LANDMARKS

NEW TESTAMENT MORALITY.

REV. GEORGE MATHESON

MINISTER OF THE PARISH OF ST. BERNARD'S,
EDINBURGH.

FLEMING H. EEVELL,

NEW YORK :
12 BIBLE HOUSE, ASTOR PLACE.

CHICAGO :
148 & 150 MADISON STREET.

CONTENTS.

PACE
I. RELATION OF CHRISTIAN TO PEE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY . I
II. RELATION OF JEWISH TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY . 25
III. THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY . 44
IV. THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN . . 63
V. GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY . 78
VI. THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH . . .96
VII. THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER . . . . I17
VIII. DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE . . 1 36
IX. THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE . 1 63
X. THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE 1 79
XI. THE NEW HEROISM . . . . 195
XII. THE SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION 215
XIII. CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY 230
XIV. CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND . 249

PREFACE.

Our aim in this volume has been to compress into
a few connected chapters what seemed to us to be
the distinctive and salient principles of New Testa
ment Morality. In pursuance of this aim we have
striven to keep the book strictly within the limits
prescribed by its title. We have therefore kept in
abeyance all subjects of dogmatic Theology. The
questions relating to the theological nature of sin,
the origin of sin, the punishment of sin, and the
atonement for sin, are outside the scope of the
present treatise ; for, however much they touch
the moral sphere, they contain an additional or
transcendental element which demands a separate
mode of study.
We have only to add that as the drift of the
work is not historical, we have made few references
to the opinions of others, and these have gradually
disappeared as we have come into contact with
those familiar sources from which alone such a
work must be ultimately derived — the books of
the New Testament itself.

a 2

LANDMARKS OF
NEW TESTAMENT MORALITY.

i.
RELATION OF CHRISTIAN TO PRE-
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
The religion of Christ came into the world rather
as a new power than as an absolutely new creed.
It never dreamed of assuming a position of complete
and startling originality ; such an attitude would
have destroyed it at its birth. Its preliminary
hope of success lay in its possibilities of union with
the old faiths of humanity ; its greatest claim to
novelty was just its power to incorporate these
faiths. From the very beginning of its career its
watchword was " reconciliation ; " by its own ad
mission it came " not to destroy but to fulfil." Its
proudest boast was, that in Christ it had gathered
together all things. It professed to have found a
meeting-place for the divergent views, for the
divergent hearts of men, to have broken down the
A

2 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile,
Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, and to have
at last made it possible that all might " come into
an unity of faith unto the measure of the stature of
the perfect man."
It will not surprise us, then, that Christianity as
an intellectual system reveals the fruit of other
intellectual systems. If the religious life, like all
other lives, be an evolution, we shall expect to find
; in the flower the traces and evidences of the seed.
Christianity is by common admission the flower of
the religious consciousness, but for that very reason
it is related to the earth beneath as well as to the
heaven above. It has grafted itself on the stem of
nature, and has thereby become a natural religion.
It professes to be the most natural of all religions,
because it claims to reconcile the discords of nature.
It gives expression in one voice to all those instincts
of the heart which the old world had expressed in
many voices — " in various forms and diverse parts."
It has the Brahmanical sense of mysticism, the
Buddhist feeling of present depression, the Parsee
conviction of sin, the Confucian hope of a coming
kingdom of glory. It appropriates the theocratic
spirit of Judea, the aesthetic spirit of Greece, the
legal spirit of Rome, the philosophic spirit of India,
aud it appropriates them because it claims to have
been itself their originator — the light which in the
past had lighted every man.
In no sphere is this appropriative power of

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 3
Christianity so distinctly manifest as in the domain
of its ethics. Here, if anywhere, it was essential*
that the revelation should not be wholly new. A
religion whose primary aim was to commend itself
to the natural conscience must of necessity make
its appeal to the moral instincts of the natural
heart. Accordingly, there is nothing so easy as to
find parallels between the precepts of Christ and '
the precepts of other masters. It is easy to find His
golden rule amidst the teachings of Confucius, His
principle that humility is the road to greatness amid
the reputed sayings of Lao-Tse. It is not difficult
in the writings of Hillel, of Philo, of Seneca, to lay
our hand on passages that will prove the precept of
brotherly love to belong to the revelation of nature.
But what then ? In putting our hand upon such
parallels we are not depreciating but illustrating
the work of Christianity. We are showing that
the work of Christianity has been from the outset
a process of incorporation, a process of reconciliation, x
We are pointing to the fact that it has achieved its
moral greatness by reason of its moral adaptation,
and that the secret of its regenerative power is its
power to re-create without destroying. Christianity
has not overridden the moral systems of the past;
it has only overridden their antagonisms.
In the life of the old world these moral systems
refused to coalesce. Each held itself to be the
absolute truth, and each denied the right of exist
ence to the other. Christianity came with a new

4 RELATION OE CHRISTIAN
life, and the hostile elements ran into unity. They
ceased each and all of them to be absolute truths,
but they became the component parts of an abso
lute truth, and the strength which in days of old
was thought to lie in their isolation was found
to consist in their reconciliation and their union.
Such has been the moral work of Christianity in the
world. It has done for the ethical systems of the
past what the vital force has done for the elements
of the physical structure — kept them together in
unity. It has given them a new reason for their
existence, a new claim on the suffrages of mankind.
They no longer ask to be judged by their contrast,
but by their relationship. Each claims to be
viewed as the member of a great whole, and finds
the justification of its being in the fact that it sub
serves an universal interest. It is to the exhibition
of this union between the new life of Christianity
and the moral elements of the old world that we
purpose to devote this opening chapter.
At the time when Christianity rose on the world
there were in existence three great moral systems,
which may be taken as the types of all morality —
the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Platonic. The
Epicurean proposed as the basis of all action the
love of self— the happiness of the individual agent.
It docs not follow from this that the Epicureans
were of necessity sensual. They might or they
might not be so ; it depended on their individual
ideas of happiness. The first men of the school

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 5
were the reverse of sensual. Their idea of happi
ness was moderation, an equable calm, a mind un
disturbed by any excitement either of grief or joy.
To the founder of the sect himself, and to his im
mediate followers, the greatest boon of life was a
balanced intellect — an intellect in which each mode
of thought and feeling had its legitimate amount
of exercise, so much and no more. Such a doctrine
is indeed very far from sensualism ; it is one which
could only be exemplified in the restraint of the
sensual impulse. Nevertheless in its very root and
essence the creed of Epicurus was the religion of
self-interest. In its best and purest form it did
not teach that self-interest lay exclusively in sense ;
but it never ceased to teach that a man's individual
interest ought to be the motive of his actions. It
never ceased to proclaim that the rule of my con
duct should be its effect upon myself, that the
guide of my life should be the search for personal
pleasure and the avoidance of personal pain. Men
in this school, as in all schools, might differ as to
what constituted personal pleasure, or involved the
highest degree of personal pain; that was a ques
tion to be variously determined by the various
grades of culture and of character. But in the
meantime the broad principle was laid down that
every man's ideal should be himself — his own in
terest, his own welfare, his own happiness. In the
glass of the universe he is to behold no other glory
than his own, and no other image than his reflected

6 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
shadow. In looking into that glass he is to expe
rience a process the opposite to that of which
St. Paul spoke. The Apostle of the Gentiles had
his image transfigured into the forms on which
he gazed ; the Epicurean is to transmute all forms
into his own image. He is to measure everything
by its power to serve him ; that it may have power
to serve the universe also is an irrelevant fact. As
Professor Wallace * points out, the Epicurean is not
an utilitarian ; he is an individualist. He looks
upon the world as his oyster, which he is to open.
It makes little difference to him whether there be,
or be not, ends to be compassed by human life
beyond his personal control, and irrespective of his
personal existence. He does not deny that such
ends may exist, but he denies that they have any
right to influence him ; there may be gods above
us, but the individual man has nothing to do with
them. The individual man has to do with nothino- O
but his own individualism — his private wants, his
personal desires, his conscious appropriation of the
benefits of life. His motive is happiness, his aim
is self-preservation, and his highest philosophy
is self-contemplation; within the limits of the
world of self he must live and move and have his
being. At the opposite remove from this Epicurean
individualism is the system called Stoicism. If the
Epicurean placed the value of life in the ministra-
* Encyclopcedia Britannica, ninth ed., vol. viii. p. 475.

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. "J
tion of the race to the individual, the Stoic placed
its value in the ministration of the individual to the
race. The object of the Epicurean was the one ; the
object of the Stoic was the many. The Epicurean
set before him the thought of self, and to the
furtherance of self he sought to use the lives of
others ; the Stoic set before him the thought of
others, and in the furtherance of their interest he
strove to sink himself. He is popularly represented
as a man whose philosophic aim was to reach the
contempt of pain and pleasure. The popular notion
is a half-truth, and the other half is much more
distinctive of Stoicism. That the disciples of this
philosophy did strive to obtain a mastery over their
individual feelings of pain and pleasure is a fact
undisputed and indisputable, but they strove for
it as a means, not as an end. They desired to
conquer the sense of individual pain and pleasure,
not for the sake of the conquest, but for the sake
of that benefit to the world which they deemed the
conquest would bring. They thought that if a soul
could get above a sense of its own interests it
would be better able to realize the interest of the
community at large, better able to consult the
public welfare and to seek the common good. If
Stoicism had been no more than a wish to free the
soul from perturbations of feeling, then Stoicism
would have been only Epicureanism under a new
name ; it would have been simply a renewal of the
effort after a balanced mind. But here lay the

8 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
difference of the two creeds. To the Epicurean
even in his purest days a calm mind was only
desirable as a source of selfish rest, — something
which would enable a man to hold aloof from the
struggles of life. To the Stoic, on the other hand,
the calm mind was an object of desire for a precisely
opposite reason ; he sought it as an aid to the
struggles of life, as a means of making him more
helpful to the cause of humanity. The real object
of the Stoic's contemplation was the sphere of
universal being — the family, the nation, mankind,
the Universe.* His interest was not limited even
to the human ; it ranged over the whole creation,
animate and inanimate. It took in bud and flower
and tree ; it embraced reptile and bird and beast.
One sphere alone it sought to ignore — the pleasures
and pains of the spirit that contemplated them, but
in ignoring that sphere it was actuated by the hope
that the spirit, oblivious to its own grief or joy,
might better identify itself with the will of the
Universe. The third system, of the old world morality is
Platonism. Ideally, though not historically, it is to
be regarded as an attempt to unite the two opposite
tendencies which found expression in Epicureanism
and in Stoicism. Epicureanism was self-interest,
or the interest of the one ; Stoicism was universal
interest, or the interest of the many; Platonism
was the attempt to unite in a new idea the interest
* A qualification to this statement, however, will be found in Chapter IX.

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 9
of the many with the interest of the one.* The
new idea by which it was sought to join them was
a spiritual conception of God as the Supreme Good.t
The true interest of every man was the indwelling
of God in his soul, and the indwelling of God in his
soul would be best promoted by living together
with his fellow-men in the interchange of virtuous
relations ; the one would become the many and the
many would become the one when it was seen that
each had a life common to the other — the being of
God Himself. Here, then, was a third fragment of
the old world's ethics. Let us live for self, said the
Epicurean ; Let us live for others, said the Stoic ;
Nay, said the Platonist, let us live for the one other
who is not another — God ! Is not this last the sum
of all possible morality ? In words, it certainly is.
If the Platonic notion of God were coextensive
with our modern notion of the universe, Platonism
would have antedated Christianity by four hundred
years. But Plato's notion of God was not co
extensive even with the notion of the Universe of
his owm day. His God had nothing to do with
what is called matter. Matter was the symbol of
the finite, and the finite was unworthy of God.
The only things which were really worthy of
interest were eternal and immutable ideas ; the
senses had no place in the kingdom of regenerated
souls. To enter that kingdom the senses must be
* See the Dialogues, particularly the Parmenides.
t R'public, Bk. vii. pp. 514-518.

IO RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
crucified, the personal affections extirpated, the
love of the finite expunged. Men must cease to
love men; they must fix their hearts upon love
itself. Not the beautiful but their beauty, not the
true but their truth, not the good but their good
ness, must be the object of human affection. God
was Thought, and the love of God was the love of
thought. Things were but shadows, forms were
but illusions, colours and sounds were but fleeting
and perishable appearances ; but the abstract ideas
of the intellect were eternal and immutable. They
were eternal because they were unseen, they were
immutable because they were immaterial.
We need not say that such a conception of the
love of God was destructive of what is called the
love of man. It only reached its goal by the
mutilation of human nature. To become absorbed
in God was in a measure to be annihilated ; it was
to lose all knowledge, all remembrance of worldly
things. But to lose such knowledge was to lose
the spirit of philanthropy. If in the life of God
I am to forget the claims of my own physical
nature, I am bound also to forget the physical
claims of my brother-man. This world as a world
can be nothing to me. Looking down from the
Platonic height the inhabitants thereof are as grass
hoppers, and their wants are as the wants of grass
hoppers. The existence of cold and hunger, of
poverty and pain, of war and pestilence, is not
worthy to be named. These are already non-exis-

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. I I
tent ; they are shadows, appearances, unsubstantial
forms which live only in the imaginings of sense, and
which shall vanish with the death of sense. That was
the legitimate conclusion, and the only legitimate
conclusion, from the principles of the Platonic philo
sophy. Its doctrine of the love of God was to all
intents and purposes an extension of the sphere of
Epicurus. It tended to paralyze all interest in aught
that was human. Whatever patriotism it may have
kindled for a Divine and impossible Republic, it
awakened none for the vulgar wants of a common
place earthly soil. The Platonic love of God, like
the Epicurean love of self and the Stoic love of
universal nature, ended in representing only a frag
ment of morality.
For here we must observe that not one of tliese
systems is even professedly commensurate with the
whole of human nature ; every one of them in truth
professes to be at variance with a part of the nature
of man. None of them is wholly false ; but each
of them insists on holding one side of a truth to the
exclusion of its other sides. Self-love, the love of
others, the love of God — these are all good things.
But they are good things in their unity, not in their
isolation, not in their mutual antagonism. Epicu
reanism said, Self-preservation is a law of nature.
Epicureanism had a perfect right to say that, for it
was true. But when Epicureanism went on to say,
Self-preservation is the law of nature, it changed
its truth into a falsehood. It denied that others

12 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
as well as self had a claim on every man. It set
up the love of the individual as an antagonist to
the love of the race, and by that act it lost its claim
to interpret the whole heart of man. Stoicism said,
The preservation of the race is a law of nature.
Stoicism too had a perfect right to make that-asser-
tion ; it was founded on the moral instincts of the
soul. But when Stoicism went on to say that the
preservation of the race was the law of nature, it
became one-sided, and therefore untrue. It proposed
to crucify the individual, to ignore the natural crav
ings of the heart, to dry up the well-springs of
personal joy, and in so doing it became itself un
natural, a contradiction to the Universe it meant
to serve. Platonism said, The love of God is the
law of nature, and besides it there is no other law.
And truly in saying thus Platonism spoke well, for
to love that which is at the summit of the Universe
is to have the key to all love. But when Platonism
went ou to say, that God had nothing to do with
the perishable shows of earthly things, it denied
Him to be at the summit of the Universe. It
narrowed Him into a corner, it excluded Him from
all participation in the finite, it made the love of
Him incompatible with the love of toiling millions.
It placed the circle of His life in a region outside
the lives of men, and he who would enter the pre
cincts of the Divine temple must drop at the
threshold all sympathies with the human.
Here, then, are three ideas whose isolation, whose

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 1 3
mutual antagonism prevents any one of them from
being true — self-love, brotherly love, Divine love.
Is there anywhere to be found a bond that can
unite these fragments ? Is there anywhere in
existence a system that can recognize the truth
of each in an unity that embraces all ? Such a
system Christianity professes to be. Whatever
may be the view taken of the relation of Christian
theology to the creeds of the past, there can, we
think, be no doubt as to the relation of Christian
morality to the moralities of the past. Christianity
has put its design in this matter beyond a doubt
by giving in a single seutence the sum of all it
means to teach : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, this is the first and great
commandment ; and the second is like unto it :
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Let us
examine this remarkable passage as a contribution
to the science of ethics. Leaving out of view in
the meantime all reference to Judaism, let us try
to see what bearing such a precept had on the
moral creeds of Gentile ages. Are we in the
presence of a moral revolution ? Are we about to
witness the annulling of all former verdicts of
conscience ? Is the new doctrine of the blessed
life to be one which sets at naught all the old
doctrines, and ushers the human soul into an
untrodden field ? Such are the questions that
meet us on the threshold. In part they are
answered as soon as asked.

14 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
It does not take long to see that we have not
here the elements for a revolution. "Love thy
God;" "love thy neighbour ;"" love thyself"—
these are the component parts of the moral law of
Christianity. But every one of these precepts has
already met us in the old world. " Love thyself"
was the creed of the Epicurean ; " love thy neigh
bour " was the creed of the Stoic ; " love thy God"
was the creed of the Platonist. It is the elements
of heathendom that meet us in the moral code of
Christendom. Christianity rears a new temple, but
it is from the scattered stones of ancient ruined
structures. Within her moral Pantheon she finds
a place for the three great representatives of Greek
humanity ; nay, it is on the union of these that
she proposes to base her ethics. She proposes
to construct a system in which the barriers to all
other systems shall be broken down, in which self-
love shall no longer be the antithesis to the love of
our neighbour, in which neither shall any longer be
opposed to the love of God. In this sacred temple
of reconstructed truth the pleasure of the individual
is to coexist with the development of the race, and
the spirit of religion is to be furthered by both ;
Epicurus, Zeno, and Plato are to stand side by side.
Here is a scheme of very striking originality — an
originality which lies in the very power to gather
and appropriate old materials. But we are as yet
only on the surface of the inquiry. We have seen
that Christianity claims for herself the three frag-

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 1 5
ments of Greek morality, and proposes to unite
them into a great whole. The aim is good, but
how is it to be achieved % It is clear that in the
Christian system the three Greek elements cannot
arise simultaneously. No doubt they are intended
ultimately to exist together in the same mind and
at the same time, but that is the goal, the final
stage of their being. To reach that stage the
Christian consciousness has to pass through a
process in which one or other of the three elements
seeks the undivided empire of the soul. The
question is, In what order do they claim this
empire ? Conceding that there is in Christianity
an Epicurean element, a Stoic element, and a
Platonic element, which of them comes first in
point of time ? Do we begin with the love of God
and then pass clown to the love of men, and end at
last with the love of self? Or, do we follow the
opposite course ? Do we begin with the love of
self, and rise up into the love of men, and cul
minate in the love of God ? These are the alterna
tives ; which shall we pursue ? Let us see whether
the Christian code itself can help us to a decision.
Now in that sum of Christian morality to which
we have referred there is one point which is very
distinctly indicated ; it is implied beyond all con
troversy that in the development of the individual
mind self-love must precede brotherly love. The
grounds on which we base this conclusion are the
words : " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. '

1 6 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
The idea clearly is, that a man in the act of bene
fiting his brother-man can have no other standard
than this : What would I like done to myself
under similar circumstances ? — in other words, an
application of the Golden Rule. The very fact that
I wish to give pleasure to my brother implies that
I have already experienced the sensation in myself,
and would not object to experience it again. What
is the impulse that impels me to save a man from
drowning ? — is it not the sense that life is dear ?
If I never at any moment had felt life to have been
a source of personal joy, it would be impossible
for me to be stirred to pity by the prospect of a
man losing life. The essence of all human love is
sympathy ; that is to say, it is the power to feel
yourself in the place of another. Sympathy in its
intellectual aspect is the imaginary appropriation
of another's grief or joy. But before a man can
imagine he must feel. If you have never felt that
pleasure is sweet and that pain is bitter, if you
have never known the personal joy of individual
possession, if you have never experienced a thrill
of delight at the moment when you have received
a stroke of good fortune, how is it possible that the
good or bad fortune of your brother-man can be
fraught to you with any sympathetic interest1?
How is it possible that you can attribute to
another a sense of pleasure or a sense of pain
which you yourself have never felt within your
own soul ? It is not possible, and therefore one

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. I 7
part of the problem is already solved. No man
can seek the interest of another until he has
learned in experience the meaning of seZ/^-interest ;
the Epicurean element of self-love must precede in
order of time the Stoic element of brotherhood.
"Love thy neighbour as thyself " is the doctrine
inscribed upon the porch of the Christian temple,
and it has not been effaced by the hand of time.
It is the watchword of modern science at this hour.
That self-love must be prior to all other loves, that
the appreciation of personal interest must be
anterior to enthusiasm for the interest of others, is
a truth which the spirit of evolution has appro
priated as its own, but it has appropriated it from
that very source which is superficially supposed to
be its opposite — the religion of the Son of man.*
What, then, is that process of transition by which
the love of self passes into the love of others, by
which the rule called Number One is transformed
into the Golden Rule ? It is that very power of
sympathy of which we have been speaking. There
is in the human mind, in all its phases and in all
its stages of development, a power of conceiving
how another would be affected by experiencing its
own pleasures or its own pains. We say, in all
stages of its development. The statement may
appear absurd to those who hold the doctrine of
Hobbes, but in reality it is no less compatible with
* See the chapter of Herbert Spencer, entitled, Egoism versus Altruism.
— Data of Ethics, p. 1S7. B

1 8 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
that doctrine than with any other. Let us say, for
the sake of argument, that men were originally in
what Hobbes calls a state of nature — a state of
mutual enmity. Let us suppose that at first the
only principles which regulated the actions of men
were a spirit of aggression on the one hand and a
desire for retaliation on the other ; we say that
even from such seemingly discordant elements we
can educe the fact of man's power to sympathise
with man. For, have we ever considered what is
implied in the desire for retaliation ; nothing less
than a man's power to put himself in thought into
the place of another. What a man says under the
influence of the revengeful spirit is this : My
neighbour has done to me that which has given
me pain ; if I do the same to him I shall give him
pain ! What is this thought but an act of in
tellectual sympathy ? The man is under the
influence of a spirit of revenge, but that spirit
itself implies as the very condition of its existence
that he has the power to think of his own pain as
if it were not his own pain but the suffering of
another. Now, that is intellectual sympathy, and
intellectual sympathy is the root of all sympathy.
True, it is as yet only the feeling with another, not
the feeling for another. It is a higher thing to
feel for than merely to feel with. If I feel for a
man I am on the borders of love, but I may feel
with him and be on the borders of revenue. In
certain moods of mind it may give me pleasure to

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 1 9
imagine my brother affected with my pain ; this is
just what is called the spirit of revenge, and it is
one form of the spirit of evil. Nevertheless the
power which in this case makes for evil is the very
power which in other circumstances will make for
good. To be able to feel that my pain may at any
moment become the pain of another is the essential
condition to all benevolence. The first and longest
step of the process is already taken even in the
state of savage enmity, for the power of sympathy
underlies the spirit of retaliation, and the germ of
peace is folded in the heart of war.
In the unfolding of this germ Christianity follows
a very different method from that pursued by
Stoicism. Stoicism's method is the annihilation of
self to make room for others ; Christianity's is the
enlargement of self to include others. " Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself" means, in its full
acceptation, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as a part
of thyself. It is the doctrine of Christianity, and
it is corroborated by modern science, that what a
man calls his individual nature is in truth but one
member of a great organism. " No man liveth to
himself, and no man dieth to himself," is the
aphorism in which the religion of Christ expresses
its sense of the solidarity of the Universe. The
main lesson which as a social being it desires man
to learn is the fact that his, individual joy cannot
be purchased by individualism. " The hand," says
St. Paul, " cannot say to the foot, I have no need

20 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
of thee." No man is himself without another. The
personal life only reaches its full consciousness when
it has identified itself with all life. The nearer it
comes to this identification the nearer it approaches
to individual joy. In its expansion from an isolated
unit into the member of a family, in its growth from
simple membership into the responsibility of head
ship, in its passage from the cares of the house
holder to the cares of the citizen, from the cares of
the citizen to the enthusiasm of the patriot, from
the enthusiasm of the patriot to the love of the
philanthropist, it goes from stage to stage of
personal strength, and reaches more and more of
personal joy ; the Stoic becomes an Epicurean
again ; he that loseth his life finds it.
So far, then, the order of the Christian evolution
is clearly determined. We have seen that in the
view of Christianity the love of self must in point
of time precede the love of others. But there is a
third object of love recognised by Christianity, and
recognised more emphatically than either of the
others : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart." In what order is the love of God
to come ? Is it to precede, or is it to follow, the
love of our neighbour I To that question Platonism
and Christianity both give an unequivocal answer ;
but the answer of Platonism is not the answer of
Christianity. Platonism says, Love God before all
other things ; begin at the head of the ladder, and
then descend as far as you can descend without

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 2 1
losing sight of the Divine Idea. Christianity, on
the other hand, says, Begin with the love of men ;
start from the foot, and not from the top of the
ladder ; enter first into communion with the heart
of your brother, and ascend thence into fellowship
with the heart of God : " He that loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God
whom he hath not seen ? "
And clearly, if the love of God is to form any
part of a moral system, it is unquestionable that
Christianity is right. If God is to be to me any
more than an abstraction, He must be conceived
by me as the fulness of humanity ; * if He is to
be conceived by me as the fulness of humanity, I
must already have mastered that conception. What
meaning of Divine Love can I form that has not
its root in human love ? When I define God Him
self as Love, I merely intensify my imagination of
the human feeling. If I have no human feeling,
what meaning can I attach to the Divine attribute ?
When I call God light, I convey to myself a distinct
idea ; but why ? Because I have experienced the
physical nature of light. When I call God Love,
when I speak of His love to me, when I speak of
my love to Him, I have again a distinct idea ; but
why ? Because in my own person I have learned
what it is to love. We are not here asking whether
our notion of personality be or be not adequate to
explain the nature of God ; that is a question fur
* This is indeed the moral basis of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation.

2 2 RELATION OF CHRISTIAN
the theologian, perhaps still more for the meta
physician. We merely say that if the love of God
be included in the study of ethics at all, it can only
be a sublimation of the love which the good man
bears to goodness. If there be any moral value in
the love of God, it can only be in the fact that God
is a moral being. There is nothing necessarily
moral in the idea that a man loves ; it depends on
what he loves. There have been men who have
fixed their heart upon a false ideal of heroism, and
whose love has made them immoral. What makes
it a good trait in any man to love God is the fact
that God is conceived to be good. The love of
God is the love of morality personified ; that is the
reason why we praise the pious. But before a man
can love morality in God, he must love it in man ;
his thought of the Unseen must be modelled on his
image of the seen. Morality must precede religion.
If to me virtue is not already beautiful, it will not
be made so by the mere fact that it dwells in God ;
rather must God become God to me because it
dwells in Him. By the steps of the finite must I
climb to the source of the Infinite beauty. By the
path of the Stoic I must reach the joy of the
Platonist. By the service of my brother, whom I
have seen, I must find the love and the loveliness
of God whom I have not seen.
We have thus tried to indicate in brief compass
our view of the relation which the morality of the
Christian religion bears to the morality of the pre-

TO PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 23
Christian Gentile world. We have exhibited the
three great types of the Hellenic mind — the Epi
curean, the Stoic, and the Platonist. We have
selected these, not so much because they were the
forms of thought which were brought into closest
historic contact with Christianity, as because they
are the forms of thought which embrace all possible
types of morality. The distinctions comprehended
in the names Epicurean, Stoic, Platonist, are by no
means merely Hellenic distinctions ; they will be
found in all lands, and in all ages. Other founda
tion for the conduct of life can no man lay than
one or other of these — the love of self, the love of
humanity, the love of God ; and the religion which
unites these has become the foundation of absolute
morality. That honour we have claimed for Chris
tianity. We have tried to show that the morality
of Christ derives its originality from the fact that,
alone of all ethical systems, it has proposed a
scheme of moral reconciliation. In the eighteenth
century it was held to be a reproach that the
elements of its teaching were as old as the creation.
We venture to think that in the nineteenth century
— a century which values all things in proportion
to their powers of adaptation — that which was a
reproach has become a glory. The modern con
ception of originality, and the glory of originality,
is in some respects the reverse of the ancient one.
We no longer seek nor desire to see the advent of
a phenomenon which has no connection with aught

24 CHRISTIAN AND PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
that has gone before ; we should not now think such
an advent a grand thing. That which commands
the admiration of our age is the appearance of a
force which manifests itself in the incorporation of
other forces, of a life which can gather up and
appropriate the scattered elements of bygone lives :
that is our modern ideal of creative power.
And that is the ideal we find in Christianity.
Coming into the world as a new moral force, it has
availed itself of the old moral materials, and in the
combination of these materials it has taken a
position which is unique and unparalleled. It has
offered a bond of union to elements which in all the
ages of the past had existed in a state of isolation
and antagonism, and in assigning to each a function
of life within itself, it has vindicated before the
world its eternal right to be. Each system of
moral thought has been justified by the cross of
Christ. Things waxing old and ready to vanish
away have in Him received their youth once more.
Elements which Paganism itself had discarded,
have in Him been found to have their legitimate
place in the life of man, and their legitimate use in
the world of being. The birth of Christianity was
the resurrection of the fading hopes of nature ; the
Gentiles came to its light, and the leaders of ancient
thought to the brightness of its rising.

