The Epistles of St. John

Maurice gave these twenty lectures to a small class of students at the Working Men’s College, at eight o’clock on Sunday mornings, and dedicated the book to the College’s students. He told them plainly that he thought one question mattered more than any other to their studies and their daily lives: whether there is a foundation for human morality, or whether it depends on the opinions and fashions of different ages and countries.

He begins with Aristotle’s Ethics, admiring their excellence while showing how they leave out theology and are not ethics for all men, and then turns to St. John, who “supplies the Manual which I wish my pupils to use.” Lecture by lecture he follows the Epistles: light and darkness, sin and purification, the old and new commandments, the world and the Father, hope, love and righteousness, faith, prayer, and Christian certainty, closing with a note on Positivism and its teacher, Auguste Comte.