The subject for our annual conference this year — Ethics and Theology — forces us to face one of the most difficult problems of religious thought, — the relation between God and morality. To this problem several solutions — all quite familiar — have been proposed and it will not be the purpose of my paper to suggest a new one of my own. In fact, as the sequel will show, I am very uncertain whether any completely satisfactory solution to the problem be possible. My aim is the much less ambitious one of placing the matter, with some of its difficulties, before the Society for discussion, in the hope that your collective wisdom may be able to throw more light upon this dark theme than the Society's benighted president for this year — who is no theologian — is able to contribute.

One of the simplest and most popular modes of conceiving the relation between God and the laws of morality is to equate righteousness with obedience to the divine will. God is good, we are told, and our goodness is to be defined as conformity to the will of God. One relatively superficial and pragmatic difficulty in accepting this view consists in the obvious fact that it is by no means easy to know with certainty what the will of God may be. Different philosophers, different prophets, different religions give us different and sometimes quite contradictory answers to this question.

The present article contains notes and discussions designed to discover the sense of or to obtain sense from a number of difficult passages in the Hebrew Psalter.

12.8: אתה־יהןח תשמרם תצךנו. Only the Pesh. agree with the M. T. in its very difficult confusion of persons; the LXX and the Eth. Vs. both have the plural first person and the Targ. has the singular third person. As the first person comes in rather abruptly, the third person may be accepted; moreover, it involves the least alteration of the text, as תשמרם can then be taken as the remnant of an unmodernized תשמרמו ‘thou wilt keep him,’ since this suffix often has a singular sense. The antecedent is of course the man described as יפיח לו ‘him at whom one puffs' in v. 6, and the obscurity of this expression may be responsible for the half-hearted attempt to change the suffix from the third to the first person.

‘Two hundred years from now,’ exclaimed William James, in one of his characteristically enthusiastic moods, ‘Harvard will be known as the place where Josiah Royce once taught.’ The approach of the twentieth anniversary of Royce's death is an appropriate time at which to inquire whether the prophecy — making allowances for the exaggeration of James's friendly generosity — is in a fair way toward being fulfilled. Has Royce's work so far stood the test of time? Or must we say that as the experimental interest bequeathed by James increases the calm assurance of Royce's philosophy must decrease? And with the growing seriousness which practical issues assume have we time or inclination left for speculations about the Absolute? Has not the war destroyed our faith in the world's reasonableness and forced us to take a less indulgently ‘idealistic’ and more frankly ‘realistic’ view?

Often we say this, but as often we are forced to remind ourselves that the ‘realism’ in which we take pride may have the virtue of looking the immediate facts squarely in the face, but may lack the sustained critical power which is eager to face other facts than those which are immediate. In that type of realism which is content to ‘take things as they come,’ there is a suggestion of an inability to see why they come as they do. As pluralists and empiricists, appealing to what we call ‘immediate experience’ for our data, we may say that our world is shot to pieces and that it cannot be put together again. But as philosophers and religious men we cannot leave the matter here and believe that we have seen through our problem or seen our job through.