II.
RELATION OF JEWISH TO CHRISTIAN
MORALITY.
It may seem a strange thing, that in our survey of
the relations existing between Christian and pre-
Christian ethics we should have taken no account
of that system, which beyond all ancient codes is
entitled to the name of moral — the religious creed
of the Jews. Our omission was no oversight ; it
had its ground in the fact that neither in the view
of the rationalist nor of the supernaturalist is
Judaism admitted to be essentially pre-Christian.
Alike to the rationalist and to the supernaturalist
Judaism and Christianity are one ; to the former
Christianity is the flower of Judaism, to the latter
Judaism is the seed of Christianity. The author
of Ecce Homo tells us on the very first page of his
work that Christianity had its root in a movement
which did not begin with Christ ; and Mr. Hard
wick, approaching the subject from the standpoint
of an exclusive orthodoxy, is not afraid to say that
if the originality of Judaism be sacrificed, the
originality of Christianity must fall.*
* Christ and other Masters, 2nd ed. I. 81.

26 RELATION OF JEWISH
We have thought it best, therefore, in the view
of this unwonted unanimity of diverse schools, to
separate the case of Judaism from the case of
Gentile forms of thinking, and to assume that the
essence of the Old Testament is identical with the
essence of the New. We have in the first instance
allowed Judaism to make common cause with
Christianity in the proclamation of a great moral
law adequate to embrace the ethical wants of all
nations, and we have confined ourselves solely to
the inquiry : What has been the historical relation
between the Gentiles and this moral law ? We
must now, however, take a more internal view of
the relations of Christianity. It often happens, to
one looking on the starry heavens, that what to the
naked eye appears a united mass of light breaks
up through the telescope into a multitude of
luminous points, with myriad miles between them.
Some such analogy as this is seen in the contempla
tion of Judaism and Christianity. At a distance
they are one ; viewed from the distance of heathen
dom they present the appearance of an united and
compact body, in whose members there is no discord
and in whose nature there is no division. But
when we draw nearer we find that this unity was
an optical delusion. The one begins to break up
into the many, and the compact- body reveals
dissonance in the heart of its members. The two
systems, which to the distant gaze seemed to con
stitute one doctrine and one life, are seen in their

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 27
immediate prospect to be animated by mutual
antagonisms. Whatever may be said of the ideal
relation between Judaism and Christianity, there
can be no doubt at all as to their relation in actual
history. The Jew from the very beginning looked
upon the Christian as his enemy. Christianity
declared in so many words that her mission was
the fulfilment and not the destruction of Judaism,
but the older system uniformly refused the proffered
reconciliation. The religion of Christ had to fight
its way to empire over the prostrate form of its
rival, and the unity which it professed in thought
was never realised in fact. Nay, in the very state
ment, "Think not I came to destroy the law,"
there may be detected already the germ of a dis
union. There was implied in that sentence a
perception of the fact that there was something in
the attitude of Christianity which seemed to oppose
the advance of Judaism, that to the eye of nature
at least, which is the eye of history, there is au
element in the Cross which seems to resist the
progress of the Law, and threatens to bring to au
end the moral precepts of the code of Moses.
Now, this was no mere prejudice on the part of
Judaism ; it was the instinctive perception of a
real danger. The danger of Judaism lay in the
very promise of Christianity — I came to fulfil.
For let us remember that there is a kind of fulfil
ment which implies destruction ; the butterfly is
the destruction of the caterpillar, the man is the

28 RELATION OF JEWISH
destruction of the child. So in like manner is moral
love the destruction of moral law : "When that which
is perfect is come, that which is in part is done away."
When St. Paul declares that Christ has abolished the
law of ordinances contained in precepts, he is speak-
' ing of a destruction through fulfilment. The nearest
approach we can find to an illustration is the idea
of a blind man restored to sight. Let us imagine
this man reading with the eye the same words
which he used to read with the fingers. Wherein
would consist the difference ? Clearly it would not
lie in the result, that in each case would be the
same — the acquisition of a certain point of know
ledge ; but there would be a complete difference in
the manner in which the result would be achieved.
In the old days it was reached by touching the
letters one by one ; it would now be gained by
seeing the word as a whole. In the former case it
came by an enumeration of materials ; it would
now come in a flash, in a moment, in the twinkling
of an eye. In the first instance it was the result
of a process of reasoning; it would now be the fruit
of an intuition, the product of an immediate light.
Something like this is certainly in St. Paul's
mind when he speaks of the abolition of the pre
cepts. The man under the Jewish law reads by
touch and not by sight. He cannot grasp the word
as a whole, and therefore he counts the letters one
by one. He cannot lay hold of the general
principle of love, and therefore he tries by arith-

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 29
metical calculation to number and perform the
various acts which a loving man would do ; he seeks
to make the hand supply the defects of the heart,
and he lays down rules to guide the hand. Now,
what St. Paul says is this : the moment you get a
heart the rules for the hand will go for nothing ;
the moment love comes law will vanish. Let but
the light of that positive command illumine your
soul, " Bear ye one another's burdens," and there
will be no longer any need for the negative man
dates, "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not
steal," "Thou shalt not bear false witness against
thy neighbour ; " they will be at once fulfilled and
abolished in the spirit of universal love. Let but
your heart be kindled into the warmth of human
feeling for your brother, and there will be no longer
any need to learn from the schoolmaster the rules
of social etiquette ; the innate graciousness of the
spirit will render such rules superfluous for ever
more. The law is but your schoolmaster to teach
you the acts of life ; but when life itself shall open
upon you, you shall perform the old acts by a short
and easy method, and reach the old result by a way
which to the schoolmaster was unknown.
Christianity, then, is by its own profession the
supplement of Judaism, and in this lies its power
at once to fulfil and to destroy. The question now
arises, What are the elements in Judaism which are
supplemented in Christianity ? They are precisely
those three ethical duties which we found in the

30 RELATION OF JEWISH
previous chapter to constitute the sum of Christian
morals — the love of self, the love of our neighbour,
and the love of God ; the doctrine of the Epicurean,
the doctrine of the Stoic, and the doctrine of the
Platonist. The thought which is forced upon us
by the preceding inquiry is the fact that Judaism
is defective in not giving sufficient prominence to
any of those Gentile systems which Christianity
has united ; it has not allowed sufficient weight to
the instinct which created Epicureanism ; it has not
given scope enough to the instinct which awakened
Stoicism ; it has not found adequate room for the
instinct which necessitated Platonism. In the
supplementing of these deficiencies lies Christi
anity's superiority over Judaism, and therefore we
must look in turn at each of these.
First, The creed of the Jew was defective in this
— that it did not allow sufficient prominence to the
instinct of self-love. The statement must appear
at first sight the wildest of paradoxes. If there
is one thing which more than another we are wont
to associate with Judaism, it is its tendency to
foster an Epicurean selfishness. We think of the
Israelite as a man whose moral code impelled him
to seek his own material glory ; we think of him
as one who did good only that he might receive
individual pleasure, who abstained from doing ill
only that he might avoid individual pain. The
truth is, the popular notion about Judaism is a
delusion. There never was a religion, excepting

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 3 I
perhaps that of the Brahmans, in which the claims r
of the individual were so little recognised. That
there are glittering promises of material gold to the
performance of virtue is a point that cannot be
denied. But it is a great mistake to think that
these promises were held out to the Jew as an
individual ; they were spoken not to the man but
to the nation. The first commandment which
carries temporal promise with it refers to the
relation of the family: "Honour thy father and
thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land."
Whose days are to be long in the land ? Not those
of the isolated unit, but those of the national family
of Israel itself. To the eye of the moral Law-giver
the whole nation is pictured as one man. The life
of the nation, the immortality of the nation, thev
perpetually increasing greatness of the nation —
these were to be the objects of every Israelite's care,
the sum of all his hopes, the goal of all his desires.
He was to live for the family. His greatest joy
was to be the faith that a covenant had been made
with his house; his greatest grief was to be the
fear lest his iniquities should be visited on his
children. His aim would have been sublime, if the
national prosperity for which he strove had been a
spiritual prosperity. But his idea of the prosperity
of his descendants was the advent of an age of
wealth, of luxury, of physical conquest, of universal t
dominion — an age when his children's children
would be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare

2,2 RELATION OF JEWISH
sumptuously every day. To give up his individual
life to this, was to surrender himself to an imper
sonal materialism, it was to sell his birthright for
a mess of pottage ; the object was unworthy of the
i sacrifice, the goal was the triumph of the flesh.
And the result, as Hegel says, was a dimness in
the individual hope of immortality.* The Jewish
hope in a state of future glory was during all the
years of the nation's greatness exclusively a national
aspiration. It was when the nation as a nation
began to decline that the individual as an in
dividual began to rise ; the Pharisee pointed to
the resurrection of the dead when there was no
longer any prospect of political glory for the living.
As long as the nation remained in strength it
allowed no man to preach any immortality but its
own. The individual was to live for the sake of
the race, and for the sake of the race was he to die.
There was always the hope indeed in the heart of
each man that he might be alive at that coming of
the Messiah which was to complete the national
glory, but a coming so long deferred must have
made the heart sick. No man can read the Old
Testament without feeling that on the whole the
individual is depressed. The harp of the minstrel
rarely strikes a chord of unmingled joy. There are
psalms which alternate between light and darkness,
but where the singer tells of himself the shades
predominate. Every note speaks of a sense of
* Philosophy of History, p. 205, Lond. 1857.

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 2>3
individual weakness ; every cadence breathes the
feeling of personal insufficiency ; every song is to
some extent a song in the night, and the refrain
which echoes through its chords is this : " What
is man that Thou art mindful of him ? "
Now the first aim of Christianity — the first in
order of time — was to inspire the individual man
with a sense of his own claims, in other words, to
create a just self-love. It is popularly believed
that Christianity did this by revealing immor
tality ; it would in our view be more correct to
say that it revealed immortality by doing this.
What kept the Jew from realising his immortality
was the fact that he did not realise himself.
Christianity for the first time spoke to his in
dividual soul. It told him that his soul was in s
the sight of Heaven an infinitely grand thing, so
grand that there was nothing he could take in
exchange for it. It told him that the acquisition
of that whole material world, which he coveted for
his country, was not in importance to be compared
for one hour with the culture and development of
his personal life, that the kingdoms of the earth
and the glory of them were a poor and insignificant
possession when weighed against the glory of an
individual contemplation of God ; and if it be asked
how Christianity taught the soul of each man to
think thus highly of itself, there can from any side
of religious opinion be only one reply — it taught
individual men by the revelation of an individual c

34 RELATION OF JEWISH
man. The glory of personality was first learned
by its exhibition in a personal life, a life from
which all extraneous ornaments were extruded in
order that it might reveal its own native light. In
Him whom they called the Son of Man men beheld
a new species of power — the power of individual
purity, of personal sacrifice, of private virtue.
They saw that there is in the life of each man the
possibility of an infinite glory, which would be his,
though he were alone in the universe ; that the
human spirit is in itself, and amidst the meanest
surroundings, capable of rising to the Divine ; and
that the rise into the Divine is reached by stooping
to the limits that environ the human soul.
Second, If Judaism was deficient in self-love, it
\ was also deficient in brotherly love. The exclusive
character of the religion is one of the commonplaces
of history. But it is by no means so clearly under
stood wherein this, exclusiveness really consisted.
Warburton seems to think that the idea of the Jew
was national isolation, and he says that its pro
vidential design was to preserve Monotheism.*
Kalisch, on the other hand, has shown that there
never was a time in Jewish history in which a
cosmopolitan element did not mingle with the
national separatism- 1 The truth is, the Jew was
not only prepared, but was desirous to call all men
his brethren ; the goal to which he looked forward
* Divine Legation, II. 419.
T Bible Studies, Part II. p. 29, sq.

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 3 5
was the time when all the ends of the earth should
desire the salvation of the Lord. But then his was
only a prospective brotherhood. He would compass
sea and land to make one proselyte, but as long i
as the proselyte was not made he recognised no
brotherhood. It was not a geographical limit that \
confined his charity, it was a moral one. He could
not love his enemy as his enemy — while yet he
remained his enemy ; that was not only foreign to
his practice, but foreign to his thought.- In the
palmy days of his nation he was no separatist, he
desired above all things an universal religious
communion ; but he desired that the concessions
should be all on one side — the side of his enemies.
He kept his love in reserve against the coming of
that time when all flesh together should see the
glory of the Lord. It did not occur to him that
there is a charity which beareth all things — that
there is a love which hopeth all things — that there
is a place in the heart for those who are out of the
way. That revelation was given to a nobler faith.
That faith was Christianity. The leading thought
in the religion of Christ is this — love to the sinner
while he is yet in his sins. The love which
Christianity reveals to the world is a love in one
respect quite unique ; it is a redemptive love. ^
Judaism can tell men to fix their hearts on the
welfare of those who are like themselves in life and
doctrine ; Christianity says that the heart has a
wider province than that. It says that love ought

36 RELATION OF JEWISH
not to be suspended until we have made others like
ourselves ; it ought to reach down to them even in
their unlikeness. It should not wait until we have
I brought up the erring from the valleys ; it should
itself go down to the valleys to seek them. Love
in the Christian system is not a power by which I
i am to claim brotherhood with humanity when
humanity shall have reached my standard of moral
purity ; it is a powTer by which I am to claim
brotherhood with men in their impurity, and
through which I am to struggle to make them pure.
The sense of human brotherhood is itself to be the
lever by which I am to lift the fallen. I am to
realise the fact that those who are lying by the
wayside, unworthy to join in the march of life, are
still even in their prostration my brothers and my
sisters, are still members of the same family of
which I am a member, are still the legitimate
objects of my solicitude and of my care. I am
forced to feel like Paul, that under the influence of
this new faith I am debtor not only to the Jew but
to the Greek — not only to the wise but to the
unwise. The love that loves against lovelessness,
( the love that, as the writer to the Hebrews
expresses it, can endure a contradiction against
itself : that is the inheritance which Christianity
has bequeathed to me, and it is an inheritance
which imposes a responsibility to which Judaism
was a stranger. It makes me neighbour to the
Samaritan, to the Gentile, to the outcast, to the

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 37
unbeliever ; I owe them all a debt of gratitude,
because from the mere fact of being men they have
wakened within me the spirit of love.*
The sphere, then, of Christian brotherhood is
wider than the sphere of Jewish brotherhood. It
would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that
even within its own sphere the brotherhood of
Judaism reaches the intensity of the brotherhood of
Christianity. St. Paul certainly had a different
opinion ; when he says, " Bear ye one another's
burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ," he clearly
means to imply that we cannot reach this goal by
merely fulfilling the law of Moses. And indeed it
may be said that, as a whole, and making allowance
for isolated exceptions, the law of Moses exhorts
not so much to bear as to forbear. It is not so
much a command to confer benefit, as a prohibition \
to inflict injury. It does not so much aim at the
glorification of humanity, as at the prevention of
any act which would maim or mutilate humanity.
Hence its most powerful watchword is not, Thou
shalt, but, Thou shalt not! It seeks to refrain the
hand from doing wrong rather than to nerve the
heart for doing right. It forbids to kill, to steal,
to perjure, to covet ; and though in this last instance
it reaches something like an inward state, it is at
best only a negative inwardness. It tells a man
not to desire that his brother's wealth may be
transferred to him, but it does not tell him to
* This point will be treated in more detail in Chapter X.

3 8 RELATION OF JEWISH
desire that the good which is possessed by him
may be equally possessed by his brother ; the
command to "covet the best gift" — the spirit of
charity — was reserved for another dispensation.
Nor is the religious side of the Decalogue more
positive than its practical side ; the duties of the
sanctuary are, like the duties of the community,
prohibitions from doing wrong. To worship no
other God, to make no image of God, to take not
God's name in vain, to do no work on God's
Sabbath — this is the sum and substance of the
religious code of Judaism. The one positive precept
of its moral law is assigned neither to its sanctuary
nor to its community, but to that relation of the
family which is its symbol of all sacredness :
" Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days
may be long in the land."
Third, We have already in part anticipated the
final deficiency in the code of Jewish ethics. It is
not only defective in its provision for self-love and
for brotherly love, it also falls short in its effort to
reach Divine love. Judaism has not only an
individual want and a social want, it has also a
distinctively religious want ; for it is quite true,
as Hegel has pointed out, that there is a chasm
between the God of Judaism and the world of
nature.* God is outside of His works. It is felt
that to bring Him into direct and immediate contact
with anything He has made, would be to lower our
* Philosophy of History, p. 204. See also his Logic (Wallace), p. 236.

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 39
sense of His absoluteness. Therefore He is made
to dwell alone, in a region unapproached and un
approachable. He speaks from the height of an
inaccessible heaven. Men can hear His words,
but they cannot see His face. He communicates
His messages, but He never reveals Himself.
All that His creatures can see is His law. The
only communion which His height can have with
their lowliness, is the intercourse between him who
commands and those who obey. To the Jew law
becomes the symbol of Divine communion, or
rather the substitute for such communion. Into
the life of God there is no entrance ; into the reason
or spirit of His mandates man cannot gaze. But
man can listen to the mandates themselves, can
read them, count them, weigh them, follow them.
He can receive them unquestioningly, teach them
dogmatically, and obey them blindly : this is to
the Judaic conscience the whole duty of man.
Yet St. Paul declares that all this would not
suffice to make a human being holy: "By the
works of the law shall no man be justified."
There is a very prevalent misconception as to his
meaning when he uttered these words. He is
thought simply to mean that no man in his natural
state could possibly keep the Jewish law. The
fact is true, but it is far short of Paul's meaning.
What the Apostle meant to say is this : If you
Jews could keep every item of your law ; if you
could observe every precept to the letter ; if you

40 RELATION OF JEWISH
could fulfil every statute to perfection, you would
not thereby earn the right to be called perfect men,
and for this reason, that you would after all be
only keeping a law, only fulfilling a statute. To
do all that is commanded you, because it is com
manded you, is good, but it is not yet the highest
good. The highest good is to see the goodness of
the command itself, and in seeing it to lose the
sense of law altogether. It is to transmute the
instinct of obedience into the spirit of choice, and
^change the yoke of service into the sense of free
dom. A perfectly obedient child may be a perfect
child, but he is not a perfect being. What makes
him fall short of a perfect being is just the fact
that obedience is his motive. He has only reached
the husk of moralitv, not its kernel. He thinks it
right because it is commanded; he must come to
learn that it has been commanded only because it
is right !
That is really what Paul designs to say. No
man can be esteemed a just man for any number of
just actions performed in simple obedience to law.
Nothing can make him just but the love of justice,
and that demands not a law but a spirit. The law
will only be perfectly fulfilled when it ceases to be
thought of — when its requirements are kept from
another motive than itself. Let us make our
meaning, or rather Paul's meaning, clear by a
simile which he himself was very fond of using —
the relation of husband and wife. There is a law

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 4 1
of marriage which binds a man to protect the
partner of his life ; but no man would be deemed
a just husband who protected the partner of his
life merely from obedience to this binding civil
power. Let us suppose for a moment that a voice
were to sound from heaven, annulling all marriage
contracts and making void all marriage bonds ;
what would be the effect of such a message upon
the mind of a true husband ? It would simply
have no effect at all. He would be told that so
far as outward law is concerned he could do as
he liked ; he would answer that outward law had
never been the ground of his obligation. He
would say that he had all along been dead to the
marriage law, that its existence or its non-existence
could be no matter to him ; that what constituted
his obligation to protect the partner of his life was
an inward bond of love which could neither be
tightened by command nor loosened by prohibition,
but which must remain steadfast through all time
and impervious to all change. Something like this
was in the heart of St. Paul when he cried : " Ye
are dead to the law through the body of Christ."
He was standing in an universe from which the
old earth and the old heavens were vanishing away.
The ties of the past were loosening around him.
The nation which had been the centre of the
Theocracy and the symbol of Theocratic power was
sinking into death, and with it seemed to be
perishing all the sanctions of morality. But in

42 RELATION OF JEWISH
the midst of this world of dissolution Paul stood
undismayed. Heaven and earth might pass away ;
the law of God, in so far as it was a state command
ment, might pass away, but God himself would
not pass away. The Apostle had within him a
principle of Divine love which said all the law
meant to say and more. All the commandments
put together could not reach the one commandment
of love. There was something higher than to obey
God — to share the will of God, to be partakers of
the life of God. Let a man once be adopted into
the house of the Father, and he was no more a
servant but a son. The laws of the servant might
be abolished for him, for the filial relationship
must destroy the relation of the master, and the
birth of a kindred sympathy must render super
fluous the voice of command.
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that
these transitions from the life of an outward into
the life of an inward morality were accomplished in
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. However
distinct in idea may be the antithesis between
Judaism and Christianity, the process by which the
one shades into the other has been historically slow.
As a matter of history, Christianity did not at once
reveal the full length and breadth of its difference
from Judaism ; here as everywhere it sought to
conquer by leavening. It breathed a new life into
the old body and bade it work its way. The new
life worked its way, not by destruction but by

TO CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 43
assimilation, and therefore by slow degrees. It
took the old elements, Judaic and Gentile, into its
system, and it waited for time to work them into
its nature. The result is, that in the morality of
the Gospel there are elements which seem to
contradict each other ; which in their isolation, as
Mr. Mill would have it, do contradict each other.*
There are more motives than one assigned for the
living of the Gospel life, and for this reason, that it
is a life. Its essential condition is the condition of
all life — growth, development. It is not a full-
grown man created at once for a garden of per
fection ; i^ professes to follow "the law of the spirit
of life " — tpe law of progress, the law of evolution.
It ascends1 from small to great; it climbs from less
to more ; its motives rise with its attitude, until at
last it reaches ^hat stage where not only is the
highest motive seen, but where all the lower are
seen to have been but shadows of the highest. An
unfolding of this view demands a separate chapter.
* Liberty, p. 88, sq.

III.
THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
The code of Christian morals is first exhibited
in the life of the Christian Founder ; it is lived be
fore it is written. The doctrine to be proclaimed
to the world was in the first instance embodied
in a human life. If we would seek tkoe history
of the development of that doctrine in' the world
and in the individual soul, we must trace it
up to its fountain-head in the person of the Son
of Man. We must try to determine before all
things what was the moral order of the life of Jesus,
what was that law of development by which men
perceived His moral glory. That they did not
perceive His moral glory all in a moment is trans
parent on the very face of the history. That the
light had to shine for long in a darkness that com
prehended it not, and that the steps by which the
darkness climbed into the light were steep and
arduous, are amongst the most indisputable facts in
the whole range of Christian annals. What were
those steps ? What was that order of thought by
which the disciple slowly mounted into sympathy
with the Master ? If we can put our hand upon

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 45
this initial process of Christian development, we
shall in all probability have reached that universal
law which determines the Christian development of
all future disciples.
Let us merely premise that in the pursuance of
this design we shall take the portrait of the Master
as we find it. We are not writing a theological
treatise, nor attempting a critical exegesis ; we are
aiming simply at an exposition of what Christian
morality claims to be. We shall therefore close our
eyes to all fields of religious controversy — to the
mythical theory, and the creed of Paulus, and the
school of Tubingen — and shall merely ask, What
does the Gospel narrative say ? What does it say
of the order of Christian development ? What
does it tell of the process by which the Son of Man
won the hearts of the sons of men ? What does it
reveal of the nature of that growth by which the
human spirit ripens from the outer into the inner
life ?
The design of the Christian Founder, in so far as
His design was purely ethical, was to reveal the
morality of Judaism no longer in the form of a law,
but in the form of a vision — the vision of a human
life. By a choice unique in history, the life He
selected to be the world's revelation of morality
was His own. At the very moment when He ex
presses most strongly the absence from His nature
of all self-consciousness, He declares unequivocally
that He came to be the model of ethics to the world

\6 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
(Matthew xi. 28, sq.). His desire above all other
things was to win the love of men. But it must
never be forgotten that He desired to be loved not
because He was a person, but because He was a
personification. Every man, saint or sinner, finds
a joy in being loved. But the Son of Man in
desiring to be loved did not contemplate Himself
in His person but in His character. It was not
because love was sweet that He wanted to win the
hearts of men ; it was because He deemed Himself to
be the type of moral purity, and held that in loving
Him men would love the pure. To say, "Lord,
Lord ! " to magnify His name apart from His char
acter, was nothing to Him ; nay, He looked upon
it as a hindrance to moral progress. " Blessed
is the womb that bore Thee," cried a woman in
the crowd. "Yea, rather," is our Lord's reply,
" blessed are they that hear the word of God." It
was because He believed Himself, and proclaimed
Himself, to be the Way, the Truth, the Life, that
He insisted on receiving human love. To love
Him was to keep His commandments. To fix the
heart on Him was to fix the heart on the virtues
of the Mount. It was to love absolute justice,
absolute purity, absolute truth. It was no sen
timental emotion, no ebullition of feeling, no
mere expression of a personal endearment. The
love of what He loved, the admiration of His
moral loveliness, the devotion to that type of
character which made His humanity Divine — that

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 47
was what He meant when He said, " Come unto
me. *
To accomplish this aim one thing was required
as a preliminary condition — man must first be
attracted within the radius of His person. It was
impossible that the immediate ground of the attrac
tion should be the beauty. Morality can only be
revealed in action, and moral action demands an
already gathered community. It was only by
coming within the circle of Christ's presence that
man could learn anything of His nature. His
nature was to be exhibited not merely, nor even
mainly, in words ; the very soul of His ethical
teaching was to come forth in the deeds of His
social life. The problem was, how to create the
society, how to make that social circle which would
render such deeds possible. Clearly to create such
a circle He must at the outset appeal to men, not
as He wished them to be, not as He designed to
make them, but as He actually found them. He
must seek to attract them, not by the appeal to an
incipient higher nature in themselves which as yet
they did not know, but by stirring up the elements
of that old nature which had long been in possession
of their souls. He could only commend the new
doctrine by throwing a momentary veil over its
novelty, by showing that it was not a complete
disruption between the old and the coming genera-
* See the antithesis of the two kinds of love in the Greek of John xxi.
15-17.

