Now for all these characteristics of the end of life, the theism that modern thought is rejecting could offer a strictly logical basis.  And first, as to its importance.  Here it may be said, certainly, that theism cuts the knot, and does not untie it.  But at all events it gets rid of it; and in the following way.  The theist confesses freely that the importance of the moral end is a thing that the facts of life, as we now know them, will never properly explain to us.  It can at present be divined and augured only; its value is one of promise rather than of performance; and the possession itself is a thing that passes understanding.  It belongs to a region of mystery into which neither logic nor experiment will ever suffice to carry us; and whose secrets are beyond the reach of any intellectual aeronaut.  But it is a part of the theistic creed that such a region is; and that the things that pass understanding are the most important things of life.  Nothing would be gained, however, by postulating merely a mystery—­an unknowable.  This must be so far known by the theist, that he knows its connection with himself.  He must know, too, that if this connection is to have any effect on him, it must be not merely temporary, but permanent and indissoluble.  Such a connection he finds in his two distinctive doctrines—­the existence of a personal God, which gives him the connection; and his own personal immortality, which perpetuates it.  Thus the theist, upon his own theory, has an eye ever upon him.  He is in constant relationship with a conscious omnipotent Being, in whose likeness he is in some sort formed, and to which he is in some sort kin.  To none of his actions is this Being indifferent; and with this Being his relations for good or evil will never cease.  Thus, though he may not realise their true nature now, though he may not realise how infinitely good the good is, or how infinitely evil the evil, there is a day in store for him when his eyes will be opened, and what he now sees only through a glass darkly, he will see face to face.

The objectivity of the moral end—­or rather the objective standard of the subjective end—­is explained in the same way.  The standard is God’s will, not man’s immediate happiness.  And yet to this will, as soon as, by natural or supernatural means, we discern it, the Godlike part of our nature at once responds:  it at once acknowledges it as eternal and divine, although we can give no logical reasons for such acknowledgment.

By the light, too, of these same beliefs, the inwardness of the moral end assumes an explicable meaning.  Man’s primary duty is towards God; his secondary duty is towards his brother men; and it is only from the filial relation that the fraternal springs.  The moral end, then, is so precious in the eyes of the theist, because the inward state that it consists of is agreeable to what God wills—­a God who reads the heart, and who cannot be deceived.  And the theist’s peace or gladness in his highest moral actions springs not so much from the consciousness of what he does or is, as of the reasons why he does or is it—­reasons that reach far away beyond the earth and its destinies, and connect him with some timeless and holy mystery.