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.