48 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
tions, by demonstrating that in some sense true and
real the aspirations of the past would be perfected
by the faith of the future.
Christ then had at the outset to attract men, not
by Himself but by something in themselves ; He
had to appeal to the hopes of their old nature.
That nature was Judaism, and from a certain point
of view it was also Epicureanism. It sought a
material kingdom, a visible crown, an outward re
ward. It was to this Judaic or materialistic hope
that Christ first addressed Himself; He was known
to the multitude in the breaking of temporal bread.
Do not think that in thus attracting men by
physical benefits the Son of Man was stooping to
a Jewish accommodation ; He was directing their
minds to a vital truth. He had indeed come to
found a kingdom, a material kingdom, a kingdom
which, if not of this world, was still to be in this
world. When He broke the bread to the multitude,
He taught that there was a real connection between
the power to follow Him and the power to distribute
bread. When He promised that those who should
come after Him would receive in this life houses
and brethren and lands, He drew men by no fiction,
but by a profound reality. Christianity in its
ultimate development is indeed intended to perfect
a man's relation to houses and brethren and lands.
It is designed to make better householders, better
landlords, better members of the family circle. It
is to strengthen the bonds of master and servant,

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 49
parent and child, brother and sister, husband and
wife. It contemplates in its last result the resur
rection of the body politic — the incorporation of
the state and all its institutions. It looks forward
to the time when the secular shall itself be the
sacred, when the week-day shall itself be the
Sabbath, when the workshop shall itself be the
temple, when the Government shall itself be the
Church. The outward rewards of Christianity are
real rewards, and the kingdom which it designs to
rear is a kingdom more real, more secular, more
purely earthly and natural, than that fantastic and
supramundane fabric which constituted to the Jew
the Messiah's empire. Nay, we may go further.
Christianity came to give what, as we have seen,
the Jew did not dare even to hope for — that
individual freedom from care which the Epicurean
sought to win. It told the Eoicurean that his was
not a dream. It told him that there was indeed to
be found a divine absence of care, a state in which
the individual soul would rest completely from its
labours, a sense of perfect freedom from all the
burden and heat of the day, and it offered itself as
the pioneer to that Elysium where the human yoke
was easy and the human burden light.
Such was Christ's message to the multitude, to
that outlying mass which He desired to bring within
the radius of His person ; He appealed to their
individual wants. Is it surprising that to the long-
repressed individualism of the Jewish nation such

50 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
an appeal should have sounded like music ? Is it
wonderful, that to men, who with all their material
ism had not been allowed to hope for more than a
national independence, the promise of personal
comfort should have been unspeakably dearl At
all events, it was so. The multitude heard Him
gladly because He manifested a sympathy with
their human struggles, and offered Himself as a
ministrant to their daily wants and toils. They
came for the sake of the loaves, but they came, and
their coming was itself the first step to the goal.
They were, as regarded the person of the Master,
as yet only utilitarians; they sought Him for what
He could give. But in so doing they were already
in the presence of a Power they did not seek, a
Power which sooner or later must make its influ
ence felt and known. In the pursuit of their own
shadow they were brought, as it were by accident,
into contact with a great light, and the accident
was thenceforth to become the essence of their
being. They were to catch the glow of a principle
which as yet they did not see, and to find the joy
of a life which as yet they did not understand.
For this brings us to the point of transition
between the first and second stage of Christian
morality. Men began by reverencing the Master
because He was the minister to their wants ; from
this there is but a step to another and higher
reverence — the reverence for the ministration itself,
the veneration for that law of Christ's nature which

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 5 I
impelled Him to minister. If the first stage of
Christian morality was Epicurean, the second was
distinctly Stoic. Men had been the objects of a
law of ministration ; they must now become the
subjects of that law: "Freely have ye received,
freely give!" The principle is the Christian
doctrine of substitution, or the imputation of one
self to another. It said, Ye who have had wants
and had them relieved, put yourselves in the place
of those who have still wants that have not been
relieved. You have found joy in your relief; try
to figure in your heart the joy they would find in
their relief. You have had the bread broken to
you by coming within the radius of the Christian
influence ; try to bring others within the same
radius that they may share the same bread. You
have experienced the age of promise ; now the age
of duty is come.
It is in this, its second phase, that Christianity
comes nearest to Stoicism. It is now that for the
first time there breaks upon the mind of the disciple
the momentous fact that each man has a duty to
the whole — a duty whose sphere is the universe
and whose standard is the Golden Rule. But here
too as in Stoicism the door which opens the revela
tion is the door of personal sacrifice. In the Judaic
or Epicurean stage of Christianity the end contem
plated above all things was physical enlargement ;
in the second or Stoical stage the end contemplated
was physical repression. There was recognisedin the

52 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
human soul a law which was not of the human soul,
a law which placed it in the front ranks of creation,
but which at the same time demanded its allegiance
and its service — the law of duty. The very name of
duty wherever it be found, implies that on one side
of the nature there is a process of fence-raising.
Moral obligation signifies by etymology a binding of
the nature of man. It means that in one direction of
the soul a barrier has been put up to check the
inroads of another, to prevent that other from
becoming too free. Were there no such binding
the word obligation would have no meaning ; it
gets its meaning from the fact of struggle. The
Christian sense of obligation appears in a sense of
conflict : " There is a law in my members warring
against the law of my mind ; " " The flesh lusteth
against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh,
and these two are contrary ; " " Think not I am
come to send peace on earth ; I am not come to
send peace but a sword ; " "If any man will be My
disciple, let him renounce himself, and take up My
cross and follow Me." Tliese are strong words, and
they carry a weighty message. They tell us that
we have passed into another atmosphere than that
in which the Master broke the loaves to the multi
tude. In contact with that Master, man has begun
to know his higher self. But the lower self is not
yet dead within him ; it remains to dispute the
field. There is no longer only one motive in his
life ; there are now two motives drawing opposite

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 53
ways. Duty says, Bear ye one another's burdens ;
interest says, Every man shall bear his own burden.
The Stoic and the Epicurean elements of the human
soul are in conflict ; who shall reconcile them 1
We must point out indeed that even from the
beginning of this stage of moral conflict Christianity
contemplates such a reconciliation. Take the open
ing words of that most remarkable of discourses, the
Sermon on the Mount. Christ's thought is clearly
this : however wide and impassable may seem to be
the gulf that separates the world of duty from the
world of interest, there is in reality a bridge
between them. Do not think that pleasure lies
wholly with the bad, and that self-denial is the only
possession of the good. I tell you that self-denial
is no more an end for the saint than it is an end
for the sinner. I tell you that the value of self-
denial is just the fact that it promotes a higher
interest than self-seeking can ever secure. If I
preach poverty of spirit, meekness, the dissatis
faction with self which men call mourning, the
spiritual aspiration which they call hunger and
thirst, it is not because individual greatness is an
evil and individual joy a sin. It is because in these
things individual greatness alone consists and indi
vidual joy is alone to be found. It is because the
fruit of these is personal blessedness — the kingdom,
the comfort, the inheritance of the earth, the
satisfaction of the spirit, the right to rejoice and be
exceeding glad.

54 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
It may be asked, How has Christianity succeeded
in achieving this end ? Stoicism crucified the
individual, but it did not thereby seek to produce
joy ; it did so as a means of crucifying the desire of
joy. Christianity exhorted to take up the cross,
but it did so as the road to a crown. It not only
declared that there was an Olivet behind the
Calvary, it said that the Calvary was indispensable
to the Olivet. Can we explain this contrariety
between the two systems ? We can ; and the
explanation constitutes the real point of difference
between this stage of Christianity and all stages of
Stoicism. For let it be remembered that the Stoic
did not, any more than the Epicurean, emancipate
himself from the bonds of self-contemplation ; nay,
his very doctrine involved self-contemplation. To
despise pleasure and pain is not only a purely
individual act, but an act which has self for its object.
To make the business of life the study of individual
nothingness is to make the business of life a self-
study ; it is the soul's worship of its own despair.*
But the " poverty of spirit " of which Christianity
speaks is totally different from this. Humility in
the Christian sense does not mean to think of one's
self humbly ; it means not to think of one's self at
all. The idea which expresses the Christian view
of sacrifice is not the restraint of self, but the death
of self; restraint implies an effort, and therefore a
constant self-inspection, but death is a complete
* Cf. Col. ii. 18 — " a voluntary humility."

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 55
self-forgetfulness. It is not that the ideal Christian
is to despise his pleasures or his pains ; he is never
to think of them. He is to pass through a form of
death called love, in which his own being is to be
lost in the being of others. That is what St. Paul
meant when he said, " Ye are dead, and your life
is hid with Christ in God." He meant that it was
possible by the power of love to become so much
the part of another life as to have no consciousness
of one's own, that it was possible to be so absorbed
in an impersonal interest as to lose all sense of
personal care. " Bear ye one another's burdens, for
every man shall bear his own burden," is a saying
which ceases to be contradictory in the developed
Religion of the Cross. Bear thou the burden of
thy brother, for thou too hast a burden of thine
own ; it will be too heavy for thee without the self-
forgetfulness of love. Only in the preoccupation of
thy heart with the wants of others can thine own
individual wants be lulled to rest. Wouldst thou
have freedom from personal care — Epicurean free
dom, bounding freedom such as youth rejoices in ?
thou shalt find it in the life of love. In that fire,
which itself is incapable of being extinguished, all
that is not itself shall be extinguished ; all the wood,
and the hay, and the stubble of merely individual
desires shall be burned up like chaff before the blaze
of a divine enthusiasm for humanity ; he that loseth
his life shall keep it unto life eternal.
This brings us to the third stage of Christian

56 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
morality. In its first stage it contemplated the
promise of virtue ; in its second it looked at the
duty of virtue ; it was now to enter on the love of
virtue. Its first vision had been all the crown ; its
second had been all the cross ; its third was to be
the vision of the crown in the cross. There is as
it seems to us in the Gospel narrative a clearly
marked line of demarcation between the age of
simple duty and the age of love, which is at once
the abolition and the fulfilling of the law. Already
in that narrative there begins to be prefigured the
reign of that influence which theologians call the
Holy Spirit, but which called by any name is a
great fact of history. The tone of the Christian
Founder is never so joyous as in those chapters
which predict the Spirit — the transition from duty
into love. When He says, "Peace I leave with
you ; My peace I give unto you," what does He
mean ? We do not ask what does He mean
theologically, but what bearing has such a state
ment on the subject of Christian ethics ? Is it not
clearly this : that to the mind of the Christian
Founder there is already present the advent of a
time when that life which was now costing His
followers so great a struggle would become as
natural to them as breathing ? He saw that a day
was coming when the crucial word for morality
would not be duty, nor yet obligation, but love.
His first or outward coming had sent into the world
not peace but a sword, it had revealed a dualism in

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 57
man's nature, and had made the human soul a
theatre of strife. But in His second or inward
coming all this was to be changed. There was to
be no more sea ; there was to be no more pain.
The virtue which now was a sacrifice and received
a sacrificial name was to become a positive joy. It
was to be a component part in the very life of man,
so that to part with it would henceforth be itself
the sacrifice, to lose it itself the pain ; it was this
absence of the sense of struggle that was predicted
in the words, "My peace I give unto you."
For, let us remember that this inwardness of the
Divine law was the essential peace of Christ Him
self.* The growth of the human nature that was
in Him was a growth towards this sublime goal.
He, too, had His Gethsemane — not, indeed, in the
form of a wish to evade duty, but in the guise of a
hope that duty might be found to coincide with a
path less strewn with thorns. None the less it was
a struggle, and a struggle which lay within the
natural limits of humanity. But there came to Him
a time when Gethsemane faded from His view, and
a Divine strength made the burden light. When
He emerged from the shades of Gethsemane He
emerged from the shadows of His own soul, He rose
into peace. The struggle, whatever it was, had all
passed away, and He had accepted the path of the
Cross as for Him the destined path. So complete
* See Arnold's chapters on the Secret and Method of Jesus, in
Literature and Dogma.

5 8 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
was His new sense of rest that He longed to make
it the possession of the world. He could wish
nothing better for the world than that it might
be able to enter into His joy — the joy of completed
conflict : " Father, I will that these be with Me
where I am, that they may behold My glory," are
the words in which He expresses that desire. He
wanted men to feel that the straight gate and
the narrow way had become to them what they
were to Him, a wide gate and a broad way. He
wanted them to realise what He realised — that the
outward law had become an inward law, that duty
had become nature, that sacrifice had become
privilege : that was the sense in which He uttered
the words, " My peace I give unto you."
This aspiration of the Son of Man was of course
only fulfilled in that great Pentecostal outpouring
which inaugurated the dispensation of the Spirit.
It is then that for the first time the antithesis
begins between law and grace. That antithesis is
no merely verbal one ; it marks the completed
transition from an outer into an inner morality.
Grace is the new word which expresses the first
sense of Christian freedom. It expresses man's
consciousness that he has passed into a new rela
tionship toward the will of God, that it is no longer
outside of him compelling him as a schoolmaster,
but that it is written in his heart and embodied in
his life. To find grace is to find the passage from
duty into love. It is in one sense the destruction

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 59
of the sense of moral obligation. The Divine Will
ceases to stand over against the human will as its
master and its monarch ; the human is made one
with the Divine. Mr. Herbert Spencer, looking at
ethics from a purely scientific standpoint, has quite
independently arrived at the same conclusion as
the New Testament. We say quite independently,
for it evidently comes to him as a discovery, and
he advances it as a paradox. He suggests that the
motive of moral obligation will lose its force in
proportion as the moral life itself advances.* What
is this but the recurrence of the old refrain that
when a man is touched by grace he is no longer
under law ? What is it but in other words to say,
that to love is to be dead to the law, that to burn
with the enthusiasm for humanity is to outstrip at
a bound all the requirements of duty ? " Where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty " — that is
to say, naturalness. A man will no longer say, "It
is my duty," but, " It is my nature ; " no longer " I
ought," but " I must." It is the difference of talent
and genius ; a man ought to use his talent, a man
is compelled to use his genius. In the one case
there is an obligation from without, which, never
theless, may be resisted ; in the other there is an
obligation from within, which, because it is the
nature of the man himself, admits of no resistance.
Grace is the reconciliation of compulsion and
freedom. It takes away all power of choice by
* Data of Ethics, p. 127.

60 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
making goodness the only law of man's being.
Henceforth his service becomes his perfect liberty,
and his implicit obedience is identical with his
empire ; the truth has made him free, and he is
free indeed.
We have thus tried to sketch the evolution of
Christian morality as it is exhibited in the im
mediate presence of the Christian Founder. We
believe it will be found to coincide with the order
of moral development embraced by every completed
spiritual life.'" There is first the unclouded promise,
which without perspective shows the distant goal
as if it were already nigh. Then there is the
intervening cloud, which turns the sunshine into
rain, and the morning into the burden and heat of
the clay. Lastly, the cloud becomes part of the
morning, and that which was a hindrance to our
vision is changed into the climax of the glory, the
master-light of all our seeing. Neither the Epi
curean's ease nor the Stoic's yoke is by itself the
goal ; the goal is only found when the yoke is easy
and the burden light.
It will be seen that in the treatment of this
subject there is a point which we have assumed but
not discussed. We have spoken of an intervening
cloud. We have said that the very idea of moral
obligation implies that there is a part of our nature
which needs to be restrained, that the very word
duty indicates the putting up of a fence to prevent
* This subject will be treated in Chapter VIII.

THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY. 6 1
the inroads of some other power. The question
which we have not asked is, What is that power ?
What is that tendency of human nature which has
made the erection of a fence obligatory ? Why is
it that in the present state of things we need to
speak of duty at all ? Why does not the moral soil
yield to us its fruit spontaneously, as the physical
soil did to Adam ? There can be but one answer,
and it lies not in theory but in fact. There is
clearly a disharmony in the nature of man. The
fact will not be denied by the representative of any
school, Christian or Pagan, Theist or Atheist. The
whole heat of the discussion centres round the
point, Whence came this disharmony ? Some tell
us it was by chance ; others, by necessity. Some
say it came from a fall which crushed one side of
human nature ; others tell us it was the result of
an evolutionary rise, by which one part of human
nature got the start of another. We shall not
dispute the point. Our purpose is not theological,
but moral, and therefore we shall avoid the
question of origins. We shall not seek to deter
mine how the disharmony arose ; perhaps in order
to find its origin we would require to be ourselves
in a state of harmony. It may be that to know
how sin came would be already to transcend the
nature of a sinful being, for how could we know
its origin without conceiving that state which pre
ceded its origination ? Be this as it may, ours
is a humbler aim. We do not inquire into the

62 THE MOTIVES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
beginning, but only into the fact of things, and only
into that fact as it was understood by Christianity.
The course we have to follow is simple and clear.
There is recognised in the Christian system, as in
all systems, a chord which jars on the universal
harmony. What is Christianity's explanation of
this jarring chord — her explanation not of its origin
but of itself ? What is the Christian exposition of
that great dissonance, which men call sin, whose
marring influence has permeated every stage of the
rhythm of this universe, and the consciousness of
whose presence has proved so powerful an agent in
the formation of every religious creed ? That is
the question which Christianity sets herself to
answer. She answers it by no appeal to antiquities
either sacred or secular, by no reference to a
theological system whose authority must be infal
lible, by no effort of metaphysical subtlety or
philosophical speculation, but by a simple flashing
of the lantern upon the secret places of the human
soul, by "commending herself to the conscience of
every man." The nature of this revelation will be
considered in the following chapter.

IV.
THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
The earliest exponent of the ethical nature of sin
was the Apostle Paul. The exposition of its theo
logical nature belongs to the Old Testament. It
was the mission of the Jewish literature to exhibit
it as a violation of the law of God, and this was
doubtless a great work to do. But it was after
all only one half of the problem ; it was reserved
for another dispensation to unfold the other half.
Judaism said, Sin is a violation of the law of God ;
it was left for Christianity to say, It is a violation
of the law of man.
As we have said, the .man who first made this
declaration was St. Paul. To him in a special sense
the problem of sin presented itself as a problem of
ethics. It was not so much a mystery of the uni
verse as a mystery of his own soul. That it had
raised a middle wall of partition between himself
aud God was a fact ever patent to his mind, but
there was another fact, if possible, more patent
still — that it had raised a middle wall of parti
tion between himself and a part of his own mind.
" 0 wretched man that I am, who shall ^deliver

64 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
me from this body of death ! " " The flesh lusteth
against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh,
and these two are contrary ; " " The evil that I
would not, that I do, and the good that I would,
that I do not ; there is a law in my members warring
against the law of my mind ; ;' through all these
there breathes one thought — the idea of inward
conflict. What are the elements of this conflict as
they appear to the Gentile Apostle ? The notion
of war implies at least two combatants. What are
they ? That is the first and fundamental question.
A subsequent question will be, Which of them is
evil % or, Wherein consists the evil of either ? But
before any decision can be arrived at as to the
cause of moral obliquity, it will be necessary to
put our hand on those elements of human nature
which in the view of Paul are in a state of disunion.
The Apostle describes these under the names of the
flesh and the spirit. What does he mean by that ?
Does he mean the body and the soul ? Assuredly
not. Paul would never have said that matter
lusted agajnst mind. None knew better than he
that the principle of lust or desire is essentially a
mental principle. When he said that by the cross
of Christ the world had been crucified to him, he
certainly was not thinking of the demolition of
streets and buildings. He knew well that the
world is not without but within a man, and that
no abstinence from outward meats or from out
ward pleasures could make a man unworldly. The

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 65
very centre of his gospel lies in the assertion that
the circumcision of the flesh availeth nothing. If
matter had been, in his view, the antagonist of
what he calls the spirit, it is hard to see why he
should not have hailed circumcision as the saviour
of mankind ; it is hard to see why he should not
have welcomed an agency which seemed evidently
to symbolise the crucifixion of the material nature
of man. But Paul felt that no material crucifixion
was of the slightest value. He felt that if he could
give all his goods to feed the poor, nay, that if he
could give his very body to be burned, it would
profit him nothing, if the act were not prompted
by charity. Here is a conclusive statement, a
statement which at once and for ever negatives the
attribution of asceticism to the Christian system.
It is declared in the plainest terms that no outward
impoverishment however complete, no outward
torture however severe, no outward mutilation
however humiliating, would bring a human being
one step nearer to the great goal of final perfection,
that the sacrifice of the physical man lis neither
acceptable to the worshipper nor the Worshipped
until behind the sacrifice is heard the living voice :
"Lo, I come, I delight to clo Thy will."
When Paul speaks then of the flesh and the spirit,
he is not alluding to two kinds of existence, but to
two kinds of thought, more correctly, two kinds of
love — self-love and universal love. In the view
of Paul things were classified as belonging to the
E

66 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
flesh or to the spirit quite irrespective of their
material or mental character. The pursuit of a
material object might be an act of the spirit ; the
pursuit of a mental object might be an act of the
flesh. To seek wealth as a means of charity would
to him have been in the highest sense spiritual ;
to seek knowledge as a source of fame would have
been viewed by him as essentially carnal. Two
men might gaze on the same physical scene, and,
to the one it might be a scene of the flesh, to the
other an experience of the spirit. To the one it
might be fraught with impressions of lewdness and
impregnated with suggestions of impurity ; to the
other it might be laden with a burden of grief for
the sins and sorrows of humanity. It was thought,
and thought alone, that gave a character to things.
The flesh and the spirit then in the system of
St. Paul refer not to the scene through which a
man travels, but to the vehicle in which he travels.
They describe not his surroundings but his state,
not his acts but his motives. The flesh represents
the love which he has for himself ; the spirit stands
for the love he bears to others. The flesh is the
self-centring principle by which a man is impelled
to seek his own good; the spirit is that power of
self-forgetfulness by which he is enabled to seek a
good not his own. The flesh is the individual
unit ; the spirit is the universal man. The question
now arises, Which of these is 'to be sought and
which shunned ? The answer which naturallv and

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 67
spontaneously suggests itself is that in the view of
St. Paul the flesh is the evil part of our nature,
and the part which needs to be repressed. If this
be Paul's meaning, if in the Christian system the
desire of individual good counts in itself for sin,
then we have no hesitation in saying that the
Christian morality is a mutilated morality. For
it is quite true what Auguste Comte says — that to
repress the personal instincts is not to improve but
to destroy the morality of man.'55'
We have already pointed out that no man can
do good to another without first saying to himself,
This is what in his place I should like done to me.
The imagination of personal pleasure is the very
condition of benevolence. If the sense of self-
interest, that which St. Paul calls the flesh, be a
sin, then the whole moral life of man is made an
impossibility. But does St. Paul say so? Does
he mean for a moment to suggest that the flesh or
the individual part of a man's nature is sinful;
that to seek the things of the flesh is to love sin ?
So far is he from saying so, that the very passage
which seems at first sight to favour such a view is
found on closer inspection to be the strongest and
the most conclusive evidence against it. If Paul
had merely said, The flesh lusteth against the
spirit, we might have thought that in his view
the flesh was the sole aggressor and the spirit the
only martyr. But Paul does not stop here. He
* Positive Philosophy, ii. 131. Miss Martineau's translation.

68 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
goes on to say that in the manifestation of moral
evil not only does the flesh lust against the spirit,
but the spirit lusts against the flesh. Here is a
new light upon the whole subject. The spirit is
no longer the sole martyr in the struggle, nor is
it on account of the spirit alone that Paul depre
cates the life of sin ; he deprecates it quite as much
in the interest of the flesh. He is not a whit more
anxious for the spiritual than he is for the carnal
nature of man, because he knows well that the soul
without the body would be as dead as the body
without the soul. Therefore he is eager that the
flesh should not any more than the spirit have an
antagonist, a foe to its development. He is eager
that the individual man, like the universal man,
should be protected from all enmities, should be
shielded from all influences which would hinder his
growth and nourishment. The Apostle of Gentile
liberty demands a free soil for the tree of natural
life ; he would have nothing to war against the
flesh. The truth is, St. Paul has no idea of blaming
either the flesh or the spirit. He sincerely com
miserates both. He regards both as the victims of
a third power which has produced disorganisation
in their joint action, and prevented either from
achieving its destiny. Sin is to him that which
has set the flesh and the spirit at variance. Its
evil lies in this, that it has impaired the united
strength of two great and glorious powers which

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 69
were made to work in unison. What it is in itself
he does not pretend to know, does not seek to
inquire : for him as for us it means the mystery of
iniquity. What Paul does seek to fathom is the
manifestation of the mystery. He asks, What is
sin in the world ? what is it as an actual fact 1 how
does it show itself 1 in what way would its absence
be shown ? These were Paul's questions, and they
were practical questions, to be answered not by
speculation, but by observation. To. answer these
questions he did the only thing that a man could
do — he looked around him. He cast, his eye upon
the world as it actually was, upon the men and
women who composed the society in which he lived
and moved. And what did he see in this society ?
He saw an anomaly in the world of nature. He
beheld two laws of the universe, evidently meant
for good and certainly designed to co-operate with
one another, breaking up into mutual antagonism,
and becoming a source of the wildest anarchy. He
beheld the flesh and the spirit, which the hand of
God had joined together, put asunder by another
hand, and that which originally was constructed to
be a bond of union becoming mysteriously and
unnaturally an element of discord. It was the
supernatural in nature that troubled the heart of
the Apostle — the presence of a false note in the
rhythm of the universal music. It mattered not to
which side he turned, whether to the flesh or the
spirit, the same jar met his spiritual ear, the same

70 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
irresistible evidence that there was a broken cord in
the organ of human life. Let us look for a moment
at the matter in detail.
The flesh lusteth against the spirit. Here is the
first side of Paul's problem, the first manifestation
of the great mystery. He saw in the world around
him, nay, he felt within his own breast the opera
tion of that power which we call self-loAre. He
perceived it to be in itself a good power — a power
which made for righteousness. He felt that if a
man was to love his brother as himself, it was well
that he should have some amount of self-love ;
otherwise he could have no standard by which to
judge of his brother's grief or joy. But Paul saw
that if this power made for righteousness in idea, it
made for unrighteousness in fact. It ought to have
been a source of sympathy ; it actually was a source
of selfishness. Instead of making his own wants
a standard by which to measure the wants of
humanity, each man took them as an incentive to
live to himself alone. Nay, this was not all, nor
even the worst. The very power to conjure up
what another would feel had been degraded into au
instrument of human torture. Conscious of what
pain was in himself, he imagined how it would be
felt by another. That power of imagination was
meant to make him merciful, but it had made him
cruel. It had incited him to wars, to murders, to
revenges. It had goaded him on to the gratification
of spite and spleen. It had inspired him to the

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 7 1
commission of deeds unworthy of the lower creation.
It had led to the satisfaction of malice and hatred
and envy and all uncharitableness. The light had
led astray which yet was light from heaven. Paul
saw this, and he said there was something wrong :
" Men and brethren, these things ought not so to
be." He felt that here if anywhere there was a
miracle of miracles, the violation not of one law
but of universal law— the law of creation's harmony,
the law of God. He felt that he had outraged a
principle of the universe, and therefore had become
an alien in the universe; By no theological dogma,
by no national training, by no metaphysical
subtlety, but simply by the logic of stern facts, his
mind was forced to the conviction that something
had separated between him and his God.
Look now at the other side of the Apostle's
problem : The spirit lusteth against the flesh.
He saw in the world another tendency the opposite
of self-love, by which men were impelled to
sacrifice, rather than to seek their own ; they called
it the sense of duty. It prompted them often to
great deeds of self-denial. It led them at times to
forego the natural pleasures of life. It sent some
into the desert, into the hermitage, into the ascetic's
cell. It drove others to seek untimely martyrdom.
It caused all to believe that the essence of virtue
lay in its being the absence of individual joy — the
crucifixion of the flesh. Now what Paul asked was
this : Why should virtue have any such tendency ?

