laws are deducible from the reactions of matter and force,
and are found to be uniform and inevitable, fundamental in the
nature of matter and force, so clear-thinking men in the course of
ages have deduced moral laws from their observation of human nature,
laws as uniform, inevitable and fundamental. In neither case has it
been that men invented or imagined the laws; in both cases it has
been genuine discovery of what was already existent and operative,
and often the discovery has involved surprise.

If Jesus had failed to see laws so fundamental, which other teachers
of mankind have recognized, it is hardly likely that his teaching
would have survived or influenced men as it has done. Mankind can
dispense with a teacher who misses patent facts, whatever his charm.
But there never was any doubt that Jesus was alive to the difference
between right and wrong. His critics saw this, but they held that he
confused moral issues, and that his distinctions in the ethical
sphere were badly drawn.

Jesus could not have ignored the problem of sin and forgiveness,
even if he had wished to ignore it. To this the thought of mankind
had been gravitating, and in Jewish and in Greek thought, conduct
was more and more the centre of everything. For the Stoics morals
were the dominant part of philosophy; but for our present purpose we
need not go outside the literature of the New Testament. Sin was the
keynote of the preaching of John the Baptist. It is customary to
connect the mission of Jesus with that of John, and to find in the
Baptist's preaching either the announcement