old English constitution, "Rex est vicarius Dei." If as a minister of religion, let not your words or acts be seen to come from man, but trace them all to God. Stand always before the child as the minister and representative of God; and then you will have a right to educate him, which he cannot dispute, which he will willingly allow.

But for this very reason you cannot educate without the Church; no! nor without a distinct positive revelation from God, declaring the validity even of those appointments which seem to be made by nature. If the Parent and the State stand over the child as ministers of God, the child will ask for their credentials. And how these credentials are to be conveyed, except by a distinct revelation, it is hard to say. The Parent now will answer with the fifth commandment, "Honour thy father and thy mother;" and the State with the express declaration of the Apostle, "Fear God, and honour the king." But without some such voice from heaven, the mere facts that a child is born from a parent, and that government must exist wherever there is society, and society wherever there is man, would scarcely be sufficient to sustain a claim to a divine authority. Therefore both parental and civil authority require the support and witness of the Church, or they fall to the ground. But when they thus recognise the existence of the Church as a commissioned ambassador from God, they must also recognise its full powers. If two ministers from a court are negotiating in a foreign country, and a third is sent out to them armed with additional authority, not to supersede, indeed, but to control and aid them; if those two will persist in acting without the third, or will trespass on his privileges, they are disobeying their master, betraying their cause, annihilating their own commission. And thus, if either Parent or State

attempt to educate man without the co-operation of the Church, without giving to it its due prominence and precedency, without allowing, nay, requiring the exercise of all the powers committed to it, they are flying in the face of their Lord and Master, and they must take the consequences.

Education without the Church is an absurdity; and therefore a system of Ethics which is not based upon the system of the Church, must be an absurdity likewise.

CHAPTER V.

WHAT, then, you may ask, is the difference between Ethics and the Catholic religion? If I am to be placed under the guidance of the Church, and the Church is ready in all points to act as my teacher, what need of any other system? This question I now propose to answer. Let us see the whole difficulty. Christianity, then, contains a system of truths relating to the nature of man, to its destination, the means of perfecting it, the knowledge necessary for its perfection, the laws of its conduct, its relation and duties to other beings. The science of Ethics contains a system, or rather as many systems as there are ethical writers, in which doctrines are propounded on precisely the same subject. The Church with the Bible is on one side; Plato, and Aristotle, and Zeno, and Epicurus, and Locke, and Hobbes, and Paley, and Rousseau, on the other. What are the differences between them?

man.

First, then, one comes from God; the other from

Secondly, the one which comes from God, whether we understand it or not, we are bound to receive; the other, coming only from man, we must examine for ourselves.

Thirdly, from this cause, it is absolutely necessary that the human system should appear in a scientific form—that is, that it should be drawn out from certain axioms and principles; the reasons for its conclusions given-the positions ranged in regular deductions-in order that at each step the under

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DIFFERENCE OF CHRISTIANITY AND ETHICS.

standing of the hearer may witness to the accuracy of the teacher: whereas the system which comes from God may be presented to us piece-meal, as it were, in scattered portions, "here a line and there a line." If an army have full and implicit confidence in their general, they will execute all his orders, though no one soldier knows why he does this, or his comrade does that; the plan of operation is reserved in the mind of the commander. But if they have no confidence in him, they will persist in requiring to be told each the why and the wherefore of the injunctions, and he must lay the chart before them in a formal shape.

Fourthly, as a necessary consequence, in receiving on testimony the system of Christianity, we abandon our own judgment of its contents, put our trust in God, and make his word the standard of truth. In studying human ethics, we take our own feelings, knowledge, experience, or conscience, as the test of true and false, each individual for himself and on each particular point. We may therefore acknowledge it in parts; Christianity we must take as a whole, without any deduction or reservation.

Fifthly, as that which comes from God must be true, and truth can be only one, there cannot be many systems of Christian, as there are of heathen ethics. There can be no sects or schools within the Church. In all points acknowledged to be revealed there must be uniform agreement; an agreement not founded on the conviction of the understanding -for different persons can scarcely ever see the same principles in precisely the same light-but on a conviction of the heart, that what such and such an authority declared to be revealed, was revealed; and that what was revealed is true, whether we can explain it or not.

Such being some of the differences between the

two systems, let us now see some of their resemblances. And the main resemblance, next to the identity of subject, is this: that exactly in proportion as human reason has made accurate observations of the human mind has traced out its laws correctly— has been directed by good feelings to good ends, in the same proportion it will approach to truth, and therefore to Christianity. Now, there never was a time when human reason was so acute and profound -when there were such opportunities of seeing it laid bare in all its evil forms-and, therefore, when good and great minds were roused to grapple with it with such vigorous and noble exertions, as in the age of Plato and Aristotle. If you would understand anatomy, you must study it in the bodies of the dead. If you would be a good physician, you must practise in a lazar-house. And Greece was a lazar-house of morals; and one blessed effect it did produce, that it raised up the noblest minds to wrestle with the plague, and aid us in wrestling with it also. Thus, too, no ethical speculator since them has ever approached to their excellence, or so near to the system of the gospel. For this reason, also,

they are the proper writers to be studied, when we would know what man by himself has thought of man and Plato even more than Aristotle-first, because his nature and character were more like what a Christian character would be; he had more heart, and feeling, and affection—and, secondly, from a cause, which offers another point of resemblance between Christian and heathen Ethics.

Plato, to a considerable degree, derived his knowledge of Ethics from an ancient revelation. For, even before the coming of Christ, man had not been left without an external declaration of his duties. The ten commandments, and all the other moral portions of the Mosaic laws, were not wrought out by the