7^ THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
Why should the Divine life in the soul be the only
life without pleasure, without individual pleasure ?
Was there piety in the fact of pain ? Why should
individual joy be the antithesis of life for the
universe ? Was not the very existence of such an
antithesis a proof that there was something wrong ?
Why should not a man's life for God and for his
fellow-man be prompted by a motive of Epicurean
joy — by a joy of the individual heart, in which
there was no sense of obligation, but the perfect
calm of a satisfied desire ? The spirit ought not to
crucify the flesh, ought not to feel that its own
merit was greater in proportion as its task was felt
to be difficult. In the very sense that something
was being sacrificed, in the very experience of a
struggle in the individual life, in the very convic
tion of a submission to self-denial which deserved
the name of merit, the spirit was already bearing
testimony that it had not put all things under its
feet. It was uttering from another side of the
creation the same voice which the flesh had already
uttered — that man had violated the law of God.
Such is clearly the meaning of St. Paul in the
second and less obvious clause of the passage now
under review. The spirit is convicted of antagonism
to the flesh by its very sense of merit. Where
there is individual pleasure, in other words, where
the spirit does not lust against the flesh, there is
no sense of merit. The mother does not think it
meritorious to love her child, and why ? Because

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 73
it costs no struggle ; the flesh is married to the
spirit, the law of duty coincides with the path of
interest. The mother's love is to her an individual
joy, and she would not dream of claiming merit
for that which is a joy. Now this is the ethical
meaning of that doctrine which has always been
peculiarly associated with what is called evangelical
Christianity — the doctrine that the true saint is
unconscious of any merit. To make use of a former
illustration, talent will be the same when it becomes
genius. Let poetry become the expression of a
man's nature, and he will no longer be proud of his
verses. His sense of merit will decline with his
literary toil. In proportion as art becomes nature
it will become unconscious, it will reach the nearest
resemblance to its extreme opposite — mechanical
inspiration. The harmony of the spirit and the
flesh would make virtue so much a personal joy
that the spiritual man would be spoken of as the
natural man, and the sense of merit in the per
formance of duty would be exchanged for the sense
of privilege in the enjoyment of nature.
But there is a correlative side of this subject,
which must not be omitted from the Christian
ethics of sin. If it be true that in the Christian
system the sense of merit declines with the advance
of spiritual life, it is not less true that with the
same advance the sense of demerit increases. The
nearer a man comes to the realisation of a harmony
of soul, the more keenly is he impressed with the

74 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
actual discord in his own heart. This, too, is an
universal law and no paradox. Absolute sin can
have no sense of sin. It is essential to the very
existence of conscience that a man should not be all
evil. " I had not known sin but for the law," says
St. Paul, i.e. only a man's waking virtue can detect
his power for vice, only by his effort to rise does he
learn the depth of his fall. Hence the immediate
fruit of all virtue is pain.*" Just as the first effect
of a stream of light projected over a hitherto un
broken darkness would be to reveal to those who
dwell therein the presence of that darkness, so the
first effect of a vision of purity is to render the
human spirit conscious of its own impurity. That
is the reason why in the initial stage of Christian
tuition the emphasis is laid on repentance and on
confession. It is not that the confession of sin is
in itself of any value, but it is an index of the
spiritual life. Its value is founded upon the fact
that ho man can begin with the recognition of
darkness ; he can only see darkness after he has
known light. If then a man confesses a vision of
darkness, it can only be because the light has come,
and that is the value of his confession. He had
not known sin but for the law ; the fact that he
knows sin is a proof that he has become the subject
of law. And the deeper he penetrates into this
subjection, the more will he feel the power of dark
ness. The loftier be a man's ideal, the humbler
* Cf. Mill's Utilitarianism, pp. 41, 42.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 75
will be the man. " Not as though I had already
attained," " If by any means I might attain," " I
count not myself to have apprehended," " I am the
least of all the Apostles " — these are the words of
one who was very near to the blaze of the absolute
vision, who had touched the very threshold of the
temple of holiness. The light which made him
feel dark wTas the illumination of his own heart, the
vision which made him blind was the brightness of
his own ideal. The picture of a stainless moral
life had been hung up in his soul, a life in which
sacrifice had become an Epicurean joy ; he had
seen the glory of the cross. For that very reason
all other things were without glory, himself in
cluded. He felt the despair of admiration. He
could never reach his ideal. It was too beautiful;
it lay beyond his grasp ; it seemed to fly before
him as he advanced, and he could only follow afar
off. In the presence of the perfect portrait he felt
himself the chief of sinners.
And yet this man Paul was not afraid at the
same moment to say, Be ye followers of me. He
was not afraid in the deepest consciousness of his
sin to offer his experience as a goal for human
attainment. How are we to explain this paradox ?
Why should a man assert his moral dignity in the
very hour when he feels his moral depravity ? The
reason lies in a fact which forms one of the most
remarkable features in the portraiture of Christian
ethics. It is from the sense of sin, which tells him

76 THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN.
he is a slave, that man first learns his right to be
free. There have been systems which have taught
that man's will is in bondage, there have been
systems which have taught that man's will is in
liberty, but Christianity alone has united the con
tradictory conclusions, Christianity alone has seen
that man's moment of conscious bondage is his
moment of potential freedom. What does Paul
mean when he says, The law of the spirit of life
hath made me free from the law of sin and death ?
He means that the law which told him he was a
sinner told him that sin was alien to his nature.
Had it not been alien to his nature it would not
have come to him as a pain, nor would he have
felt it to be a bondage. He would no more have
experienced it as a privation than a man born blind
experiences as a privation the want of sight. His
sense of darkness proved that light was his birth
right, and he felt that his birthright must be within
reach of his normal powers. His ideal of purity
was itself his moral obligation to seek it, and the
fact of his moral obligation was the proof of his
power. He said, like the German thinker of a
later age, / ought, therefore I can ; in proportion
to my sense of obligation, so is my measure of
power* Between Saul of Tarsus, the Protestant
of the first century, and Emmanuel Kant, the Pro
testant of the eighteenth, there is, indeed, on the
purely historical side a very marked intellectual
* See Kant's " Categorical Imperative," Metaph. of Ethics, p. 27, 3rd ed.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SIN. 77
resemblance. Both rose into being as the result of
a reaction. Both set themselves in antagonism to
a conventional and legal theology. Both sought
to re-establish religion upon a basis of inward
morality. Both made the starting-point of that
morality to consist in something which was not
national but universal. Both, above all, through
the sense of actual dependence, arrived at the pro
phetic recognition of a possible freedom, recognised
in their very power to feel their chain the evidence
that the chain was not their birthright, and the
power that impelled them to be free. In a word,
to the religious reformer of the first century, and
to the philosophic reformer of the eighteenth, the
chain of moral corruption presented itself as a
burden of responsibility, and where there is a
burden of responsibility there is already a sense of
independence. The man who is weighed down with
the conviction of something which he ought to do,
may indeed be bowed to the earth as one who
bears the yoke, but the load which makes him a
servant is the weight of his own riches. The study
of the Christian doctrine of sin leads us directly
to the gates of a new problem — the Christian ex
position of the ground of human responsibility.
To the study of that new problem we must now
direct our attention.

V.
GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
At the close of the previous chapter we pointed out
that there is a very close connection between the
sense of human depravity and the sense of moral
responsibility. But it must be observed that in this
statement the word "sense" forms a very important
factor. It is just by leaving out this little word
that some creeds and confessions have fallen into a
contradiction in terms. The sense of depravity is
not identical with the state of depravity; the former
begins when the latter is passing away. Yet at
certain epochs of the Christian Church it has been
no uncommon occurrence for these two things to be
confounded. It has been no uncommon occurrence
for the preacher in one breath to proclaim at once
the moral deadness and the moral responsibility of
the soul. We have been told again and again that
all the imaginations of every man's heart are only
evil continually ; that he is incapable in his own
strength of thinking one good thought, or of doing
one good thing ; that, without the aid of a super
natural life transforming him into a new creature,
it would be impossible for him even to desire a

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 79
participation in the pure and holy. And yet at the
close of all these statements — nay, as a corollary
from all these statements — there has come the
assurance that we are under the wrath and curse
of God, and only waiting to receive the just
reward of our sins. Now it is quite competent
for any divine to hold either of these, but not
both. He may say, if he choose, that man's
nature is depraved to the extent of being incapable
even of conceiving goodness, or, he may say that
man's nature is so bad as to be every moment in
danger of the Divine judgment, but he cannot hold
these two propositions at the same time without in
tellectual suicide. The one is the contradictory of
the other ; if the one be true, the other must be
false. The one is the doctrine of human impotence,
and therefore of human unaccountableness ; the
other is the doctrine of human responsibility, and
therefore of human power.
No man is responsible for that which is natu
rally and originally beyond his power. We lay this
down as a first principle of ethics, and we use the
qualifying phrase advisedly. We can conceive
circumstances in which a man's impotence may be
itself culpable. He may have allowed the passion
for strong drink by repeated acts of indulgence to
gain such an ascendancy over him that resistance
to it has become impossible. In this case the
impotence is not natural nor original ; it is
acquired, and exists within the man as a monu-

80 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
ment of blame. But the position of man in the
theological systems under consideration is very
different from this. It is not the position of one
Avho has squandered his fortune and become poor ;
it is the case of a being who never had a fortune to
squander, who has been born and bred in poverty.
and has no conception of the pleasure which money
brings. As if to leave no mistake on this subject,
the sin of man is declared to be original — born with
him. Of course no one would say that the fact of
original sin is incompatible with responsibility. A
man may be born with a hereditary bias towards
drunkenness, but if in addition to that bias he is
born with a hereditary strength of will, it becomes
his duty to root it out. Let us suppose, however,
that this bias towards drunkenness were the only
evidence the man gave of life, that he gave no sign
of any other sensation, nor of any other manifesta
tion of will, you would then represent the case of
the theologians in question. A sin which is at
once original and universal, born with the man
and diffused through the whole nature of the man,
cannot possibly involve the imputation of guilt.
Guilt demands power. If I am responsible for
living in ignorance of God, it is because I have
faculties which bring me into some relation to God.
Why am I not responsible for my ignorance of
what will happen ten years hence? Simply and
solely because I have no faculty which relates to
the future. If there be not an original righteous-

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 8 1
ness as well as an original sin, theologians must
abandon the belief that religion has anything to do
with morality.
The key-note of Christianity is, man has power
to be saved ! The proof is that it offers salvation.
It holds out a gift which may be taken by the
putting forth of the hand, and thereby it assumes
that man has a hand. It declares in the most
explicit terms that the motive which it brings to
bear on the human soul ought to be irresistible.
"If I had not come and spoken to them, they had
not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their
sin " (John xv. 22), These words are very striking.
Taken in their purely ethical aspect they imply that
the principle of virtue, as Christianity has revealed
it, ought to exert an, invincible influence over all
men, that its empire should admit of no competitor,
and that its dominion over the human heart should
brook no bouuds. And this is not less remarkable
from the fact that it is spoken not of saints, but of
sinners, of men who have chosen to live contrary to
the law of virtue. One asks, On what ground can
such a statement be made ? If these men have
been born in a state of absolute depravity, in a
depravity which has rendered immoral not only
every deed and word but even every thought, why
should it be said that one manifestation of virtue
ought to be more compelling than another ? What
meaning would there be in saying of a blind man,
" If I had not brought the light of the sun to him,

82 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
if I had only given him candle-light, I would not
have blamed him for not seeing"? wherein would
consist the absurdity of such a statement ? Simply
here, that to such a man there can exist no
difference between candle-light and sun-light;
there can be no degrees in negation. Yet it is not
a whit less absurd to say that a totally depraved
man is rendered in any degree more guilty by the
fact that he has rejected the highest manifestation
of spiritual light and love. Moral blindness, like
physical blindness, must be just as impervious to
the rays of a Sun of Righteousness as to the glimmer
of a merely earthly heroism, and it is alike as
blameless in its failure to perceive the one, as it is
in its inability to discern the other.
There is then a presupposition involved in the
Christian revelation. It assumes that man is
endowed with a moral nature, with a power to
choose what is good. But the question now
arises, Where is the evidence of such a power?
The problem is comparatively easy so long as
it lies between the revelation of Christian morality
and the systems of Christian theology, but it
assumes a more serious aspect when it embraces
the wider battle-ground between the revelation of
Christian morality and our experience of the facts
of life. For the question simply is, Have we a free
choice ? Is there within the human soul a power
of goodness ? That is the great problem of one of
the greatest theological works of modern times — ¦

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 83
Julius Midler's Doctrine of Sin. An ardent
advocate for the liberty of the will, he feels that
unless man has been allowed to choose virtue for
himself he cannot be said to love virtue. To make
a man worthy of the name of good, there must
have been some golden moment of his life in which
his choice between good and evil was free and
unbiassed, a moment in which he stood on the
mountain's brow and saw on the one side the
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and
on the other the kingdom of righteousness and its
power. But Mulier cannot find any such moment
in the life of man. At no stage of individual
existence can he discover an unbiassed will. We
are what we are by reason of what we have been ;
the present is the child of the past. We have
never had a chance of choosing virtue, for the
choice of vice has been bequeathed to us as an
inheritance. We have come into the world with
corrupt natures, and the corruption has weakened
the will's power. Virtue no longer stands before
us as she is ; she is seen through a mist, through a
glass darkly. Her beauty is veiled to the human
eye. Man would choose her if he could only see
her. But the mist of his own corruption prevents
him from seeing her; his eyes are blinded, there
fore his choice is not free.
Whence then, asks Mulier, is this sense of
responsibility which beyond all doubt exists within
us? If in point of fact wo have never since the day

o

84 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
of our birth enjoyed one hour of freedom, if there
has not been one solitary moment in which our will
has been suffered to fix an unbiassed gaze on the
alternatives of good and evil, how is it that every
moment of my life I feel as if I were free, feel when
I do good that I ought to have done better, when
I do wrong that I ought to have refrained ? Mulier
answers, It is because we have come from another
world where the will was free ! There was a life
before this life in which we had our choice of right
and wrong. We stood upon a pre-existent moun
tain, and saw the alternative of the two kingdoms,
and said with open eyes : " Evil, be thou my
good ! " And the result has been this present
world of material corruption, this world in which
the eye is under mist and the will is under chains
and the heart is under ice. The slavery has come
to us with birth, because before birth we elected
to be slaves, and the sense of responsibility alone
remains to tell us we once were free.*
The barren speculation here indulged in is one
that can neither be verified nor contradicted. The
point which concerns us is that we are quite inde
pendent of either its verification or its contra
diction. The hypothesis is purely superfluous, and for this
reason that the facts of nature explain themselves.
There is no need to go out of the present world to
find a solution of the difficulty; the solution lies
* Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom, vii. 6,

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 85
within the moral world itself. We agree with
Mulier that freedom is necessary to responsibility,
we agree with him that the sense of responsibility
demands the existence somewhere of a power of
choice. But we say that this power of choice is
here. We go further. We say that every de
veloped man, whether he is classed in the category
of good or bad, has in point of fact chosen the good
in preference to the evil. We say that the differ
ence between a virtuous man and a vicious man
does not lie in the difference of their intellectual
choice. We believe the aphorism of Socrates to be
capable of verification in all experience : No man
is wicked from choice. We all know what led
Socrates to give utterance to that remarkable state
ment. The Sophists were denying moral responsi
bility. They said, How can there be a standard of
right and wrong when so many deliberately prefer
wrong to rio-ht ? Socrates said, It is not so ; no
man that has come into consciousness of his moral
nature cau for a moment hesitate, or does for a
moment hesitate, between the alternatives ; the
absolute standard of virtue is proved by this, that
it is always chosen. That is what Socrates meant,
and perhaps profounder words were never uttered
in the whole sphere of morals. For, we ask, What
do we mean by such terms as right and wrong,
good and evil, virtue and vice ? We do not ask
how we came by the ideas ; we leave that question
to the metaphysicians. We may hold with Butler

86 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
that conscience is a natural tribunal within the
soul,* or we may hold with Bain that it is only
the last result of a process of utilitarian education;!
for our purpose it is all the same. We take up the
man just where the evolutionist lays him down, and
our anatomy begins where his comes to an end. It
is denied by no school of physics or faith or morals
that the ideas of right and wrong belong to normal
humanity; on this rock we build our structure. In
whatever manner we came by these ideas, it is ad
mitted on all hands that we have them now; the
simple question is, How much does this admission
imply ?
It implies nothing less than this, that man has
freedom to choose rectitude. The very fact that
he calls right by the name of right and wrong by
the name of wrong is a proof, not only that there
is no barrier to his choice of virtue, but that his
choice of virtue is already made. If the form of
virtue were hid from him it would be quite im
possible that, even in language, he should use such
an antithesis as that implied in the ideas of right
and wrong. The moment a man says, I have done
wrong, he chooses the other course, declares that
the other course is better, preferable, more worthy
of being followed. And he does not choose it a
whit the less should he continue to follow the lower
path ; the very condemnation in that case is that
* See Sermons I and 2.
+ See Emotions and Will, pp. 283-286.

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 87
he is acting in opposition to the choice of his higher
nature. Every sting of a remorseful conscience is
a choice of that nature. Every sense of sin is a
preference of the human will for holiness. Every
effort even to shut the moral eyes, every attempt
to drown the voice of conscience in a vortex of other
voices, is an indirect testimony to the fact that man
in some mode of his being has declared goodness
to be the strongest motive.
It may be said, indeed, if man thus habitually
chooses the good, why does he so generally follow
the evil ? It was man's following of evil that led
Julius Mulier to say that the form of virtue must
be dimly seen by him. What if the cause of the
anomaly should be exactly the reverse ? What if
it should be found that of the two alternatives, the
one which is the dimmer is not the virtue but the
vice ? What if the reason of man's degeneracy be,
not so much the inability to see virtue clothed in
her own garments, as the inability to divest vice of
garments not her own ? For our part we have no
doubt about the matter; we hold the faith of
Socrates. We believe that in the present system
of things no being has ever been heard to say, Evil,
be thou my good ! It is true, there are certain
states of primitive culture in which commendation
is extended to many acts that are now called
criminal. And the argument would be indeed very
strong if they were commended as criminal acts.
But the truth is, the thing which is not seen by

88 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
the savage is just the criminality or moral turpi
tude. He considers theft as an act of adroitness,
robbery as a proof of strength, duplicity as an evi
dence of wisdom. Adroitness and strength and
wisdom are all good things, and in themselves all
objects of desire. Accordingly, when these qualities
are displayed, as they may be, in a course of selfish
aggression, the savage loses sight of the selfishness
in the admiration of the traits by which it is accom
panied. Nor let it be thought that the savage is
peculiar in this respect. We believe he only ex
hibits in a coarse form the principle on which all
vice makes its progress in the world. To the
civilised man as to the savage the secret of the
power of vice is a false heroism.
" Vice is a creature of such hideous mien,
That to be hated needs but to he seen. "
So doubtless it is, but then the word " but" is very
deceptive. It implies that to see evil as evil is a
very simple thing. The truth is, it is not only the
most difficult part of the process of moral regenera
tion, it is, strictly speaking, the moral regeneration
itself. If a man saw evil to be evil and evil only,
he never would follow it. This he does not readily
see, and in the mere state of nature never can see.
Evil always comes to him as something more than
evil, and it is always chosen by him for the sake of
the something more. Sometimes it takes the form
of interest. Sometimes it takes the shape of man-

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 89
liness. Sometimes it offers itself as an ocean of
forgetfulness in which to drown a load of care. In
no case does it present itself as what it really is ; if
it did, Pope's aphorism would be fulfilled, and it
would be hated ; it is not hated because it is not
clearly seen.
Now it is in strict and rather striking accordance
with this that in the teaching of the New Testament
the degree of a man's spiritual illumination is said
to be proportionate to the degree of clearness in his
vision of sin. At the top of the spiritual ladder we
find the saintly Paul calling himself the chief of
sinners; at the foot of the ladder we hear the ideal
types of paganism spoken of as unconscious of their
own depravity (2 Thess. ii. 7)- The passage just
referred to is indeed in this connection worthy of
some consideration. Paul says that " the mystery
of iniquity doth already work," in other words, that
sin is operating in hearts that are quite unconscious
of its presence. It is most hid from those in whom
it has become a nature, an atmosphere. It is too
near to them to be perceived by them ; the reve
lation which they need most is a revelation of their
own actions. Now, according to St. Paul, there is
something which prevents such a revelation : " He
that hindereth will hinder until he be taken out of
the way, and then shall that wdcked one be
revealed." Who is "he that hindereth?" Is he
the Devil or the Roman Emperor ? We should say
he stands for both, and a great many other poten-

90 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
tates beside. Whatever Paul meant historically,
there can be no question what he meant ethically,
and this alone here concerns our purpose. The
power which in his view prevented sin from being
seen as sin was the worldly or carnal principle.
The power which blinded pagan Rome was a false
ideal of greatness. Men had come to think that
the secret of man's glory lay in the abundance of
the things he could call his own. The pursuit of
self had thus become heroic, and all the forms of
selfishness had been masked under heroic names.
It has been more or less the same in every age.
The true character of vice has a hundred times
been hid by a false glare and a false name. Duel
ling has been called a debt of honour. Opposition
to the spirit of religion has been styled freethought.
The life of impure morals has received the name of
libertinism — suggestive of freedom from a chain.
The effect in each case is the same. Sin is not seen
to be what it is, and is made to seem something
which it is not. We are forced to experience what
Paul experienced — that there is something in the
human heart which prevents the revelation of man
to himself, a curtain which hides from him his own
actions and shuts him out from the possibility of
self-scrutiny. The region where man is strongest
is precisely that region where he is most a slave ;
he has a very dim perception of the nature of his
own evil.
This, then, is the conclusion at which Christianity

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 9 1
and human nature have both arrived. Man is
partly a slave, and partly free. His slavery consists
in the fact, that in the world of actual practice he
finds it hard to detect sin as sin ; his freedom lies
in this, that in the world of thought and theory he
never hesitates in his preference for the good :
"The evil which I would not, that I do; and the
good which I would, that I do not." * It will be
observed that in the view of St. Paul embodied in
this passage the one free thing about man is just
the will itself: "I would," "I would not." It is
in practical action he shows himself a slave : " I
do," "I do not." Man's strong point is with St.
Paul his power of choice, or rather, his want of all
power to choose anything but the good. Paul's
notion of moral freedom is different from some
modern notions. He looks upon it not as a
capacity, to weigh impartially the claims of virtue
and of vice, but as a necessity to be swayed by the
claims of virtue alone. Man's freedom of choice is
the unrestrainedness of his choice, the absence of
all hesitation in his choice. In so far as he
hesitates, deliberates, weighs alternatives, he is not
free. Perfect moral freedom is the perfect captivity
of the life to goodness, or to what Paul calls, "the
law written in the heart." True freedom is not
liberation from law, but liberation from the sense
of restraint. The sense of restraint will never be
perfectly absent until our subjection to law is
* Cf. Kant, Metaph. of Ethics, pp. 70-73.

92 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
complete. A man only masters an art when the
art has mastered him ; he is then, as we say in
common language at home in it. And this is his
freedom. To be morally free is to have the moral
nature dominated by a spirit of holiness ; " Where
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
Now we have admitted, St. Paul has admitted,
that we see not yet all things subject to this spirit ;
there is an element of slavery in the nature of man.
But what Paul says is, that the slavery does not
extend to the will. There is one part of our nature
which is free to choose good, which never hesitates
for a moment in its preference for virtue ; it is that
power, call it by what name you will, which
distinguishes between the right and the wrong.
The very capacity to distinguish is itself a choice.
The moment I have said — There is a right, and
there is a wrong, I have declared virtue to be the
stronger motive, I have decided in favour of good
ness. That moment too I have become a responsible
being. I can no longer plead that the motives of
sin are too strong for my weak nature ; by the very
use of the word right, I have decided that goodness
is, and ought to be, the most powerful influence.
It is true I have only made this decision in the
will, but, as Kant says, a man's will is his proper
self.* The will is the man ; the moral decision of
the will is the moral decision of the man. That
decision has made us responsible beings, for, wher-
*¦ Metaph. of Ethics, p. 71,

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 93
ever the distinction of right from wrong is known,
it is always on the side of good. The very fact of
making such a distinction is itself a choice ; it is a
proof that the will has already been dominated by
the influence of a mighty motive which has im
pelled the innermost life of man to call the moral
law by the loftier name.
What, then, is the nature of this responsibility ?
Its ground lies in our choice, but what is the extent
of its requirement ? The answer must be clear.
My will, that is to say, my innermost nature, has
chosen the moral law, has declared the moral law to
be the more excellent way, by giving it the name
of right. I am responsible for the carrying out
of that choice. I am bound to make that moral
law, to which my will has already submitted, the
governing force of my whole nature. There is no
longer any excuse for disharmony when my highest
life has decided that the right lies with moral law.
Henceforth it must be my task to make my nature
consistent with itself. As yet there is no such
consistency. We have seen how in the conception
of St. Paul the elements of our being are at war.
There is a rupture in the life of man, a schism in
the human soul. I always choose right ; I tend to
follow wrong. The question is, Why ? Is it that
when I come from the inner into the outer world a
stronger motive assails me and compels me to re
verse my choice. In point of fact I never do
reverse my choice ; even where I follow the wrong,

94 GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY.
I still " see and approve better things." It is
impossible, therefore, that the superior strength of
a new motive can be my excuse. What is
conscience itself but a protest against such a
conclusion ? What is it but the declaration that
the first choice of the will remains unreversed, that
the first motive of the will remains undimmed, and
that the failure to execute the will remains un
accounted for and therefore unexcused.
It is this unanswered "Why" that constitutes
man's sense of moral guilt. He feels that he ought
to do more than he has done, that he has power to
do more than he has done. His sense of duty is
itself a sense of power — " I ought, therefore I can ! "
He has chosen the right, therefore the right cannot
be beyond him. It is within the orbit of his aspira
tions, and so it must be within the range of his
capacities. The mind's recognition of its slavery is
itself its hope of redemption. What, as unfolded
by Christianity, is the plan of its redemption?
What are the steps of that process by which, in the
view of the Christian system, the spirit of man is
to rise from slavery into freedom? All doctrines
of a purely dogmatic theology we here pass by on
the other side, for the simple reason that in rela
tion to our subject they are on the other side. In
their own departments of study they have their
legitimate place, but the department with which
we have to do lies within the limits of human
nature and normal experience. The question which

GROUND OF CHRISTIAN RESPONSIBILITY. 95
we have to determine is, To what extent do the
doctrines of Christian theology admit of being
translated into the principles of universal morality ?
Amid the many things which they profess to reveal,
do they throw any light on the ethical life of man ?
Do they furnish any hint or suggestion or principle
which may serve to light up the steps of that steep
ascent by which the human soul must mount the
heights of duty ? The answer to that question is
the problem that now lies before us.

VI.
THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
We have now come to the great practical question,
In what way is a human soul to justify itself, to
set itself in harmony with the law of conscience ?
The question assumed originally a theological form,
but its interests really lay in the appeal which it
made to the moral struggles of the heart. We have
seen that a part altogether from theology, nay, apart
altogether from any definite form of religion, there
is within the human soul the sense of a violated
law. We have seen that in the heart of every man
there is a dualism — a strife between two. Christi
anity neither created nor revealed that dualism ; it
only made the perception of it more vivid. The
sense of a violated law belongs to no creed ; it
belongs to man as man. It takes its rise originally,
not from the promulgation of a priestly mystery,
but from the discovery of an actual discord. To
man in every age there thunders a voice from the
mount of his highest nature — Thou shalt! Thou
shalt not ! — a voice which ought to be supreme, and
which claims to be omnipotent.. But to man in
every age there has come also one uniform experi-

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 97
ence — that of a tendency to resist the voice. It is
the voice that wakens his sense of responsibility ;
it is his tendency to resist the voice that makes his
sense of guilt. And it is from the conflict of both
that the question comes — What must I do to be
saved ? Christianity did not start that problem,
religion did not start that problem ; it is, first aud
foremost, a problem dictated by the daily life and
common needs of man. Christianity has added no
new need to the soul ; it has only flashed a fresh
light upon the needs of nature. The starting-point
of Christianity is the want of nature — the absence
of a peace within the soul.
What, then, is the moral method by which
Christianity meets this moral want of man ? Its
method is at once simple and profound. It pro
poses to begin the moral education of the soul by
an appeal to the child-life. It proposes that man
should enter on his training for the kingdom of
heaven by a precisely analogous process to that
which constitutes his tuition for the kingdom of
earth. This is the deep thought which Christ
means to suggest when He sets a little child in
the midst of His disciples, the deep principle He
designs to convey when He declares that the spirit
of childhood is essential to participation in the life
of God. For, let us consider what is the method
by which the child first enters on the knowledge of
this world. It is in some form or other the study
of a picture-book. It sees in objects the symbols
G

98 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
of men ; in men the symbols of thought. Unto the
child, without a parable, life speaketh not. Its first
idea of everything must be an embodied idea. It
can only love virtue by loving the virtuous man.
It cannot learn the maxims of the copy-book as
long as they are not translated into experience.
Before all things it must see the action, the form,
the life. It must learn to admire the deed as the
deed of an historical being, must long to emulate
the act as the act of an heroic man. The birth of
its virtue will coincide with the birth of its hero-
worship ; its reverence for greatness will be the
reverence for a person. When we turn now to the
childhood of Christianity we are confronted by a
very similar spectacle. The entire aim of that
religion is at the outset to draw back the mind
of man into that mode of perceiving truth which
characterised his early days. It calls him to behold
moral truth in a parable, i.e., in the picture of a human
life. That which flashes before the view of infant
Christendom is not an abstract idea, but the figure of
a man — a man whose every word, whose every deed,
is a professed appeal to the intuitions of the child-
life. He acts by symbols, He speaks by parables,
He wins by ministration to the common needs
with which every child can sympathise. He meets
the world as a world, in its daily toils and common
place wants. He calls to Him those who labour and
those who are heavy-laden. He breaks the bread to
famished multitudes in the desert. He takes up

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 99
the cross of paralytics, lepers, demoniacs. He
throws himself into contact with the weak ones
of the earth, those who had proved themselves
unfit for the battle of life, and He reveals to their
hearts the glad assurance that life even for them
has not lost all its glory. That is the form in
which Christian morality first addresses itself to the
Christian consciousness. It is the form in which
all truth everywhere begins to speak — the form of
a symbol. The child-life of humanity is placed in
front of a sensuous stage, ostensibly to see, really to
learn. It is attracted first only by the images of
things, and it is through its admiration of the
images that the things themselves enter in. Chris
tianity has only followed the universal law of
development when it says, " Except ye be converted
and become as little children, ye cannot enter into
the kingdom of heaven."
But let us advance a step further. We have said
that the child-life of humanity, while it is seemingly
only a spectator, is in reality a learner, and this in
the present instance is pre-eminently true. All the
time the infant-life of Christendom was to outward
appearance merely gazing on a human image, it
wras unconsciously imbibing a new moral nature,
becoming the recipient of another and a higher life.
Yet it is just here that for the first time we are
confronted by that element in Christian morality
which constitutes at once its special feature and its
peculiar difficulty. Were you to ask a Jew what

IOO THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
use there is in looking on the vision of a good man's
life, his answer would be, It will help you, by its
example, to keep the moral law. But if you were
to ask a Christian of the first century in what way
a man is to receive good from the vision of Christ,
his answer would be seemingly the opposite. He
would not tell you in the first instance that the
advantage of such a vision lay in the incentive it
gave to moral practice ; he would say, " We are
justified by faith ! " An answer so strange and
paradoxical — an answer which by the earliest age
of the Christian Church itself was felt to involve a
grave and arduous problem — certainly demands our
full and free, consideration. That it is not a matter
of purely theological import may be inferred from
the fact that the principle which it involves is made
to underlie all theology. For it is quite true what
Dr. Stanley Leathes says, that the relation which
Christ required of His disciples was above all others
the relation of faith— the believing attitude of
soul.* Not only does He require that attitude
more prominently than all others, He asks it
previous to all others. He will not even display
His power until He has found faith in the man who
desires to see it. He values faith, not as an
evidence of theological training, but as a prepara
tion for theological training. He looks upon the
power to believe as a part of man's moral nature,
and it is because He desires an approach from the
* Religion of the Christ, p. 229.

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. IOI
moral nature of man that He seeks before all things
an evidence of faith.
And yet, after all, is faith a moral act ? Such is
the question which with ever-increasing power is
pressing upon the nineteenth century. It would
be a great mistake, however, to imagine that it is a
purely modern question ; it is as old as Christianity,
and in one sense older.'"" It gave rise to a Jewish
party in the Christian Church ; it generated an
intellectual schism in the Jewish Church ; it has
agitated human nature outside of all Churches. It
is not merely that an intellectual belief in the his
torical facts of Christianity is to be found side by
side with the most corrupt moral practices ; St.
James himself saw this when he cried, " The devils
believe and tremble." But the question which
chiefly presses upon the mind is concerned with a
deeper difficulty. It does not so much ask whether
men are living up to their belief, as whether their
belief itself has any moral value. To the modern
mind especially the inquiry presents itself as a
matter of vital interest. It asks, Why do we call
a man good ? Is it for what he does, or is it for
what he believes ? If it is for what he believes,
why is not all belief of equal value ? If a man
says, I believe in the accuracy of the narrative of
Josephus, we should no more think of calling him
virtuous than we should think of callino- him
O
discerning. Yet what is the difference between
* See Farrar's Early Christianity, II. p 79, sq.

102 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
the man who makes such an averment and the
man who says, I believe in the narratives of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ? Is not the one
as much as the other expressing his conviction of
the truth of an historical fact? Nevertheless the
verdict of religious opinion treats these men very
differently ; it regards the belief of the first as a
thing morally indifferent ; it calls the faith of the
second a proof of Divine grace. If the first man
should at any time come to the conclusion that the
narrative of Josephus is not accurate, he would not
be esteemed morally either better or worse. If the
second man were at any time to reach the convic
tion that a similar inaccuracy attached to the evan
gelical narrative, the verdict of religious opinion
would pronounce upon him a sentence of con
demnation; he would be called a sceptic. How
are we to explain this seeming inconsistency ? how
are we to vindicate the morality of faith ?
The first step towards such a vindication is to
distinguish two things which the popular view is
apt to confound — the scholastic and Scriptural
meaning of the word faith. In the scholastic
sense faith signifies merely an assent of the intel^
lect. Now, we have no hesitation in saying that
a merely intellectual assent can have only an intel
lectual value, and that the possession of such a
faith does not render a man good or bad. It may
be said indeed, Is not a man who believes in a
future life more likely to lead a good life here thau

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 103
a man who does not ? To this we must answer,
It depends entirely on the moral character of that
future in which he believes. We can conceive
circumstances in which such a man would be
positively the worse for his belief. Let us suppose
that his conception of future happiness is the
Mohammedan one of a heaven of selfish indulgence
and unrestrained libertinism ; will any man say
that his faith in the future is not an absolute
hindrance to his moral development? Christian
theology, indeed, has extruded from its heaven the
element of libertinism, but has it always extruded
the element of selfish indulgence ? We shall not
here discuss the point ; we shall only say that if
ever such an ingredient should enter into the con
ception of the Christian heaven, it would render
the Christian's faith in immortality immoral — a
barrier to his spiritual progress, and a death to his
Divine aspirations.
The same may be said of any other dogma. If
it be asked, for example, if a man's life is not likely
to be better for believing in the Divinity of Christ,
it must again be answered, that it depends solely
on the moral sense he attaches to the word Divine.
There have been men in pre-Christian religions who
have worshipped physical power, brute force, ability
to crush the weak. To such men these things were
the essence of divinity ; and for that very reason
they were to them a source of immorality. Men
followed that which they admired. They looked

104 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
upon physical oppression as an object of worship,
and it was only natural they should look upon it
as an object of emulation. If their notion of
divinity had been merely an abstract or intellectual
one, it would have made them neither better nor
worse. But when their notion of divinity was an
immoral one, it could not do otherwise than render
them immoral. The vices of Roman Imperialism
are the legitimate fruit of the worship of Roman
paganism ; where a man's treasure is there his
heart will be. Nor has the Christian conception of
the Divine been at all times free from the same
reproach. The Christ of Medisevalism was too
often but a pagan deity under a Christian name —
a terrible figure in the air, brandishing the flaming
sword of Judgment, and evoking vengeance upon
the head of His enemies. And wherever in the
Medigeval world that conception of the Christ
prevailed, the hearts of men were proportion
ately hardened. It created the atrocities of the
Crusades, it gave rise to the horrors of the Inquisi
tion. If the God of Mediaevalism had been but an
intellectual abstraction, His influence would have
been harmless. But when the God of Mediaevalism
was conceived as a despot in the sky, His influence
became pernicious. Men received a bias in favour
of despotism. They came to admire crushing power
because it was crushing. They grew callous to the
call of mercy and deaf to the voice of pity. The
tenderness of the humanity within them would have

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 10 5
been utterly suppressed if the influence of the God
of heaven had not been counteracted on earth by
the reverence for the memory of the human Child,
and the softening devotion to the virgin mother.
Now, let us suppose that the conception of Christ
had been of an opposite nature. Let us imagine
that the mediaeval conception of Divinity had itself
been that ideal assigned to the virgin mother.
Conceive that, instead of a stern unbending sove
reign wrapt up in the consciousness of his own
majesty, and valuing beyond all things the material
strength of his own dominion, the eye of the
medisevalist had rested habitually on the form of a
high priest in heaven, on the figure of a Divine
Being whose Divinity lay in his sacrificial power,
and the rod of whose empire was the sceptre of
love — apart altogether from dogmatic considera
tions, is it possible to imagine a more salutary
influence than such a conception would have
exerted ? It would have gone far to make the
world of the middle ages in every sense the opposite
of what it has actually been. Presenting a new
object of worship, a new standard of the Divine, it
would steadily and surely have conformed to that
standard the lives aud thoughts of men. Nay, that
which a man worships is already in possession of
his thoughts ; it is only the life that needs to be
conformed, and where the heart is the life shall soon
be. If the mediaeval world had assigned to its
ideal of God in heaven a portion of that feminine

106 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
helpfulness which is found in the Virgin on earth,
its ideal of priesthood would have been transformed
from a conception of Papal power into a conception
of ministering service.
Now, what we have here said hypothetically is in
the New Testament exhibited actually. If we ask
why it is that the New Testament requires faith we
shall find the answer to be, that what the New
Testament calls faith is itself a moral aspiration.
The New Testament is quite well aware of the
distinction between an intellectual and a moral
assent, as the narrative of Nicodemus clearly shows.
Nicodemus has all the faith of the most orthodox
Scholastic ; he has not only determined the measure
of Christ's greatness, but he is able to give a reason
for his belief. Yet this man, so correct in his
theological convictions, is declared not to have even
seen the kingdom of God. He is told that before
he can see the form of God's kingdom he requires
to be in possession of its spirit. From such a
statement there can be but one inference, viz, that
the faith which Christianity demands is not so much
a persuasion of the intellect as an aspiration of the
soul. To see the kingdom of God is to be already
in possession of that kingdom, for it is only seen
by that spiritual similarity which enables kindred
minds to recognise each other's power.
If then it be asked, why is faith in Christ
regarded by the New Testament as a valuable
thing ? the answer is not hard to find. If Christ

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 1 07
had been introduced into the world as a mere
abstraction, or if He had demanded faith from man
as a condition of revealing His character, the belief
in Him would then have been a merely intellectual
act, and could in no way have possessed a moral
significance. But the case is entirely altered when,
before demanding anything at all, Christ reveals
the nature of His mind. He does not ask faith in
Himself until He has shown Himself — " Believe Me
for the work's sake." His first attitude is not one
of receiving but of giving : He begins by manifest
ing His purity. The faith which He requires is a
faith in this manifestation. To believe in Christ is
a sign of moral goodness, because it is a belief in
moral purity. It is the soul's assent to the beauty
of holiness, it is the spirit's admiration of the
loveliness of a stainless life. When a man looks at
a portrait of moral perfection, and says, " I believe
in that," he is already in participation of that which
he admires. He could not admire it unless it were
in him. If it were a mere physical gift it would be
very different. A man may love to gaze on out
ward beauty though he himself be outwardly de
formed. But he cannot admire spiritual beauty if
he be altogether spiritually deformed ; to say so
is a contradiction in terms. The admiration of
spiritual beauty is itself a feature of that beauty ;
it implies an adaptation between the seer and the
thing wrhich he sees. As surely as the love of
poetry proves the presence of a poetic soul even in

108 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
him who has hitherto been mute, as certainly as
the interest in a metaphysical problem shows the
existence of a philosophic faculty even in a practical
mind, so surely does the admiration for virtue show
that he who admires is in germ already virtuous.
That admiration is expressed in Christianity by the
word faith. When a man said, I believe in Christ,
he really said, and meant to say, I believe in the
beauty of goodness, in the desirableness of purity,
in the right of righteousness to be ultimately
triumphant. He declared that Christ was his ideal
of perfection, that to that ideal he was in thought
at least loyal and true, and that he longed for the
time to come when the actions of his life would be
conformable to the thought of his soul.
And this leads us naturally to consider that
problem which has always been specially associated
with the subject of faith — the connection between
the thought and the life. When it has been de
cided that Christian faith is itself a moral impulse,
it still remains to ask, what is the relation of this
impulse to the outward lives of men ? To ask this
is really to revive that crucial question of the First
Christian century : Is a man justified by works or
by faith only ? For us indeed that question can
have only an ethical significance ; with its theo
logical aspect we have here nothing to do. We
believe, however, that as all widely accepted dogma
has its root in some fact of human nature, the theo
logical dogma of Justification can be illustrated by

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. I09
the moral nature of man. Nay, we shall go further.
We say that Paul's theological conception of faith
is directly built upon the moral aspiration described
in the previous paragraph. By faith in Christ,
Paul means union with Christ. Now in every
moral aspiration, by which one mind seeks to rise
to the level of another mind, such an union is im
plied. The moment I have admired the spiritual
beauty of another soul I am already in union with
that soul. My aspiration towards him is only
possible to me on account of the oneness of our
minds. I cannot seek any spiritual good which I
have not already begun to find. If I say, I belieA^e
in the name, i.e. in the character, of the Lord Jesus
Christ, I only do so, I only can do so, by reason of
a kindred spirit ; I believe in Him through that
which is common to Him and me — "Blessed art
thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood have not
revealed it unto thee, but My Father in heaven ! "
The theological conception of faith being then
not at variance with the moral one ; but, on the
contrary, the necessary inference and corollary from
it, it remains to ask whether the theological effect
attributed to faith be in any sense analogous to its
moral effect in the actual world ? Is there any
moral sense in which it can be said that a man is
justified by faith without the deeds of the law?
There is ; and it is one of the deepest experiences of
the moral consciousness. It may be said with perfect
truth that the measure of a man is, not what he

I 1 0 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
can do, but what he believes in. In every case the
spiritual belief of a man outruns his actual capacity.
We often point with sadness to the amount of
hypocrisy that exists in the world. We hear men
in their books and conversation giving utterance to
the most pious and edifying sentiments, but when
we meet them in the contact of life we experi
ence a shock of contradiction. Yet there is no
necessity to suppose that the contradiction has its
root in hypocrisy. In a large number of cases it
would be more correct to say that these men are
"justified by faith." They have the sight of an
ideal — the true definition of Christian faith. They
see before them an image of what they would like
to be. They have faith in it, that is to say, they
believe it to be the only object worth following, and
the only object Avhich it will reward them to follow.
But just as the natural eye can see further than the
steps can travel, so the moral sight of these men
penetrates to a distance which transcends their
capacity for moral walking. They see like Balaam
the Star that comes out of Judah, but while it
speaks to their eye it lies beyond the reach of their
feet. They have sight of the ideal, but their foot
steps lag behind their sight. The new vision does
not at once dispel the old nature any more than the
morning sun at once dispels by its rising the clouds
and shadows which the night has left behind. The
charge of inconsistency would be much more easily
substantiated than that of hypocrisy ; only it is, at

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. I I I
the outset, an inevitable inconsistency, an inconsis
tency which springs from the constitution of human
nature itself. It springs from the fact that the
nature of man does not advance simultaneously to
perfection, that there are powers of the human soul
which seem to outrun the others and arrive more
quickly at their destined goal. It arises from that
law of moral growth by which, while it is yet winter
in the world of action, the aspirations are bursting
into the buds of spring, and while the limbs are yet
paralysed with cold the heart is made aware that
the time for the singing of birds is come.
We ask, then, as St. Paul asked, what is to be
our measure of the man ? Shall it be his works or
his faith, his actual righteousness or his ideal
righteousness ? Two opposite solutions of the
problem have been proposed. The first is that of
the Jew. He decides in favour of works as the
measure of a man. He proposes to estimate the
moral power of a human being by that which at any
given time he is able to do. But it is a law of the
moral life that the more a man can do the more he
feels his own impotence. His ideal seems to fly
further from his sight just in proportion as his acts
conform to it. Hence it was that the Jew of all
men had a peculiar sense of moral unrest. The very
effort to keep the law made him feel the impossi
bility of keeping it ; his legal self-measurement
ended in despair. But here the Christian stepped
in with another and a very different solution. He

I I 2 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
said to the Jew, what if your sense of impossibility
be itself the mark aud sign of your moral progress ?
Are you not altogether on the wrong track to find
an inward source of justification ? You think that
you are less justified in proportion as the law
appears to you too grand to be realised ; it is the
reverse that is true. It is only when the contrast
appears between your moral ideal and your actual
self that you are really on the road to justification.
It is only when your heart feels itself in the presence
of a righteousness, before which the deeds of its
actual life seem poor and mean, that it truly enters
into the hope of a moral and spiritual regeneration ;
it reaches nearest to perfection precisely at those
points in which its distance from perfection is most
vividly realised.
Now, between the claims of these two solutions
there can be no difficulty to decide. That of
Christianity is clearly the one which is most in
harmony with human nature. As a matter of fact,
no great work ever comes up to the greatness of its
ideal. We may take it for granted that the Para
dise Lost, as it appears in print, is not nearly so
grand a creation as the Paradise Lost when it
existed in the brain of Milton. We may consider it
certain that the imitative acts of the child are of
less value than the principle of imitation which
prompted them. We may look upon it as beyond
dispute that the spirit of religion which underlies
any form of worship is of more importance than

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. I 1 3
that form or all other forms put together. What
do these facts mean but this, that the main value of
a deed lies in what it does not say, that the thino-
which makes it good and gives it value is not what
it says but what it suggests of power beyond its
own ! It is true alike of the intellectual and of the
moral hero, that the only sense of satisfaction he
can experience in the completion of any actual
work is just that sense of dissatisfaction which tells
him he is beyond his work ; he is justified by the
sight of his ideal — by faith.
We have now vindicated the claim of Christian
faith to a commanding place in the moral world; we
have done so on the ground of a particular definition
which we have assigned to that faith. We have
defined it to be the sight of an ideal. We have to
add, that if this definition be accepted it will go far
to minimise, nay, to reduce into a unity, those
seemingly various meanings which the word bears
in the New Testament. It is often pointed out by
theologians that the term faith is used in Scripture
to denote different things. Sometimes it is the
opposite of physical perception — " We walk by
faith, not by sight." Sometimes it is the opposite
of outward works — " By the deeds of the law can
no man be justified." Sometimes it is a term that
denotes a steadfast loyalty preserved in the midst
of surrounding difficulties, the opposite of a waver
ing mind — " Thy faith hath made thee whole."
Now, while in these senses of the word faith there
H

I 1 4 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
is admittedly a shade of difference, there is in our
view a common root of agreement. Is there any
similarity of meaning which belongs to the word in
each of these senses ? There is ; the idea of outward
incompleteness. When it is said that faith, and
not sight, is the principle of a Christian's life, what
does that mean ? Is it not clearly this, that he
believes in something which is not yet outwardly
realised ? When it is said that we are not justified
by the deeds of the law, what is that but to say that
we cannot realise our ideal of purity ? When it is
said, " Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give
thee a crown of life," — is not this but in other words
to declare, that the highest of all trust is that which
can believe in a promise which has lost all prospect
of being realised on earth ? In each and all of
these eases faith has one and the same meaning.
It is the sight of an ideal whose outward manifesta
tion is not yet seen, the conviction of a truth whose
proof lies beyond the eye and ear, the assurance of
a result whose accomplishment seems belied by the
actual facts of life.
There is still another sense of the word faith in
the New Testament, iu which it no longer represents
a personal act, but stands for a body of collective
doctrine, it is that^ sense in which Paul says to
Timothy : " Hold fast the old faith once delivered
to the saints." Yet even here it may be said with
truth that the dogmas of the early Church were but
the crystallisations of her ideals. Whatever the

THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH. 1 15
dogmas of Christianity may have become in the
hands of the mediaeval world, there can at least
be no doubt that with the Church of primitive
Christendom they were but the embodiment of the
heart's moral longings. To that Church the value
of the dogma was the moral element to which it
gave expression. It was good to believe in a divine
Christ, because divinity was then something more
than power ; it was power working by love. It
was good to believe in a Trinity, because trinity
was then something more than dogma; it was
grace, love, and communion. It was good to
believe in heaven, because heaven was then some
thing more than a place where men received
physical rewards for duty done ; it was a Temple in
which men served God day and night. It was
good to believe in atonement, because atonement
was then not the mere means of a salvation from
physical fire, but a mode of reconciliation between
the ideal law of conscience and the actual life of
man. We do not say, as an eminent English
divine has tried to show, that the dogmas of
Christianity were essential to the ethics of Christi
anity.""'' We neither affirm nor deny that ; it lies
outside of our province. But we do say, that the
doctrines which to the mediaevalist were precious
on account of their intellectual mystery were prized
by the early Church in view of their moral intelli
gibility. Whether to that primitive Christian
* Wace, Christianity and Morality— ~Boyle Lecture for 1S7S.

I 1 6 THE MORAL PLACE OF FAITH.
consciousness dogma was or was not deemed
essential to morality may be left an open question,
but there can be no question at all that morality
was deemed essential to dogma. In the primitive
gospel religion and morality were two halves of one
whole — the Christian religion was the theory of
Christian morals ; Christian morality was the
practice of the Christian religion. The word
doctrine had always a practical senses it meant
something by which to live. Alike to Paul and to
James, faith without works was dead, because faith
was itself but a visiou anticipative of the work
completed. It Avas but the recognition by the
inner eye of that which the outer eye could not
see, and the realising already of that purity to
reach which the actual life has still to travel far.
The object of a man's faith was nothing less than
the goal of his aspiration, the treasure which he
sought and prayed for. Here we are brought to
the gates of a new subject, to a phase of the
Christian life much misunderstood and often misre
presented — the connection which subsists in Gospel
morality between the value of a man's faith and the
value of his prayer. A subject of such great moral
significance, and one so distinctive of the ethics of
Christian belief demands subjection to a separate
study.

VII.
THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
In the previous chapter we arrived at the conclu
sion that Christian Faith is the sight of an ideal.'
That which immediately follows the sight of an
ideal is the desire to realise it, and hence in the
Christian system faith is the root of prayer. By
the study of the one we are led by direct logical
sequence to the contemplation of the other :
" Whatsoever things ye have need of, believe that
ye receive them, and ye have received them."
The moral place of prayer is one of the distinctive
features of Christian ethics, and could not by any
process be eliminated from a scientific view of the
subject. And yet when we look at the matter from
any standpoint outside of Christianity itself, it is
not very easy to see what prayer has to do with
morality. Prayer in its most elementary meaning
signifies the expression of a wish, whether that
wish be expressed to God or to man. A wish is
itself the expression of a need ; it is the proof that
something is wanting to our nature. Is there, then,
anything suggestive of virtue in the experience of

1 1 8 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
want, or in the expression of that want, if it be
experienced ? Or, can it be said that it makes any
moral difference to the nature of a wish whether it
be addressed to a human or to a Divine Intelli
gence ? If I am hungry, I ask food from the first
human being that passes by ; in doing so I have
proved myself a natural man, because I have
followed the call of nature. But no one would say
that the act proves me to be a moral man. I may
or I may not be so ; the deed leaves it still an open
question. Now, suppose that in my physical dis
tress, instead of appealing to the first human being
who passed by, I utter my need aloud to a Being
whom I believe to be Omnipotent, and in whose
Divine power and sympathy I feel the most im
plicit confidence, in what respect does this act
belong more to the moral sphere than the other ?
In the latter case, as in the former, am I not simply
making an effort to realise my physical necessities,
and appealing to such sources of help as seem to
me to be most valuable ?
Let us not imagine that the question here
suggested is one either of pagan scepticism or of
modern neology. So far as known to us, it is a
question which never arose until it was proposed
by the Christian Founder Himself. The question
of the moral efficacy of prayer is a problem which
may be said to owe its origin to the very ideal of
goodness which Christ created. It is He Himself
who first points out that the mere fact of prayer is

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. I 1 9
not a virtue, and that the virtue of prayer depends
on something else than the asking. He declares
that there are two kinds of prayer — that which He
teaches, and that which is taught by the Gentiles.
Let us mark carefully the distinction which, in the
view of the Christian Founder, subsists between
these two orders of petition. The instinct of
prayer is universal ; it is a part of natural religion.
But Christ says that in Him, and in that system
which He has come to inaugurate, the instinct of
prayer has entered on a new departure. It has
passed through a complete transformation, which
has made it no more like the old instinct than the
intuition of the man resembles the bias of the
animal. Christ claims to have made this doctrine
of natural theology a new and original doctrine, so
new that the Gentiles would not recognise it, so
original as to involve the entrance into humanity
of a moral force which has linked the creature
with the Uncreated, and changed an act of
servile supplication into an experience of Divine
communion. What has produced the change ?
Wherein lies the distinction between the prayer of
the Gentile and the prayer of the Christian ? What
makes the difference between the act in the order
of nature aud the act in the order of grace ? — that
is the question we have now to consider.
To answer this question we must begin by asking,
Wherein to the view of the Gentile world consisted
the value of prayer? Now on this subject our

1 2d THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
Gospels give us a very decided and a very explicit
statement. They tell us that to the Gentiles the
thing which made prayer valuable in the sight of
God w7as the fact of supplication : " They think
they will be heard for their much speaking." Their
prayers are marked by the use of "vain repetition."
They give emphasis to the fact that they are
suppliants. They seek to intensify the labour of
language. They feel that their prayer is more
acceptable above, in proportion as it is disagreeable
below, that God likes it in proportion as man finds
it irksome. Hence the penance of words is multi
plied, and the interest of words is minimised. The
value lies not in them, but in that sense of pro
stration of which they are the unintelligent sign.
The prayer is pleasing to God because it is a prayer.
It is here that Christianity steps in with a direct
negative. It declares that the value of prayer lies
not in the fact of the supplication, but in the nature
of the thing supplicated. That which sanctifies the
prayer in the Christian system is not its abjectness,
nor its prolongedness, nor even, strictly speaking,
its sincerity, but its object; the proof of this is that
in Christianity there is a prayer which teaches to
pray. Now, we think it will be found that within
the compass of the New Testament there are three
degrees of prayer — a prayer that is evil, a prayer
that is natural or legitimate, and a prayer that is
moral or saintly. Let us look at each of these.
" Ye ask and ye receive not, because ye. ask amiss,

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 121
that ye may consume it upon your lusts." In
these words of St. James there is adduced the
startling statement that there may be an irreligious
prayer — that a man may offer up to God a petition
which is perfectly sincere, and which yet has no
higher source than a disguised selfishness. We
should doubt the possibility of such a thing in an
act of professed religious worship, did Ave not re
member that a man's notion of God is just the
shadow of himself. He gives to the object of his
worship, in an intensified degree, that element
which to him constitutes the ideal of earthly
happiness and of human greatness. If his ideal of
these things be high, his thought of God will be
sublime ; if it be low, his thought of God will be
ignoble. The selfish man cannot rise above his
selfishness, even in his religion. His very con
ception of prayer is an image of himself. His God
is pleased with prayer, because great kings love
flattery and homage. If he were in God's place, he
would like to be praised, he would feel it sweet to
receive the plaudits of creation. Hence, when he
is told that God does all things for His own glory,
he has no hesitation in attaching to these words a
purely personal or selfish meaning. He comes to
persuade himself that the homage involved in his
prayer is a kind of reward which God would miss if
it were not given : " If Thou wilt keep me in the
wa}7 in which I go, so that I have bread to eat, and
raiment to put on, then wilt Thou be my God."

122 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
And the character of the prayer will be proportionate
to the view entertained of its value. A selfish man,
praying to a selfish God, cannot ask unselfish things.
He Avill not consider the problem whether his
prayer could be granted without injuring the
interests of another ; nay, he will not scruple to
pray for the injury of another, provided that other
be an enemy. Two armies, on the eve of battle,
have often engaged in separate religious services,
that each might petition the Deity for the exter
mination of its opponent. We have no hesitation
in saying that the New Testament would not
endorse such a form of prayer. The most it would
authorise in such circumstances would be the
petition : " Thy kingdom come " — let that cause
triumph whose triumph would least disturb the
balance of the empire of the King of Kings ! If a
man believes his cause to be the right, then, how
ever erroneous his judgment may be, his desire for
its prosperity is a moral desire; but he must not seek
the extermination of an enemy as an enemy. Nay,
there is a wider principle still ; it is not enough
that there be no enmity — there must be no isola
tion. Man must not ignore the interest of his
brother-man. He cannot, with moral purity, view
himself as an unit, or contemplate the universe as
existing for himself alone. I have no right to offer
up a prayer for universal rain, if I am cognisant of
the fact that there is only a partial want of rain.
The universal rain will indeed cover my Avant, but

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 1 23
it will intensify the want of others — the want of
prolonged fair weather. Here, again, as in the case
of the opposing armies, Christianity comes forward
as a mediator. " Give us this day our daily bread "
is the form of petition which it puts into the mouth
of the farmer. It tells him to consider, not the
want of his own district alone, but the want of
his own district in its relation to the wants of the
universe. It bids him seek such a distribution of
good to him as will not detract from the good of
all. It commands him to remember that his
interest lies in the fact that he is not an isolated
unit, but the member of a body corporate, to whose
deArelopment his life is necessary, and whose united
welfare is necessary to the development of his life.
In a word, Avhat Canon Liddon says is profoundly
true — that in the ethics of Christian prayer all
petitions for merely personal good must be condi
tioned by the three earliest petitions in the prayer
of the Christian Founder — petitions which are
themselves reducible to the one supplication for
the whole universe : " Thy Avill be done." ""
Here, then, is the first or lowest order of prayer
enumerated in the New Testament. It is pointed
out that we may avoid it, and that we may not
imagine the mere fact of supplication to be in itself
a sanctifying power. But there is a second and
superior order of prayer suggested by Christianity.
If the first class comprehends things which we are
* See Liddon'B Some Elements of Religion, p. 197.

124 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
not to seek at all, the second includes things which
we are not to "seek first," i.e., not until we have
sought something else. " Take no anxious thought
what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or where
withal ye shall be clothed, for after all these things
do the Gentiles seek ; but seek ye first the kingdom
of God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you, for your Father knoweth
that ye haA^e need of all these things." In these
words we are introduced to an order of prayer
Avhich is neither immoral on the one hand, nor yet
saintly on the other. It is not immoral, because it
is admitted to be the expression of a natural and
legitimate want : " Your Father knoweth that ye
have need of these things." It is not saintly
because the need which is felt is as yet only natural,
and does not express the measure of the true wants
of man. It is an order of prayer which is specific
ally described as Gentile — level with the height of
heathendom. And indeed it may be said that in
the pre-Christian or Gentile world the standpoint
of the popular masses was an epicurean attitude.
It was so both in their religion and in their want
of religion. In their want of religion they lived
for the gratification of their physical desires ; in
the exercise of their religion they prayed for that
gratification. No one will say that they were
immoral in doing so. They were sensible, they
were prudent, they were duly impressed with the
historical fact that no man has proved adequate to

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 1 25
the supply of his own wants, and to that extent
they are worthy of commendation. But then that
extent is very small, and does not nearly touch the
boundaries of human nature. It is at best but a
recognition of man's secular need and secular
dependence, and to recognize these things there is
wanted only a secular faculty. If the child ask his
earthly father for a fish it would be malignant in
the father to give him a stone, but so far as the
child were concerned it could morally make no
difference whether he had asked a fish or a stone.
He might desire the fish to-day from hunger, and
the stone to-morrow from curiosity. If it be asked,
Which of these requests is the more legitimate ?
the answer is easy : they are both equally legitimate.
If it be asked, Which of them is the more moral?
the question is absolutely without meaning. They
are neither of them either moral or immoral ; they
are simply non-moral. They have nothing to do
with the sphere of duty ; they belong exclusively
to the region of secular desire. They are natural
but not spiritual, legitimate but not saintly, evi
dences of healthy physical growth and normal
mental development, but not yet the sign or
prophecy of a growth beyond the physical, or of a
deA*elopment higher than the merely normal powers.
Nor can the case in any sense be altered by trans
ferring the scene of supplication from the house
of an earthly father to the house of God. The
character of a man's prayer is determined not by

126 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
whom he asks, but by what he asks. He may
supplicate God day and night in sackcloth and
ashes, and may repeat his request Avith endless
reiterations ; it will not bring him a step nearer
towards saintship if his request itself be not saintly.
If he ask God for a fish or a stone, he is no more to
be praised than he is to be condemned ; he has
performed a secular act which, from a worldly point
of view, may be prudent or imprudent, which in
the result it achieves may be successful or un
successful, but which, in itself and by itself, has no
reference to his moral character either in the past
or in the future.
Now, let us understand why this second kind of
prayer which Christ calls distinctively Gentile does
not reach higher than the natural or legitimate. It
is not because it deals with material things — what
we shall eat or what we shall drink, or wherewithal
we shall be clothed ; it is the kind of thought given
to these things that lessens the value of the prayer.
It is quite possible, for instance, that such prosaic
concerns as eating and drinking and clothing may
be made the materials of a richly spiritual prayer.
The prayer of a philanthropist, if it be complete and
comprehensive, must embrace these things. He can
not desire the welfare of humanity without desiring
its temporal or bodily comfort. His desire for the
temporal comfort of humanity is one of the thino-s
which spiritualise his prayer, make it a Christian
prayer. What is it that here constitutes the differ-

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. I 27
ence between the Gentile and the Christian suppli
cation ? What makes the one only legitimate, the
other saintly ? It cannot be the dwelling in the mind
of material images, for in this case the two kinds of
prayer are both concerned Avith such images. It
lies in a difference of thought. In the one case the
material image is an end ; in the other it is only a
means to an end. To the philanthropist the old
earthly elements remain, but they are transfigured
into chariots of helpfulness. He sees in them the
instruments through which his own unselfishness
may work, and he values them because they are
instruments. If he has any personal care for the
morrow, it is no longer an anxious care, for the very
weight of the burden of others has caused his own
burden to drop into the sea. The truth is, we are
here on the lines of the grand transition which
Christ Himself has indicated — the transition from
the lower into the higher form of prayer : " Seek ye
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and
all other things shall be added unto you." It is as
if He had said : I do not ask you to despise the
things which the Gentiles seek ; I ask you to value
them more than they really do. You can never
perfectly value them until you find their spiritual
use, their power to help in the cause of humanity.
Get first the spirit of unselfishness — the kingdom
of the Father's righteousness, and then you will
know how grand are these outward influences of the
universe ; all these things shall be added unto you.

128 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
In passing to this third and highest kind of
prayer, Ave are called at once to notice the unquali
fied measure of certainty which is attached to it.
In no respect does Christianity stand in a more
marked contrast to Gentilism than in the confidence
of its affirmations regarding the efficacy of prayer.
The Pagan goes to his Oracle to learn the issue of a
coming battle, and he commonly receives an answer
so ambiguous as to point equally to either result.
The Christian, on the other hand, claims for his
prayer an unlimited promise of success, an answer
of whose positive comfort there can exist no dubiety.
" Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I
do," "If ye ask anything in My name, I will do it,"
" All things are possible to him that believeth,"
"Ask, and ye shall receive," "Whatsoever things
ye have need of, believe that ye receive them, and
ye have received them." These are weighty words,
and to many they have been as startling as they
are weighty. They will only cease to be startling
when we remember that the Christian Founder is
there speaking of a distinctively Christian prayer —
that new form of prayer which Himself had come
to inaugurate. When He says, "Whatsoever ye
shall ask in My name," He means whatsoever ye
shall ask in My line of character. The name, with
the Jew, was always meant to be descriptive of the
nature ; to ask in the name of Jesus was not only
to ask in conformity with His nature, but to ask
His nature itself. It was to aspire to the possession

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 1 29
of those things which appeared lovely in the Son of
Man. It was to pray for holiness, justice, goodness,
truth. It was to desire a clean heart and a right
spirit. It was to petition God for a communication
of His own will — not a communication of what He
willed, but of His will itself. It was the request
to be made able to desire nothing which God did
not desire, to be empowered to wish everything
which declared itself to be the will of God. Above
all, it was the prayer to be made unselfishly human
— the petition for humanity to man, and it was here
that it came into contact again with those same
material elements which stimulated the prayer of
the Gentile world. The Christian was again
authorised to take up these elements, but to take
them up transfigured, glorified. He, like the
Gentile, was permitted to take an interest in the
physical wants of life — in the breaking of the daily
bread, and the mitigation of the temporal pain.
But then the breaking of the bread Avas no longer
a merely personal act, the mitigation of the pain no
longer a purely individual thing. The follower of
Christ was to become impressed with a sense of
universal hunger. He was to recognise himself as
the member of a vast body whose every pain and
want made itself felt within his own being. That
sense of union with humanity, of participation in
its joys, of identification with its sorrows, of
sympathy with its wants in every sphere, whether
of nature, mind, or spirit, is the true goal of
1

130 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
Christian aspiration, the true object of Christian
prayer. The disciple of the Son of Man seeks the
things of the Spirit, but he finds the things of the
Spirit in the unselfish ministration of the things of
the body. He puts no fence around the field of
Gentile materialism ; he claims the liberty to walk
in that field at will. To him the outer man does
not mean the material man, but the selfish man,
and selfishness may exist as powerfully in the
world of mind as in the world of matter. That
which makes him free from the dominion of the
Gentiles is not emancipation either from matter or
spirit, but emancipation from self; to a Gentile
community, which had realised this goal, a Christian
Apostle was not afraid to say : " All things are
yours." Now, it is not difficult to see not only that such
a prayer must be answered, but that in point of
fact it is answered in the very act of asking — " Be
lieve that you receive them, and ye have received
them." If a man who is outwardly poor should
offer up a prayer for outward riches and succeed in
persuading himself that his petition will be granted,
it could not in any sense be said of him that his
riches had already come. Of no material possession
can it be affirmed, " Believe that ye receive it, and
ye have received it." But the reason is obvious.
If I desire any form of physical beauty, that does
not prove me to be myself physically beautiful.
But, as we have already pointed out, it is impossible

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. I 3 I
to desire any form of spiritual beauty unless the
elements of that beauty are already to some extent
present in my soul. He who prays to be made
good, and upright, and true, is in germ even now
possessed of goodness, truth, and uprightness. It
is the possession of these things that itself has
prompted his prayer. It is the possession of these
things that gives a moral value to his prayer. A
man can no more wish to be made religious without
being religious in germ than he can desire to live
to-morrow without having life to-day. It is only
by the things of the Spirit that a man can seek the
things of the Spirit, and it is that which in the
Christian system has made the act of seeking an
act of greatness. All spiritual search is spiritual
aspiration, and all spiritual aspiration is spiritual
life begun. We reverence the man of Christian
prayer because we reverence the things that he
prays for. We hold love, meekness, mercy, purity
of heart, to be saintly things, and we feel that the
spirit which desires them must already be in
sympathy with them ; the soul's ideal is the fore
cast shadow that predicts its coming self.
It will be seen from the foregoing explanations
that Christian prayer is not an act, not even a
series of acts ; it is essentially an attitude of mind.
To pray, in the Christian sense, is to aspire, and
aspiration is not limited to times or seasons. In
no case is a man's aspiration a separate deed of his
life ; it is a spirit wiiich breathes through all his

132 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
deeds. It breaks out wherever he goes, involun
tarily, spontaneously. It shows itself in his most
commonplace action, in his eA^ery word, look, and
gesture. It prompts whatever he does, it pervades
whatever he says, it gives shape to his waking hours,
it gives colour even to his dreams. It is in this
light alone that the singular Christian precept,
" Pray without ceasing," becomes clear, and how
it can be uttered by the same religion which says,
" Use not vain repetitions." In any other faith
these commands would be mutual contradictories ;
the one would negative the other. But in Chris
tianity there may be an unceasing prayer where
there is a constant change of action, because in
Christianity the prayer is not the action. Just
as the same tune may subsist beneath endless
variations, so the same Christian prayer may be
breathed through endless acts, through periods of
life infinitely varied, through circumstances of life
infinitely diverse. " Ask and ye shall receive, seek
and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened,"
are the striking words in which that diversity is
indicated. They tell us that, in the Christian
system, the same prayer may be expressed either
in devotion, in thought, or in practice, by asking,
by seeking, or by knocking. It may be uttered by
the mystical mind desirous only of being a passive
recipient of the light of God ; it may be breathed
by the intellectual mind, whose very struggles are
the voice of a prayer ; last, and not least, it may be

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 1 33
expressed by the working mind in the very act of
its practical working, its knocking at life's door.
Every labour of the philanthropist in behalf of his
felloAv-men, every deed of charity, every act of love
must, consciously or unconsciously, end in a prayer.
We say end, because it is not till the work is done
that the true philanthropist feels its inadequacy,
becomes aware how little it can really do to miti
gate the woes of humanity. The man's ideal of
what ought to be done bursts into view just at that
point where his actual work has failed. And the
man's ideal is his prayer, his aspiration. It is at
once his act of faith and his confession of impotence,
his promise of help and his cry for succour. It
expresses what he cannot do, what he would like to
do if he could, what he hopes to do some day. It
is from the daily toils of life that the aspiration
grows. So far from being suspended until the
burden and heat of the day be past, it is the
burden and heat of the day that give it wings. It
rises from the dust of death, from the Aveight of
human cares, from the din of human strife. It is
contemporaneous with all struggle, it is associated
with all effort, it is compatible with all duty ; if it
exist at all it must exist persistently : it is a prayer
without ceasing.
We have not here professed to do more than to
A'indicate the moral efficacy of Christian prayer —
its efficacy for the heart of him who offers it. There
is a vast region which remains untraversed — the

134 THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER.
sphere of Christian prayer in its claim to exert an
efficacy outside the soul of the petitioner. That
region, however, is not to be traversed by us ; it
lies beyond our province. Our province is the
domain of Christian morals, and that is the domain
of Christian theology. It may be, as one of our
leading scientists suggests, that there is a connection
between the moral motive of the prayer in the heart,
and its influence when it passes beyond the heart.*
The study is one of great speculative interest, and
of high theological value, but it touches a side of
the Christian faith with which we have here no
concern. It deals with the relation of Christianity
to God ; we are here only considering the relation
of Christianity to man. No one who accepts the
supernatural claim of Christianity can for a moment
refuse his assent to the objective power of prayer ;
but it is equally true that he who admits that claim
is bound to recognise the fact that the value of
Christian prayer is not its objective power. The
value of Christian prayer, from a moral point of
view, is not the getting, but the asking, or rather,
to speak more correctly, the power to ask is itself
a getting — a good and perfect gift of the Spirit of
Christ. " The prayer of faith shall save the sick,"
says St. James. That is a theological thesis, and
must be established on theological premisses. It is
the announcement of a physical effect in prayer.
But that which makes such a prayer a subject for
* Alfred Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, p. 209.

THE MORAL PLACE OF PRAYER. 1 35
our study is the element in it that is not physical,
the thing Avhich transcends the Gentiles. That
which makes it a distinctively Christian prayer, is
the spirit of unselfishness which it breathes — the
fact that it is a prayer of faith. Nay, we shall go
further. The highest effect of the petition would,
in the eye of Christianity, be its moral effect.
Should it lift up the man from a mere bed of
physical sickness to resume an old life of sin, its
success, in the view of Christ's religion, would
indeed be small. But should it infect the man with
its own spirit, should it touch him with somewhat
of its own fire, should it wake within him some
regret for a misspent past, and some resolve for a
desired future, then, whether, physically speaking,
he should live or die, the verdict of Christianity
still would be that the prayer of the righteous man
availed much.

VIII.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
In the two preceding chapters we contemplated
the first conscious manifestations of a new vital
movement — faith, the sight of a moral ideal, aud
prayer, the effort of the soul to reach it. We say,
the first conscious manifestations ; for in every
vital movement there is something which lies
behind consciousness. The first conscious breath
of the infant is itself the product of a mystery.
It comes from an underlying power of whose
nature it has no knowledge. We say, L think, i"
speak, / feel ; and in the very act of saying so, we
have made a momentous declaration. We have
expressed our conviction that behind the mani
festations of thought and speech and feeling there
dwells a mysterious "I" — the source and subject
of them all ; that these things are not the begin
ning of our life, but our life the beginning of these ;
that we ourselves are more than we see, or hear, or
touch, more than we speak, or think, or feel — a
power at the back of consciousness, a life in the rear
of thought.
Now, though the discussion of the subject lies

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 37
outside of our province, it is a precisely analogous
power which Christianity claims for the origin of
that which is distinctive in her moral system.
She maintains that the distinctive manifestation
demands and requires a distinctive life behind it as
surely as the colour of the rose demands the belief
in an object. Christian faith, hope, charity, meek
ness, patience, mercy are only qualities ; in them
selves they are the colour without the rose — a
mere abstraction of the thinking mind. To give
them reality they must be lived; in other words,
must have a life in which they inhere. Their
very existence as ideas demands such an origin.
Christian faith and Christian prayer are both pro
fessedly ideal ; they seek that which is not yet
attained by the human soul — moral perfection.
None the less are they the evidence of a life behind
themselves, a life to which they owe their life. I
cannot believe in that which is good except
through a power of goodness. I cannot pray for
that which is spiritually fair except by the posses
sion of a spiritual loveliness. I cannot ask, seek,
strive for those things which are above me unless
already I am " born from above ; " unless even now
there be in me a spirit equal to those things.
Now, this is precisely the claim which Christianity
advances to the merit of originality. It professes
to have brought a new force into the world. It
declares that since its coming men have had new
desires, new aspirations, new ideals of heroism ;

138 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
old things are passed away, and all things have
become new. It says that a renewing power must
itself have novelty in it ; that all things must pro
ceed from sources that are like them in kind :
"That which is born of the flesh, is flesh, and that
which is born of the spirit, is spirit." It affirms
that the revelation of the Divine morality pro
claimed by the Gospel is just one which flesh and
blood could not give, but which must seek its
origin in a cause commensurate with itself. That
is the position of Christianity on this matter, and
if you grant the premises, you will have to acknow
ledge it to be thoroughly philosophical. If this
religion has brought into the world a new ideal,
or if it has intensified to an extraordinary degree
an old ideal, and diffused it from a few souls into
the mass of humanity, it can only have done so
either by the putting forth of a new force into the
Universe, or by modifying and transforming the
forces already there.
It is probable that the latter alternative will be
conceded to Christianity even by modern science.
If a pebble cast into the sea produces endless
undulations, if a word spoken into the air leads
to unceasing movements, if a foot struck upon
the sand affects the whole physical frame of the
world, what shall we say of a force which has
changed the current of all history ? Rising out of
the silence and the solitude, coming with no carnal
weapons, appearing with no gorgeous accompani-

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 39
ments, this power may be said to have filled the
habitable world. It has touched every department
of life, and everything it has touched has been
transformed. It has given a new turn to ethics.
It has given a new department to politics. It has
inaugurated a second birth for the spirit of poetry.
It has almost created painting. It has developed
the institutions of modern charity. It has relaxed
the bonds of despotism. It has tightened the bonds
of family and home. All this, and an hundred
things more, Christianity, we do not say has
claimed to do, but has actually done ! Its relation
to the fabric of existing civilization is not a matter
of religious belief, it is a matter of historical fact ;
its religious force has been a transforming secular
power ; what the man of science would call a sub
liming of energies. The question is, why ? That
which can transform other things must surely have
itself a new or transforming element. It cannot
work changes by means of the same old material
which could work no changes. It must have a
cause proportionate to its effect, a power adequate
to explain its own actions. That which can effect
a sublimation of the world's energies must itself
surely be an energy transcendently sublime, a force
which itself has been sublimated by the combined
influences of universal nature.
We are able, then, even from the side of reason,
in some measure to vindicate, and in still greater
measure to sympathise with, the claim of Christianity

140 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
to be a new life. That claim it does certainly
make. It declares its Founder to have been a New
Man, a second Adam ; the first-fruits of a Spirit
that had grafted itself afresh on the old tree of
human life. It declares that this Spirit, which in
its fulness first lived in the Christian Founder,
repeats itself from day to day in the lives and
experiences of His followers. It declares that alike
in the Church Universal, and in the solitudes of
the individual soul, there is to be seen the evidence
of a life higher than the natural life — a life involv
ing changes complete, radical, permanent; itself
incapable of explanation, yet capable of explaining
all other things. It says that this life pursues in
the Church Universal and in the solitudes of the
individual soul, that identical order of evolution
which it pursued in the experience of the Divine
Founder — a growth in wisdom and in knowledge
and in favour with God and man. The second
Adam, whether in the world of history or in the
world of the heart, is altogether unlike the first.
He does not spring up at once, a finished manhood,
a creation which is complete in the very act of
being ; He submits to the condition of human ex
istence, the condition of development. The spirit
of the new life accepts the law of the spirit of all
life ; it elects to grow. It chooses the path of
sacrifice, the path of struggle, the path of patience.
It begins in what may be called a spiritual germ-
cell, in which life is hardly, if at all, distinguishable

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. I41
from death. It passes into a child-life whose main
characteristic is a sense of want it does not compre
hend, a vague hungering and thirsting after an
object which the sequel proves to be righteousness,
but which as yet is formless, nameless. It takes
up one by one the different spheres of human
nature, beginning with the narrowest, and cul
minating in the widest. It starts with the in
dividual life in its unity and in its isolation, and
thence it spreads itself outward to embrace the
world. It expands from sphere to sphere, from the
unit to the member of a family, from the member
of a family to the householder, from the house
holder to the citizen, from the citizen to the patriot,
from the patriot to the cosmopolitan. In a word,
this life proceeds, as all life proceeds, from within
to without. It grows as the seed grows — from
latency into manifestation, from weakness into
strength, from a being of isolation and solitude into
a life of companionship and union.
It may be asked, why do we speak of all this in
a subject so prosaic as the principles of Christian
morality ? The reason is plain. If the spirit of
Christianity be unfolded by evolution, it follows
that the precepts of the New Testament, however
prosaic, are something more than a catalogue or
almanac. They can no longer be viewed as a mere
set of beads tied together by a string. They are
parts of a great unity. They too have a law of
development in which they move, and an order of

142 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
arrangement in which they come. They exist, not
as dislocated fragments, by as the symmetrical
stones of a sacred temple whose places are definitely
determined, and whose relations are mutually ad
justed. The truth is, the Christian doctrine of the
Holy Spirit has a literary as well as a religious
significance. It has elevated Christian morality
into a Christian philosophy, and given it a place
among the sciences. It has caused that morality
to be no longer a series of disconnected maxims, no
longer a mere collection of proverbs and aphorisms,
but the expression of an eternal law in its endless
adaptations and its infinitely varied developments.
What, then, is the philosophy of Christian
morality ? the order of development in which its
laws are revealed ? We have said that the law
of all life is a progress from within to without. In
this respect, we should say, the law of life is the
converse of the law of education, Avhich is a pro
gress from without to within. When the child
begins to learn, it begins with the world of sense.
Its first lesson is in the things it sees, hears, handles.
It passes from the concrete to the abstract, from
the form to the idea, from the image to the thought ;
and its education is complete when it has mastered
the study of self ; the goal of its knowledge is the
germ-cell. But with the actual life of the child it
is far otherwise. That begins within. It is at first
a mere series of isolated individual feelings. Then
it becomes able to connect its impressions, and refer

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 43
them to the fact of its own existence. By degrees
it awakes to the knowledge of existences other than
its own, and embraces that knowledge in ever-
widening circles. It reaches its completeness when
it is furthest removed from the germ-cell, when it
comes into contact Avith all humanity, and touches
the centre of universal life.
Now, the order of Christian morality, as depicted
by the New Testament itself, follows the order of
universal life ; it is a process from within outwards.
We see this even in a discourse so popular as the
Sermon on the Mount. It traces the blessed life
from its origin to its consummation. Is shows us
that virtue in its rise is a purely individual thing,
the struggle of the inner man against himself; it is
poverty of spirit, mourning for sin, the restraint of
passion, and the aspiration after good. Then comes
a second stage. The individual enters into relation
with other individuals. He comes out of his isola
tion, he emerges from his solitude. He is no longer
merely the "poor in spirit;" he is the merciful
spirit — the spirit that can bear the poverty of others.
He is no longer simply the "meek;" he is the
peacemaker — the man avIio can make others meek.
He is no longer only a being who hungers and
thirsts after righteousness ; he is one who is able to
be persecuted for righteousness' sake — to support
the burdens of human duty in the midst of the con
flict with the outward circumstances which environ
him. At last the final stage arrives. The light of

144 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
ATirtue ceases to shine through clouds of struggle ;
it breaks forth spontaneously and just because it
" cannot be hid." It ceases to be merely outward ;
it becomes cosmopolitan — the " light of the world."
It is no more simply a moral power ; it has become
a moral ministrant, and it shines for the sake of
ministration. It is no longer merely solicitous to
be glorified through conflict; it seeks rather to
glorify by contact, to make pure by being pure.
Its final law is embodied in the great command,
" Let your light so shine before men, that they may
see your good works, and glorify your Father in
Heaven." Here, then, is the general law that regulates the
development of the Christian moral life. It pro
ceeds from the inner to the outer, and from the
outer to the outermost, while at the same time it
is a progress from the unconscious to the struggling,
and from the struggling to the spontaneous. But
now, can we trace any more minutely this law of
Christian development ? We have seen its general
operation : can we determine its process in detail :
Does Christianity itself give any account of the
moral order of its own precepts ? There is one
very remarkable passage of the New Testament in
which it does — a passage in which, professedly,
and in so many words, it declares the philosophic
sequence in which its precepts move. We allude
to 2 Peter i. 5, where it is said, " Giving all
diligence, add to your faith, virtue ; and to virtue,

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 45
knowledge; and to knowledge, temperance ; and to
temperance, patience; and to patience, godliness; and
to godliness, brotherly kindness ; and to brotherly
kindness, charity." We need not say that the so
much disputed Apostolic origin of the passage is
here a matter of indifference. What we wish to
find is not an authority, but a representation ; not
an evidence that Christian morality was inspired,
but an exposition of what Christian morality was
conceived to be. Here is a document belonging
unquestionably to a very early age, and giving
undoubted expression to the Christian conscious
ness of that age, in which there is unfolded a
complete theory of development from the seed to
the flower. A study of this earliest system of
Christian ethics cannot be without interest. It
can be verified by a surer test than any authority
— the test of universal experience. If we should
find that the earliest is also the latest consciousness,
if we should arrive at the conviction that what was
attested by the Christian experience of the first
century is still attested by the Christian experience
of the nineteenth, we shall have attained an incon
testable guarantee that the New Testament order
of moral development is an order based on the
reality of things.
Let us look more in detail at this earliest effort
to construct a philosophy of Christian morality.
It will be observed that the first stage of the pro
cess is taken for granted ; it is assumed that the
K

146 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
basis of the whole is "faith." We have already
pointed out that faith, in the Christian sense, is
the sight of an ideal — the vision of that which we
would like to be. It is not difficult to see that in
any moral system this stage must indeed be the
first. The root of all moral being is moral aspira
tion ; the wish is here the father, not only of the
thought, but of the deed. The beginning of a
man's holiness is in every case his admiration of
holiness. The moment he has looked into the face
of moral beauty and seen it to be beautiful, he has
crossed the boundary line between good and evil.
That look is what Christianity calls faith. It is
that process by which an individual sees his defor
mity in the light of a pure mirror. It is at one
and the same moment depression and exaltation.
Man learns his nothingness in the glory of the new
vision, and falls prostrate before its blaze. But
the fall is in reality a rise. The light which strikes
him down is a light already within his own soul.
Saul of Tarsus could never have seen a Christ in
the air; only an incipient Paul could do that.
The vision was the effect, and not the cause, of a
conversion. Faith — that sight of a moral ideal
which for the first time reveals to the human soul
the distance at Avhich it lies from holiness, and the
length of that journey it has still to travel— is, by
reason of that very revelation, the beginning of that
upward flight in which his youth is renewed as the
eagle's.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 47
The first breath, then, of the moral life is faith
— the sense of the contrast between what we are
and what we ought to be. It is impossible, how
ever, that faith can be the rest of the soul. It is
its very nature to be a state of unrest. The soul's
vision of a moral beauty which as yet is not its
own is, and can be, nothing else than an awakening
to pain — the stimulation of that great hunger which
cries for more. Hence it is that in this passage of
2 Peter, we find almost an immediate transition to
a higher step in the process of development. "Add
to your faith, virtue." We may remark at the out
set that the word " add " in our Authorised Version
is unfortunate. Addition is a process from without.
It is the increase of a thing by something Avhich
originally had no connection with it. If I receive
lessons in French one year, and in German another,
I may be said to add German to French. This is
certainly one mode of progress. It is not, however,
the mode of progress suggested by the passage
before us, nor the form of interpretation implied
by the Greek of that passage. The progress of
which St. Paul speaks is a development from within.
It is not the impartation to a certain quality of a
thing not originally there ; it is the unfolding from
it of a thing which is latently there. It is the
bringing out into bloom that life of the flower which
sleeps already in the bud; the expansion into meri
dian glory of the sunshine slumbering in the dawn.
The literal rendering of the words is — "In your

148 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
faith supply virtue." It is an exhortation to ex
pand the life of the germ, to remember what possi
bilities are folded within the germ. This faith, in
itself so small a thing, is declared to be the seed of
all other things. It contains within its tiny com
pass the first and last principles of all morality, the
nucleus of a life whose goal is generic humanity.
It hides Avithin its bosom the treasures of all
spiritual wisdom, and the sources of all spiritual
acquirement ; and that which in the sequel shall
issue from the heart of the man will be only the
outward evolving of what is there inwardly and
unconsciously implied.
Let us now try to trace this evolution, this
unfolding of the germ. Its first step is indicated
in the wTords, " Add to your faith, virtue." Put
into modern language this means to say : Carry
out the ideal into the actual. The object of faith
is at first seen only in the distant. It is its dis
tance that makes it an object of faith ; it is not yet
realised, it is simply an ideal. But it is impossible
that any ideal can take possession of the soul with
out struggling for realisation. We have seen that
the birth of faith is the birth of aspiration, the
entrance into the heart of a new desire. The
moment such an event takes place the approach of
war is heralded. Two lives exist in the human
personality — one, old, the other, new ; one, already
in possession of human action, the other, in pos
session of the highest thoughts of the human heart ;

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 49
one, strong from custom, the other, fresh with the
glow of youth's enthusiasm. Here are the elements
of a conflict, and of a conflict in which the new and
higher life will be the aggressor. The ideal must
O CO
prove itself to be the actual, and the effort of the
ideal to prove itself the actual is Avhat is called
virtue. Virtue is not a different quality from faith ;
it is faith struggling It is faith hardening itself
OO o o
into solidity by its own movement. It is faith
losing its spontaneity, or child-like character, and
becoming a force conscious of its own power.
Faith in itself is simply Eden — the unclouded sight
of an ideal glory. Faith resisting the Tempter of
Eden is virtue. Its view of paradise is broken, and
it seeks to restore it. Virtue is not so beautiful as
faith, but that is because it is a higher stage of
development without being yet the highest. All
intermediate stages in the development of any life
are less beautiful than the first and the last. The
first has the wonder of miracle ; the last has the
wonder of completed law. The intermediate stages
have neither the novelty nor the completeness ;
they exhibit the seeming confusion which belongs
to every fabric in the act and process of construc
tion. Therefore it is that virtue is less beautiful
than faith. It is no longer the first breath of the
morning, nor is it yet the glory of meridian day.
It is essentially a life of transition, aud so of neces
sity a life of struggle. Yet that Avhich, in a com
parison with faith dims its beauty, increases its

I 5 O DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
ATalue. It is a descent from the top of the moun
tain into the squalor and confinement of the villages
in the valley, and as such, from the side of sense it
is a fall. But from the side of spirit it is a rise, and
the only rise of Avhich spirit is capable. It is an
approach toward the life of humanity. The hum
of human voices in the valley no longer suggests
the freedom of the mountain breezes, but the very
limit which they bring is to the spirit an enlarge
ment. It is the promise of a new knowledge — the
knowledge of Man ; a knowledge which can only
be purchased indeed by the loss of what the world
calls freedom, but which, when it is purchased, is
the entrance into a larger life than the highest
flight of faith ever dared to compass.
And this is the transition to the third stage of
Christian development — "Add to Adrtue, know
ledge." Virtue, as we have said, is the promise
of knowledge. It is in itself only a sentiment.
It is the determination to do right in all cases
and against all temptations ; but it is not yet
the knowledge of what in all cases will be the
right. I may be animated by a horror of cruelty
springing from my sight of the beautiful ideal, in
other Avords, from my faith. Actuated by this
horror, I may lay down the resolve that in no
circumstances whatever shall I be induced to give
another pain. Here is a sentiment which has its
root in virtue. Yet it is clear that if such a senti
ment were to be sent forth into the world without

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 151
any further development, it would defeat its own
end. It is not too much to say that the infliction
of pain is in many cases the absence of cruelty,
and necessary to the soul's ultimate joy. What
is the error, then, in my benevolent resolve ? It
lies, not in my Adrtue, but in the application of
my virtue ; it is a defect in knowledge, the quality
which, St. Peter says, must be added to virtue.
The feeling of virtue is a sentiment, but the act
of virtue is a judgment. I may desire to make
men happy, it is well ; but if I have nothing more
than the desire, I have no right to act upon it.
How do I know that I am not making grave
clothes for those I seek to benefit ? To know that,
I need something more than a heart, I want an
intellect. That which is to be added to all virtue
is intellectual sympathy — the power to know what
another needs. Before I can minister to his wants
I must put myself in his place ; before I can put
myself in his place I must learn what his place is.
The kind of knowledge which is wanted to teach
me that, is essentially a worldly knowledge — a
knowledge of what is in man. It demands out-
ward observation, keen scrutiny, long study of
the human heart. Yet after all the main organ
for its acquisition will be my own heart — the
virtue I have already won. Blessed are the pure
in heart for they shall see Man, is an aphorism
which is implied, though not expressed, in Chris
tianity. My desire to make my brother happy is

152 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
my first step toward the unveiling of his nature,
for the deepest veil that rests between me and
him is just the weakness of my sympathy; the
fulness of the sentiment of virtue is the dawn of
sympathetic knowledge.
Let us resume the tracing of the golden chain.
We ha\Te seen that virtue is not complete until it
is supplemented by practical knowledge, i.e., by
a knowledge of the world of man. In this respect,
and to this extent, the passage now under review
ao-rees with the statement of Mr. G. H. Lewes :
O
" There cannot be moral relations apart from
society." * What now is the effect of this social
element on the development of the spiritual life ?
That is the question which next arises, and that is
the question, the answer to which forms the next
link of the chain. The answer is given in the
words : " Add to knowledge, temperance," i.e.,
self-control. The word temperance has in modern
times received a limited meaning. It is often
used as a synonym for restraint in a special class
of excesses. In the New Testament it has a larger
acceptation. It refers to the restraint of any ex
cess Avhatever in the principle of self-love. The
idea here, therefore, is that a man's knowledge of
the wants of men is a help to the control of his
own individual wants. It was the doctrine of
Stoicism that all knowledge had a calming effect
on the mind. The Christian doctrine limits itself
* Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i. p. 173.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 53
to a particular kind of knowledge. It says : Are
you perturbed by inordinate desires — individual
ambition, personal covetousness, selfish lust of
appropriation ? The best way to moderate these
is to study the wants of humanity at large. The
best cure for self-assertion is the remembrance that
you are only one member of a vast body, every
one of whose members has wants equal to your
own. The true human calmness comes from the
true human knowledge. If in the experience of
sorrow I abandon myself to the impulse of a wild
despair, I am in want of another fact of experience
to make me calm — the fact that what happens to
me has happened, and is happening, to all. The
moment I have realised this, I have, in spite of
myself, anrved at the grace of temperance, that
grace which exists essentially in the restraint of
self. I have no longer the sense of being Avronged ;
I no longer feel as if I had been singled out for
suffering from the great world of humanity ; on
the contrary, I know now that I am called to suffer
just because I belong to that Avorld. The con
templation which stills the individual mind is not
the contemplation of stars and systems, but the
study of the human soul in history and in life. It
Avas this which really made the Stoic calm, though
he mistook the cause of his composure. He thought
it lay in his abstract philosophy ; it lay, in truth,
in his concrete experience, in his experience of the
world of men. He felt his life to be onlv an unit

154 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
amid many lives, each regulated by the same law,
each fulfilling the same destiny. He felt that he
had no right to vociferate his complaints through
the universe, to ask exemption from the common
law of man. That which came to him, came to
him as a member of the universal race; he bowed
to the common destiny, and was calm. His own
pulse grew still when he had measured the united
beat of the pulse of humanity ; his social know
ledge taught him self-control.
O O
Yet this self-control, or temperance of views,
which even with the Stoics is fostered by know
ledge of the world, passes, with the Christian,
into something far more pronounced and specific.
"Add to temperance, patience," is the next com
mand. There may be a self-control where the self
is not resigned. The sense that we are the subject
of an inevitable law may serve to dull human
effort, and even to lull the soul into a lethargic
apathy. But this is not resignation ; it is no
more resignation than a captive's recognition of his
chained hand is resignation. The production of a
sense of calm is not peculiar to Christianity.
There is the calm of Stoicism, which is purchased
by the death of the old love ; there is the calm of
Cynicism, Avhich is purchased by a scorn of the
old love ; there is the calm of Buddhism, which is
purchased by the despair of the old love. In each
and all of these the love of self, which is in itself
a true function of the moral nature, is crucified by

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. I 5 5
the moral will ; it is salvation by annihilation.
But the calm which Christianity sends is not so
purchased. Here, unlike Stoicism, Cynicism, and
Buddhism, self-control does not pass into apathy,
into scorn, nor into despair; it passes into some
thing Avhich preserves the new restraint, while yet
keeping alive the old humanity ; it merges into
patience. Patience is no longer mere self-control ;
it is self-resignation. It is self not needing con-
O O
trol, but resigned to the law of the Universe. So
far from being identical with apathy, scorn, or
despair, patience has an element of hope in it ; it
is a waiting for something. Suffering is accepted
as an unseen good ; the soul believes that some
where, somehow, it will issue in a joy. It feels as
if it were itself the subject of a grand problem, a
problem which is being worked out in the inner
chambers of its own nature, and to whose solution
its experience and its life are unconsciously contri
buting. Faith, that sight of the Unseen Avhich
lies at the root of all its being, wdiich has sup
ported its struggles into virtue, which has aided
its growth into the knowledge of man, is still the
power which keeps it fresh and green amidst the
winter cold, and for the realising of whose vision
it is content to wait.
But even patience is not the goal of Chris
tianity ; there is a possession of the individual
life, which is higher still, and whose presence is
expressed in the words : " Add to patience, godli-

156 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
ness." Patience, as we have said, is the waiting
for an unseen good ; godliness is the unseen good
become visible. The unseen good in fact is seen
to be the waiting itself. Waiting on God is at
O O
first accepted for the sake of what it Avill bring,
and this is patience ; at last it is accepted for its
own sake, and this is godliness. There comes a
time when the attitude of leaning on the Divine
will is felt to be the most delightful of all atti
tudes. It Avas once a duty, a necessity, perhaps
even a pain. It becomes not only a pleasure,
but the only pleasure — the state of mind without
which there can be no happiness. Patience can
say without murmuring, "Thy will be done;"
godliness can say it, not only without murmuring,
but with positive acquiescence — it does the Divine
will on earth "as it is done in heaven." Patience
leans on God for what He can give ; godliness
dimply for what He is. The man of patience
hopes, that if he trusts God, all things will work
together for his good ; to the mau of godliness
trust in God is itself the highest good. Patience,
in a word, is passive ; it is the individual will
sinking into silence before the universal Will of
God. Godliness is in the highest sense active ;
it is the individual will rising up to meet the
universal, and by an act of determinate choice
making the universal Will its own.
This stage of godliness marks what may be called
the last phase of the purely individual Christian

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 57
life ; it is here that, to use tlie language of philo
sophy, egoism ends and altruism begins. Hitherto
the course of moral development has been simply a
progress in the path of personal duty ; it has con
templated only what a man owes to himself. But
with the close of this period we have to witness
the advent of another, in which the man is viewed
no longer in Avhat he owes to himself, but in what
he owes to his fellow-man. The transition is marked
by the words, " Add to godliness, brotherly kind
ness," or, as it ought to be rendered, "love of the
brethren." The idea is, that when a man once feels
the power of godliness in his own life he will see
it in the lives of others. That which he knows to
be good within himself he cannot fail to admire
when it is presented to his outward eye. Hence
it is, that when a man has reached the stage of
personal godliness he has already potentially got
beyond this stage. For godliness is not a mere
personal possession, it is a possession Avhich I share
in common with hundreds besides. It introduces
me into a brotherhood. I cannot love that which
is manifested within, and not also love that which
is manifested without. The picture which I see
in my oavu soul is the identical picture which I find
reflected in the souls of others. I must love that
picture wherever I find it ; the common possession
of it must constitute a common bond of friendship.
Have we not here the moral side of the table of
Christian communion ? That it has also a theo-

158 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
logical side Ave seek not to deny, but that which
touches our province is its ethical aspect. And its
ethical aspect is assuredly that of brotherhood. To
one outside the Christian creed, the table of Chris
tian communion presents the appearance of a
number of individual beings united by one soul.
It is the mutual love of men for that in others
which they feel within themselves. It is essentially
the love between brethren, for, brotherhood of
thought and feeling is the condition of entrance
O O
within the sacred circle. It is a beautiful senti
ment, but is it exhaustive of love's possibilities ?
Is there no higher goal conceivable for the spirit
of man ? Is this circle, sacred though it be, to be
the limit out of which I cannot, dare not move ?
Has Christianity no wider sphere in which to dis
play itself, no broader circle in which to manifest
its power ? Is there not a world outside the Chris
tian world with which the Christian world has still
to do ? Are there not societies of men beyond the
brethren to which the brethren are yet indissolubly
related ?
It is the answer to this question that has
prompted the Apostolic writer to give expression
to a final stage of Christian development, a stage
which is indicated in the words, "To love of the
brethren add charity." No words could more
powerfully express at once the sense, and the
supply, of the want still left by the mere love that
springs from brotherhood. Put into a paraphrased

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 1 59
form their reading is this : You profess to be ani
mated by a love to those who cherish a kindred
faith ; it is well, it is beautiful, but is it all ? To
sit down at a table of communion with those who
hold a belief in harmony Avith your own is indeed
an act which bespeaks the spirit of love. But it is
not yet love in its meridian, in the splendour of its
noonday. It is only the love of brotherhood, the
love of that which has manifested its agreement
with your own sentiments, and stands on a common
level with your own perfections. Behold, I show
you a more excellent way, because a way that
euters deeper into the valley of Christian sacrifice.
To the love of the brethren add charity. To your
love of those who are like you add the love of those
who are not like you — the love of the loveless.
If you would reach the perfection of the Christian
life, you must pass beyond the circle of Christian
brotherhood. You must go down into that other
circle which is not yet Christian. You must be
able to see the ideal where there is not yet the
actual, to hope where there is no room to realise,
to cherish the patience of hope Avhen fulfilment
seems long delayed, to detect the promise in the
bud aud the dayspring in the dawn, — that is the
completion of the Christian life.
We have thus traced those stages of ethical
development through which, in the view of the
New Testament itself, the disciple of Christ is
called to pass. A life which has conquered all

l6o DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
these stages and reached the top of the hill, is,
of course, a complete illustration of the law of
gospel morality. We must remember, however,
that between the first and the last stage there are
six intermediate stages. We must remember that
the transition of the mind through these is effected,
not by a leap, but by a growth. The growth may
be slow, or it may be rapid, according to the
nature of the life and soil ; but whether it be
slow or rapid, it must accomplish its development
by an experience of definite changes. Take the
life at any one of these preliminary stages, and
what do we find ? An incomplete life, which
from the standpoint of the finished whole, is an
inconsistent life ! No charge is so frequently
adduced against Christian morality as the incon
sistency of its professors. The common a.nswer to
this is to plead the frailty of human nature. The
true answer we believe to lie in the nature of
Christian morality. If Christian morality Avere
simply a law of Judaism, the charge of a prevalent
inconsistency would be a reproach, as it would
seem to indicate that its precepts were impracti
cable. But the case is entirely different when
Christianity is not a law, but a life. Every stage
of a life's growth must in some sense be inconsis
tent with the completed whole. The life of the
child would be highly inconsistent with humanity
if it were lived by a man ; that is to say, viewed
from the top of the hill it is inconsistent. Why

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. l6l
then do we not call it so when it appears in the
child ? Because childhood is by definition just so
much less manhood, and, therefore, only a stage
on the road to manhood. That which is unnatural
to the whole is the essence and virtue of the part.
One of the best illustrations of this as regards
the present field of inquiry will be found in the
origin of that remarkable phase of morals Avhich
from time to time has appeared in the Christian
Church — asceticism. Whence has it come ? Is it
the legitimate fruit of the completed gospel prin
ciple ? or is it the excrescence produced by another
and foreign principle? It is neither. It belongs
to Christianity, indeed, but not as a fruit ; it is a
stage in the growth of that tree from which the
fruit has come. It has its necessary place in the
growth of New Testament morality within the
individual soul, and it is not difficult to determine
that place ; it lies in the transition expressed in
the words, "Add to knowledge, temperance," i.e.,
self-control. Christianity has its age of Stoicism,
though it is modified by the light of another sun.
Here, too, there is a time for individual repression,
a repression whose end is indeed individual en
largement, but which none the less for the present
is not joyous, but grievous. The stage of self-
control which precedes even the strength of
patience is, and can be, nothing less than a stage
of pain. The first flush of faith is past ; the final
glow of love is not yet come. The conclusion is
L

1 62 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
inevitable : there is in the ethics of the gospel a
place for self-denial. If we are asked — Is Chris
tianity the religion of asceticism ? we say, No !
If we are asked — Does Christianity countenance
asceticism? we say, Yes — for one of its stages.
The goal of Christ's religion is not self-denial, but
self-enjoyment; but the goal is won through the
surrender of the individual soul. To him who
stands at the foot of the mountain-pass the gate
of the spiritual life must be straight, and the way
must be narrow ; only he who looks down on the
scene from the summit of a completed love is able
to recognise the truth that the yoke after all was
easy, and the burden light.
To that summit of the spiritual life the course
of our investigation has now led us. We have
viewed, step by step, the stages of Christian deve
lopment in the individual soul. We have traced,
one by one, the phases of moral thought through
which the human spirit passes in its progress from
the isolation of faith to the companionship of love ;
from the struggle between the ideal and the actual
to the time when the actual becomes itself our
ideal. The progress has in every case been the
course of the seed — a growth from within to
Avithout, from loneliness to social union, from the
recesses of secrecy and silence to the voices of a
great multitude. The consideration of this final
and finishing stage is the subject Avhich now lies
before us.

IX.
THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
The stage of the Christian life at which we have
now arrived may be called the flower of New
Testament morality. That morality, as we have
seen, is essentially an evolution ; it begins in a tiny
germ, in a single act of faith ; and thence, in ever-
widening circles, it spreads from withiu to Avithout.
Its final stage, to which we have now come, is love.
It is described by St. Paul as the most excellent of
all ways, and is honoured by him with one of the
most eloquent eulogiums in the whole range of
sacred literature — the thirteenth chapter of ist Cor
inthians. We intend to -take this chapter as the
basis of our present inquiry. Our object is to dis
cover the distinctive nature of Christian love — that
which separates the Christian idea of love from all
other ideas of it. How can we better achieve that
object than by consulting the testimony of a docu
ment, beyond all question genuine, which offers a
direct description of Christian love from the experi
ence of one contemporaneous with the birth of
Christianity ? If any man was qualified to speak

1 64 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
on such a subject, it was Paul. His was no one
sided mind. He had seen all the sides of the
question, and had been impressed by each in turn.
He had passed through the experience of the Jew ;
he had felt the influence of the Gentile ; he pro
fessed himself indebted both to the civilised and to
the barbarian. He had studied many minds, and
he had seen some good in them all. When he
broke out into an eulogium on the beauty of Chris
tian love, he spoke from a standpoint of comparison.
He knew in what respects it was like, and in what
unlike, the love of surrounding religions. His
description is therefore above all measure valuable :
it is the voice of a witness on the spot, the testi
mony of an actor in the scene.
And the result of this comparison is that Paul
is willing to peril the question of Christianity's
religious permanence on the distinctive character
of its final stage of moral evolution. It is in the
nature of the conception it has formed of love
that he finds the surest guarantee for its absolute
dominion and its endless duration. He sees in
Christianity itself something which is essential,
and something which is only accidental. He is
not blind to the fact that even in this religion
there are elements whose functions are only tem
porary, and which in due season are destined to
pass away. " Whether there be prophecies," he
says, " they shall fail ; whether there be tongues,
they shall cease ; whether there be knowledge, it

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 65
shall vanish away." Nay; he would even seem
to go further still. He appears to imply that all
forms of merely intellectual activity are of neces
sity fleeting and changeful, and that the only
absolute, unfleeting, changeless element in our
nature is morality in the form of love. " We know
in part, and we prophecy in part ; but when that
Avhich is perfect is come, that which is in part is
done away." It is a great mistake to imagine that
by " that which is perfect " he means a future state
of existence. He means Christian love, in what
ever state of existence it may be found, present or
future. What he designs to say is this : All mere
systems of thought are, by their very nature,
evanescent. None of them, nor all of them united,
can express the whole truth ; they can, at best,
reveal only part of the ways of God, and God is
more than they. But love is not a part of the
ways of God ; it is His essence ; it is His Spirit ;
it is Himself. To reveal love is to reveal God ;
and the momeut that revelation comes, Ave find
that all previous revelations Avere but poor aud
inadequate expressions, mere fragments of the true.
We are ushered into an atmosphere where the old
measurements no longer apply, where the old lan
guage is no longer suitable. We are made aware
OO O
that feeling is larger than thought. We learn that
there is a religion of the heart which can remain
unaffected by the transmutations of its intellectual
forms, and which, in a single breath of its aspira-

1 66 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
tion, can express more than has been uttered by
all the intellectual forms united — a religion which
develops not Avith the future, and fades not with
the past ; but which, in the freshness of eternal
youth, is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever;
" love never faileth."
Paul, then, regards the Christian conception of
love as that element in Christianity which is eternal
aud immutable. It is Avorth while to inquire —
What is this conception of love ? The greater
number of religions have, in words at least, recog
nised some form of love ; but in Christianity alone
has the form of love survived the decay of the in
tellectual form. Why is this ? Men who do not
agree on a single article of faith are found to glory
in the common name of Christian, and to glory in
that name by reason of a special phase of moral
life which the possession of Christianity involves.
What is that phase of moral life ? and where lies
its speciality ? We may be sure that its special
feature is that which constitutes its power. If we
Avould understand this power, Ave must try to see
wherein the idea of love as revealed in Christianity
differs from the idea of love as manifested in other
faiths. If in doing so we should cast our eye on
ground already traversed, it must be remembered
that such a process is not of necessity a repetition.
When seen from the top of the hill, the old ground
has a different aspect from that which it presented
in the act of climbing. When that which is per-

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 67
feet is come, that which is in part loses its partial
character. In the second chapter of this book, we pointed
out that Judaism differs from Christianity, not in
the extent, but in the quality of its love. We
showed that the Jew Avas not only willing but eager
to embrace the stranger within his fold. He
wanted to love all the world, but he insisted that,
in the first instance, all the world should love him
— should agree with that system of doctrine which
he held to be the only truth. The Jewish condition
of love was equality of mind, union of sentiment,
participation in a common ritual ; outside of this
there was recognised no room for fellowship. We
have now to observe, however, that the statement
we have made concerning the Jew is equally
applicable to all pre-Christian religions in which
the sentiment of love is found at all. The demand
for an equality of standpoint as the basis of a
mutual love is by no means peculiar to Judaism ;
it is only more conspicuous in Judaism from its
historical contact with Christianity. Take, for ex
ample, the vast circle of Indian religions, and what
do Ave find ? We see immense communities of men
united by a tie of brotherhood, but what is the
ground of that brotherhood ? It is caste — the
Ocommon possession of a particular social status.
The man who loses caste, who, as we should say
in modern times, becomes an outcast, is thereby
separated from the circle of earthly brotherhood. It

1 68 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
may be thought, it for a long time was thought,
that Buddhism forms a grand exception to this
rule. It is a popular opinion that the Buddhist
had for his direct mission the abolition of caste.
As Professor Kuenen, however, has pointed out,
this is a grand mistake.* In point of fact, the
Buddhist never did look upon himself as a revolu
tionary ; he would have said at all times that he
came not to destroy but to fulfil. He did not view
himself as a man who came to overturn the tradi
tions of his fathers ; he was, in his own eyes at
least, an orthodox disciple of Brahmanism in all
that related to the present world. What distin
guished him from the Brahman was his larger hope
— hope for altered conditions outside the present
world. He wanted caste to be abolished so far as
to give to all an equal chance of salvation, i.e., of
admission into the Nirvana. Buddhism was at
best, however, only a prospective brotherhood. It
was the promise of a common share in things not
belonging to the earth, but it guaranteed no com
munity of earthly possessions. In all temporal
concerns the principle of caste remained. The
spirit of brotherhood was only theoretical and
ideal ; it had not learned to penetrate the institu
tions of the secular life.
The same may be said of the state religion of
China. There is much in the doctrine of Confucius
* See the chapter on Buddhism in his Hibbert Lectures : " National
Religions and Universal Religions." 1882.

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 69
Avhich suggests the idea of brotherhood, but it is
still the brotherhood of a caste. It is no longer,
indeed, as with Brahman and Buddhist, the caste
of a family, but it is the caste of a nation. It
does not occur to the Chinaman that there is a
world beyond the portals of his native soil ; and
if the thought of such a world did occur to him,
he would treat it with contempt. With him the
Empire is the world. All his legislation, moral
and political, is made on the supposition that the
Chinese form of civilisation is the only perfect
form. So far as Confucian morality ever reached
the standard of love, so far as it ever succeeded
in rising above the influence of utilitarian motives,
it only attained a brotherhood commensurate with
its national limits. Its love was determined by
the caste of a common patriotism ; it was confined
to the children of the great Celestial Empire. Out
side the walls of that Empire was the Chaos — the
world without form and void, for which no legis
lation as yet was possible ; it would only become
an object for love when it had become a subject
of the Chinese commonwealth.
Passing now to the Western world, and espe
cially to that portion of it Avhose philosophic era
was contemporaneous with the dawn of Christianity,
we find that the only two systems which challenge
comparison with the principle of love in the new
faith are the doctrines of the Stoic and the Platonist :
the Epicurean may be left out of account, as his

170 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
principle is that of self-love. Let us begin, then,
with the Stoic. We have pointed out in our open
ing chapter that Stoicism was by no means a
negative creed ; it really did contemplate the
benefit of mankind. The peculiarity of Stoicism
as a positive creed lay in the nature of that benefit
which it wished to confer. It sought not so much
the happiness as the dignity of man. It looked
upon man outside its own system as a very un
dignified being — a being not to be loved, but
despised. It saw him driven about with every
wind of fortune, uplifted by the sunbeam and
depressed by the shade ; and it was unable either
in the one case to congratulate, or in the other to
condole. The Stoic pitied man for a state of mind
which could lead to either of these experiences ;
but his pity was akin to contempt. He despised
a human being who allowed himself to be over
joyed at fortune's smile, or sad at fortune's frown ;
and he sought to raise him up to his own standard
¦ — one of indifference to the lot of life. But the
point for us is that until the process of raising was
complete there was no brotherhood. The fellow
ship of Stoicism is a fellowship within the sect.
Those who meet together in the Porch are the men
who have reached a common feeling — shall we not
rather say a common want of feeling. It is again
a brotherhood constituted by caste, only the caste
is not one of birth nor of nationality, but one that
has its ground in au unity of philosophic sentiment.

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 171
The Stoic Avas in philosophy what the Jew was in
religion — an advocate for mental uniformity. He
too wanted to save all men and to call them brethren;
he too refused to call them brethren until they had
been saved. The most which an outlying humanity
could claim from him was the promise of a love
to come and a brotherhood to come; there was no
room for a Stoic's sympathy beyond the limits
of the Stoic faith.
When we turn to Platonism, we find a similar
limit to the power of love. Platonism professes to
deal with that which is essential, and not accidental,
in the nature of man, and therefore we should
expect that here, if anywhere, we should be brought
into contact with- an universal love. But the truth
is, as we have indicated in our opening chapter, it
is the very universalism of the Platonic creed that
here constitutes its weakness. It tells man to love
in man only his abstract ideas — those elements
which he shares in common with the Mind of the
Universe. It bids him not to love the man but
his manhood ; not the person but his personality ;
not the mind but its qualities. It makes the
physical life an accident, a shadow, a dream, and
against the wants of that life it seals its sympathy.
It abstracts from the domain of love at least one
half of human nature, and that the most indigent
half. It is iu our lower nature that Ave are most
dependent. Our intellectual wants may carry Avith
them a sense of pain, but it is a pain which itself

172 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOATE.
carries the joy of a reATelation, the testimony that
our present powers do not exhaust the possibilities
of our being. But the wants of common life bear
with them no prophecy ; they speak only of defect
and weakness. In hunger and thirst, in war and
pestilence, in dangers of the land and perils of the
sea, man feels himself in the truest sense to be a
dependent being ; it is here that specially he needs
the humanity of his brother man. Yet, if the
Platonic Adew be correct, it is here that specially
the humanity of man is denied. In this creed
there is no provision for the lower life, nor for the
Avants of the lower life. Love, whether it be
divine or human, is limited to the sphere of the
intellect, and it cannot be exercised on that which
is suggestive only of defect. It is concerned with
ideas but not with sensations. Sensations are but
fleeting and transitory ; therefore they are not
divine, and not worthy of love. Privation, poArerty,
pain, weariness, are but shadows, and because they
are but shadows they cannot waken any pity Avhich
is akin to immortal loATe. Love must have for its
object something endowed with its own immor
tality, and it must find it, not in fugitive Feeling,
but iu permanent Thought.
Now, we do not criticise this theory ; our object
here is not criticism, but comparison. All we have
to say is that this Platonic love, be it false or true,
does not in any material sense differ from the form
of love assumed by other faiths and philosophies

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LO\rE. 173
of the pre-Christian world. It does not really
transcend the limits of caste. It is just as circum
scribed in its horizon as is the religion of the
Brahman or the creed of the Stoic. Unlike the
Pauline charity, it is a love that " seeketh her
own," that will only be united to those who are
already in harmony with herself.
For this brings us back to the passage we selected
as the basis of our present inquiry. If we examine
the descriptions of Christian love in i Corinthians
xiii., we shall find that there is one aspect in which
it differs from all the other views here enumerated.
In all these, as we have seen, the duty of love was
limited to men of the same caste. The caste in
some cases was physical ; in others intellectual, and
in others moral ; but making allowance for this
diversity, the principle was the same — a principle
of exclusiveness. In this chapter of St. Paul,
however, Ave have a love whose essential nature is
power to pass outside the favoured circle. The
distinctive power of the love depicted by St. Paul
is a power to seek for objects and to lavish itself
upon objects which are at present unworthy of it,
and which it knows to be so. In truth, our English
word charity, in its common use, however bad it
may be as a translation of St. Paul's Greek, is in
our opinion a thoroughly good rendering of his
meaning. Charity, in its common English sense,
means generosity to those in need, whether the
need be bodily or spiritual : in either case the idea

1 74 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
of need is present. We never speak of being
charitable to our father or mother considered as
such ; Ave profess to love them. But if our father
or mother should sacrifice toward us the parental
relation, if they should seem to act in a manner
unbecoming a parent, and if in spite of that fact
we should make such allowances for them as should
enable us to love them still, we should be said to
exercise charity. Charity always implies a bend
ing down, a stooping from the height of our own
caste. There is in it an element of resistance to
the self-nature of a man, something which prompts
him to do what another part of his nature Avould
bid him refrain from doing. Take this chapter of
St. Paul, and you will find at every line of his
description that he regards Christian love as a love
that can exist in spite of temptations to loveless-
ness. It is a love which makes its way through
barriers, a love which manifests itself in struggle.
7 OO
It " suffers long," " is not easily provoked," " envies
not," " doth not behave itself unseemly," " beareth
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things." It " never fafleth," not even
when prophecies fail and tongues cease and know
ledge vanishes away ; it has in it the power to
persist through all changes. In every one of
these statements there is contained the same
common idea — love battling against difficulties.
It is no longer the Stoic embracing the followers.
of Stoicism, or the Platonist communing with the

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 75
disciples of Plato, or the Brahman enfolding the
men of his own caste. It is the spirit of a human
brotherhood grounded on the fact of humanity and
disregarding every other fact. It is a religion pass
ing by the power of love outside the gates of its
own circle and its own creed in order to claim
a fellowship, a kindred with a circle and a creed
not its own. It does not merely look forward to
claim such a fellowship in the future ; it claims it
now. It asserts the fact of a present brotherhood
with the Avhole race of man — a brotherhood which
exists by reason of humanity and irrespective of all
beside. It loAres, therefore, in spite of difference of
sentiment, in defiance even of contradictions against
itself ; the spirit of Christian love is a spirit of
charity. It will be seen from all this that the Christian
idea of love carries in the very heart of it an element
of sacrifice. It cannot be said that the love of the
Brahman or the love of the Stoic is sacrificial ; in
neither of these cases does the man in loving his
brother man pass beyond the circle of his own
opinions — the man Avhom he acknowledges to be a
brother must himself be a Brahman or a Stoic. It
would not, indeed, be far amiss to say that all pre-
Christian brotherhood is a form of self-love. What
a man sees in the object of his brotherly affection
is, as it were, his own qualities reflected in a look-
ino--o-lass. He is pleased with another because he
is the shadow of his own soul. As long as that

176 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
other is not his shadow he is nothing to him ; he
may be an object of pity, but he is not a subject
for brotherhood. In all this there is no sacrifice.
The man does not give up anything in order to love.
The pleasure of love is to him the pleasure of having
a mirror wherein he can see and approve — himself.
Far different is it with Christianity ; there the fore
most thought is brotherhood. Man looks out upon
the world, and sees it lying in wickedness. He
does not, however, say, If I could only lift the world
out of its wickedness, then would I claim brother
hood with it. What he says in the Christian
system is this : This world has gone all astray, but
it is my brother. I have not one opinion in com
mon with it, but I owe it my love ; I love it
because it is human, and I am human. I am
angry with it on account of its impurity, and I am
sorely tempted to recall my love, but love is stronger
than I. It forces me to stoop from my own purity
into contact with the world's impurity ; at its bidding
I have to leave my caste and to come down ; my
love is older than my caste, and it conquers it.
Now, in all this we have the root of the idea of
sacrifice — the passage out of self-life into the life of
others. It is often said that sacrifice is the mani
festation of Christian love ; it would be more correct
to say that Christian love is the fruit of the spirit
of Christian sacrifice. The element of sacrifice here
lies deeper than the act ; it lies in the thought, in
the feeling ; it lies in the very power to extend our

THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 177
sympathy beyond the limits of our caste, to
give play to our hearts in a region which is not
their own, to feel an interest in objects which are
foreign to the soil of our being. That is the reason
why Christ Himself begins His moral teaching by
the proclamation of sacrifice. We might have ex
pected it to have been otherwise. It seems at first
view a strange thing that He should not at the
outset have altogether hid the form of the cross,
that in promising the advent of a kingdom of glory
He should have coupled with the promise the con
dition that man should be poor in spirit and meekly
self-restraining. Why does He not conceal the con
dition of sacrifice until the initial stage is past?
The reason is plain. It is because the initial stage
itself is one of sacrifice. It is quite true, indeed,
as we have said, that men were brought at first to
Christianity by motives of worldly advantage. But
to be brought to Christianity is one thing — to em
brace it is a very different thing. In order to learn
what it was, they had to be driven to it by some
thing other than itself, but the moment they came
near to it they saw that it must be accepted or
rejected for itself alone. And the object to be
accepted or rejected was a sacrifice. The instant
Christianity revealed itself, it revealed itself as a
sacrificial life. It was not merely sacrificial in its
consummation ; it was so, nay, most of all so, in its
beginning. It was here that the old love flashed
into antagonism with the new. Not only was the
M

178 THE BASIS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
Avay narrow; the very gate which led to it was
strait. The new love demanded a renouncement of
the old self ; it demanded it not as a pledge to be
redeemed at the end of the way, but as the very
condition of entering the gate. Sacrifice itself was
the gate, therefore love alone could enter in.
It will be seen from this that Christian love is
a sign of power. It is in the highest sense a
spiritual force whose function is movement and
struggle. It comes not to send peace, but a sword
— and not peace, but a sword does it receive. We
have seen that 1 Corinthians xiii. is a record of
love's struggles, and it is on that account a descrip
tion of love's powers. What are these powers ? In
what direction lies the strength of that energy
which has proved so mighty to the pulling down
of unspiritual strongholds ? The answer to that
question will be the subject of our next chapter.

X.
THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
The powers of Christian love as delineated by St.
Paul in i Corinthians xiii. are classified under four
heads — first, passive strength : " Love beareth all
things ; " second, intellectual charity : " Love be
lieveth all things ; " third, moral optimism : "Love
hopeth all things ; " and fourth, persistence in time :
" Love endureth all things." To see the full range
of the power of this love, we must consider each of
these in turn.
We begin with the passive strength of Christian
love: "Love beareth all things." The idea sug-
o o
gested by the original is that of an infinite capacity
for silent suffering. Now it is hardly too much to
say that the very idea of such a power was a new
thought to the world. The notion of suffering was
O O
not new, and the notion of sflence was not new ;
but the union of the two was a somewhat novel
combination. The Jew suffered, but he cried out ;
the Stoic did not cry out, but he had ceased to
suffer. It will be found that the Avhole ancient
world had its type in one or other of these. It

180 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
either looked with horror on the prospect of pain,
or it looked with contempt on the susceptibility to
pain. There is a passage cited in the Epistle to the
Hebrews which has always seemed to us to mark
off the two opposite effects of sorrow on the old
world : " Despise not thou the chastening of the
Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked by Him."
To despise suffering, and to faint beneath suffering :
these were the separate tendencies of separate minds.
The mind of the Jew, and the popular mind of the
Greek, though from different reasons, habitually
fainted ; the one from the sense of being a religious
outlaw, the other from his abhorrence of aught but
physical ease. The Buddhist, on the other hand,
sought to crucify the Arery fact of sensation, and in
this he was joined by the Stoic and the Platonist.
Their aim was to despise sorrow. Their idea of
moral perfection was a heart in which all feeling
was dead, to which pleasure could bring no thrill,
and pain no sting. They sought a life in which
reason alone should rule, a life from which all
emotion should be banished, and from whose borders
should be excluded alike the sound of laughter aud
the sight of tears : their motto in the hour of
calamity was — Be strong, and do not suffer.
Paul's motto, on the contrary, is — Suffer, and
still be strong. His view is essentially different
from either of the preceding extremes. On the
one hand, he refuses to believe with the Jew that
pain is an experience under which a man should

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. l8l
crouch ; he sees in the ability to bear it a proof of
the possession of divine love. On the other hand,
he refuses with the Stoic and the Buddhist to be
lieve that a man's patience is perfected in propor
tion as he feels little ; rather would he say that
the proof of patience is the strength of that suf
fering Avhich it bears. And we must all feel that
the Gentile Apostle has here the philosophic ad-
ATantage over the Stoic and his allies. Stoicism
professed to teach men how to bear calamity ; it
appeared in the sequel that it only taught them
how to crucify calamity. It did not give them
power to be strong in spite of sorrow ; it simply
administered an opiate which caused the sorrow to
be forgotten. Paul saw clearly that such an opiate
was no real victory. He saw that the only moral
conquest of suffering was the power to bear suffer
ing, and that the bearing of suffering implied its
presence. He saw that the strong man was just
the man who had not an opiate, Avho was alive to
the pains of life, aud yet did not succumb. That
is the power he claims for Christian love.
Now it has been the experience of all men in all
ages that personal depression is naturally unfavour
able to the diffusion of our social affections. When
a man is down in the world, he does not by nature
look with much benevolence on those who are up.
But if their being up has something to do with his
beino- down, the sense of grievance is intensified
tenfold. If he be a deformed slave like Epictetus,

I 82 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
eiid is conscious that the Roman world is either
or'ighing at him or shrinking from him, it is A'ery
pa3icult indeed for him to cherish for that Roman
Herld a feeling of warmth ; if he does cherish such
off eling, we are justified in calling his love a power.
vyorrtetus himself did not reach that state. He was
Lorcifrom an anger, but that was because he had
To de himself from all desire. He, on his part, had
these A&t a contempt for the Avorld as the world had
The min '> au(I so far as the love is concerned, it is
Greek,ry easy to see the difference between them.
fainted^d a contempt for the other's gift, and there
fore eacfia Avas regardless of the other's scorn. This
is a far preferable state to enmity, but it does
not nearly? attain the Christian power of love.
What prevents it from attaining the level of that
power is the absence of the bearing element. If
Epictetus had be^en converted to Christianity, he
would have lost hik Stoicism, and therefore his re
fusal to hate the wprld would have meant the pos
session of power — mower to bear through the power
to love. His reticemce would not then have been a
mere negation, but fl^he positive manifestation of a
sublime spiritual for?ce which had power not only
to refrain from vengeance, but to return good for
evil. \
We have called this i a passive strength to mark
the fact that it is love subsisting under the support
of a burden. We must carefully distinguish, how
ever, between the word passive and the Avord nega-

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 83
tive. We are often told that Christianity differs
from other religions in the prominence it gives to
the passive virtues — poverty of spirit, humility,
meekness, and the like. Such a statement may
mislead unless we bear in mind that there are
negative virtues which are called by the same
name. There is a poverty of spirit which will be
found in the creed of the Cynic, centuries before
Christianity. There is a meekness which will be
found in the doctrines of the Stoic long ere the
Cross appeared. Yet we do not say that this
humility, this meekness, was an anticipation of
Christ's morality ; it had the same effect, but it
had a different cause. The meekness before the
Cross was content to dwell in the valley, but only
because it recognised the existence of no real
mountain ; it was the meekness of indifference
which looked upon all life as on one common level
of nothingness, and was therefore oblivious of the
fact whether fortune smiled or frowned. The
meekness of a Cynic or of a Stoic Avas not self-
restraint ; Avhen he had reached that stage he had
nothing to bear. But the meekness of Christianity
had nothing in it either of Cynicism or of Stoicism ;
it was essentially a self-restraint, and its motive
was love. It was not grounded on the belief that
the pleasures of life were in themselves undesirable,
or that the pains of life were in any case a matter
of indifference. It was built upon something whose
presence was felt to be better than pleasure, and

I S4 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
whose absence was believed to be worse than pain
— the enthusiasm for humanity, the love of man
as man : that was the secret of the Christian's
meekness. It is in this light that we come to understand
Avhat is meant by Christ's own precept : " Love
your enemies." To a Stoic the fulfilment of that
precept in a positive form would be impossible ;
the most that he could do would be to abstain
from hating his enemies. There are two motives
which may induce a man to abstain from hatred
— indifference and love ; the Stoic reached the
first, the Christian alone attained to the second.
The one became so indifferent to the outward con
cerns of life that the infliction of a personal injury
produced no impression on him ; the other had
such a love for the man as man that the injury
of the moment though felt was covered. The
expression as man is to be especially emphasised.
The command to love one's enemy as an enemy
would be not only a paradox, but a contradiction
in terms. It would be the command to fix our
affections on that phase of a man's character which
Avas most opposed to our own nature. The Chris
tian sense of love towards an enemy is precisely
the opposite of this ; it is the remembrance that
our enemy has a side of his nature which is not
discordant with our own, that even if there be
nothing more between us, he is at least human.
The enmity is in every case borne as a cross, but

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 185
it is borne. The power which bears it is love;
the object of love is the man in himself, the man
because he is a man. The enmity is not a subject
of indifference ; it is ever a source of pain. The
triumph of Christian love consists in the fact, not
that it feels no obstacle, but that it has overcome
the obstacle. It has not annihilated its cross ; it has
taken up its cross, and its power has been magnified
and glorified in proportion to the weight it bears.
The second of the powers of love is that which
we have called intellectual charity: "Love believeth
all things." The idea is not that Christian love
is able to believe wrong to be right, or incapable
of seeing any fault in its object. It is not too
much to say that the perception of a fault is
quickened by Christian love. It is inevitable that
it should be so. If the presence of the disease
involves the danger of death, the eye of love will
be quick to detect its presence, quicker a thousand
times than the eye of indifference. Christianity
professes to see in sin the presence of a disease
which, if not arrested, must end in death ; is it
surprising that the first manifestation of that
disorder should be made to the eyes of those who
are most interested in its victim ? Intellectual
charity does not consist in believing all things we
see to be right. It cannot be designed as a veil
o o
to hide^from a man's observation the actual state
of the facts around him ; its province must lie in
a very different sphere.

1 86 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
And, indeed, a little reflection will convince us
that the sphere of intellectual charity is not the
world of observation, but the world which a man
does not see. To have intellectual charity, is, in
plain terms, to think well of one's neighbour, to
believe all things good of him in the absence of
any proof of evil. It is clear that such a state of
mind belongs not to the region of observation, but
to the stage preceding observation. When I
actually look upon a man's actions, I am at liberty
to judge whether they be good or bad, and it is
no charity to say they are good if I know them
to be bad. But if I do not know, if I have had
no direct observation of the man's life and conduct,
4hen in the absence of any such evidence it is the
duty of my Christian love to disregard any unsifted
rumours to his disparagement, and to believe in
the meantime all things in his faATour. We say
in the meantime. There is no obligation laid upon
any Christian man of refusing to observe facts, or
omitting to investigate facts. The man is only
pledged to an act of faith so long as knowledge is
not within his reach. The sphere of knowledge is
the legitimate sphere of judgment. The moment
I have come to know all the facts of the case I am
in a position to give a verdict. It is when the
facts of the case are not before me that I am asked
to walk by faith towards my brother man. I am
asked to occupy towards him an attitude of belief.
I am bidden to preserve that attitude even in the

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 87
face of difficulties unless these difficulties amount
to an absolute negation. Just as my faith in the
universe is to be steadfast in spite of the clouds
which environ it, so my faith in the integrity of
my fellow-man is to remain undimmed in spite of
the breath of calumny. Love by an act of faith
is to impute its own righteousness to the suspected
party as long as there hangs over him nothing
more than suspicion. It is to cover him with its
wings until the calamity be overpast, or until the
obloquy be proved to be just. If the obloquy be
proved to be just, love is not therefore to die ;
nevertheless in this case it will change its attitude ;
it will be no longer a love of charity, it Avill be
a love of forgiveness. There can be no charity
towards wrong as wrong ; there may be an admis
sion of extenuating circumstances, but that is
simply a suspension of judgment in our ignorance
of the amount of wrong. For wrong itself there
can be no charity, but there may always be for
giveness. Forgiveness, however, belongs rather to
the first than to the second power of love, rather
to the bearing than the believing. We are at
present only considering love's power of faith, its
power to believe in human goodness as long as
human goodness is not proved to be a dream. We
have called this distinctively a stage of intellectual
charity to indicate the fact that it belongs to the
world of thought. What we say is, that it can
only be expected to last as long as faith remains

1 88 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOArE.
faith, that when faith becomes knowledge love
must take another form. If my brother is proA^ed
to be pure, charity becomes superfluous ; love Avill
not then say : I believe all things, but I know all
things. If my brother is proved to be impure,
charity towards his sin is improper ; love will then
say, not, I belieAre all things, but I forgive all
things. The stage in which a man is bound to
O O
believe all good things of his brother — in other
words, the stage of intellectual charity, belongs
purely to that region of experience into which the
light of his brother's life has not jret come. It
belongs to the period in which there is no personal
knowledge on which to build, to the time when
facts are few and testimonies doubtful. It is then
that the Apostle demands faith from love. He
demands not so much a suspension of judgment
as a continuance in the original judgment formed
ere any cloud had come. He asks us to justify
the man by our faith, to believe in him Avithout
knowing him, and before we have had an oppor
tunity of testing him, to assume that he is true
until the facts prove him to be false. That is
Paul's description of the essence of Christian charity
¦ — the charity of thought by which in the absence
of proved facts Ave lend to our maligned brother
the gift of our faith, the charity which in the
meantime " believeth all things."
The third of the powers of love is what we have
called moral optimism : " Love hopeth all things."

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 89
This power is essentially distinct from either of
the foregoing, and marks a higher phase of the
strength of love. The logical order in which the
possibilities of the human heart are unfolded,
would have been best expressed by saying that
love first believeth all things, then beareth or
forgiveth all things, and in its third stage hopeth
all things. It begins by disregarding the breath
of suspicion, by refusing in the absence of definite
knowledge to lose its faith in a man's virtue. If
there should come a time when love can no longer
retain its faith in a man's virtue, it has then a
second phase of life to enter upon ; it can no
longer believe that all things are right, but it can
forgiAre all things that have been Avrong, can bear
OO O7
the sin. But when this has been done there
awaits love a yet higher task ; it has not only to
cancel the past, it has to hope for the future. I
may forgive an act where I have very little hope
for the man, and I may continue to love him
without having any hope of him. We presume it
is this which is meant when it is said, I will
forgive it, but I cannot forget it. You are willing
to overlook the deed in itself, in so far as it is a
past action, but you cannot ignore that present
state of the man's mind which the action indicates ;
your love is unlit by joy. Now, St. Paul says
that it is possible for love to reach not only for
giveness, but forgetfulness. He says that a perfect
love will look upon its object with the eye of hope.

I go THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
The old ideal you formed of the man was not true,
is not true, but still may be true. Charity can no
longer believe him to be what he is not, but hope
can believe that he will be what he is not. Charity
belongs to the sphere of faith, forgiveness belongs
to the sphere of knowledge, hope belongs to the
sphere in which faith and knowledge shall be
reconciled, to a sphere in which that ideal of
human life which is now proved to be an illusion
shall become at last a great reality, and shall fulfil
the highest expectations of our hours of charity.
Now, this moral optimism, this power of love to
hope, is in the full extent of its range a pheno
menon peculiar to Christianity. Buddhism was a
religion of despair. Brahmanism was a religion
of sadness. Parsism was a religion which limited
the power of God. The Mythologies of the Old
World did not lift their votaries above the impres
sions of the hour ; the popular mind of Greece
and Rome was too much occupied with the present
to have either hope or fear. Even the sects of
philosophy did not reach an universal hope for
man. The Epicurean avoided all thought of ques
tions which did not touch his own individual com
fort. The Stoic longed for all men to think as he
thought, but he did not dare to hope for it ; it was
his want of hope for mankind at large that pointed
the edge of his contempt. The Platonist had the
ideal of a great and glorious republic, but its glory
was to be reached by lopping off one-half the

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 191
branches of the tree of human life. The only
two regions in which an analogy to the Chris
tian optimism is found are the ideal kingdom
worshipped in the system of Confucius, and the
Messianic kingdom contemplated by the children
of Israel. But the ideal kingdom of Confucius is
after all but an idealised China, not an empire of
universal Man, and the Messianic kingdom of
Israel is a kingdom which is to minister rather to
the glory of Israel than to the glory of humanity.
Now, Christianity is pre-eminently the religion
of hope — of hope for all men without distinction.
The very first care of Christianity is to abolish
distinctions in the claims of men to be objects of
hope. It declares that all are by nature equally
guilty before God. The earliest equality which
the religion of Christ established among men was
not a levelling up, but a levelling down. It
appealed to the brotherhood of souls, not by a
common sense of privilege, but by a common sense
of impotence. Dean Merivale says that from a
human point of view its essence consisted in the
doctrine of the fundamental equality of men.* It
is true, and therefore to teach them this equality
it spoke to that which was the most fundamental
element in their nature — their feeling of absolute
dependence ; it told them that, one and all, they
were dead in trespasses and sin. And what we
wish to point out here is that this common degra-
* Hist, of the Eomans, I., p. 55.

192 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
dation was a common hope. If there was hope in
a dead world for the life of one, there must be
hope for the lives of all. There can be no degrees
in death. If love had any sphere at all it must
be an universal sphere. In every case there Avas
the fame barrier to be overcome ; if that barrier
could ever be broken, it could always be broken.
If a single human soul had at any time, in any
place, amid any circumstances, been raised from
the bondage of corruption into the life of moral
liberty, there was no reason in the nature of men
why every human soul should not so rise, no reason
in the nature of love which should prevent the com
mand being given to it : " Hope all things ! "
The fourth and last of the powers of love is that
described in the words " endureth all things." It
differs from the three foregoing powers, not in its
quality, but in its quantity, and on this account
it will not long detain us. It is not a separate
power from the charity of love, or the forgiveness
of loAre, or the hope of love ; it is the persistence
in time of any one of these, or all of those. It is
the power of charity to retain its faith in man,
however long that evidence is delayed which shall
either clear or condemn him. It is the power of
forgiveness to forgive seventy times seven ; it is
the power of hope to hope on to the end. In each
and all of its phases it may be described as love's
ability to wait. The ability to wait, the power to
be permanent, the strength to keep its youth amid

THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 1 93
the dilapidation and decay of that ideal structure
which was the object of its early gaze, is a posses
sion which has always been regarded as marking
the boundary line between love sensuous and love
spiritual. The affection of the animal for its off
spring is shortlived ; the affection of the voluptuary
for his object fades with the fancy of the hour.
Spiritual love is incapable of change and indepen
dent of change ; spiritual love is the love of man
as man, because he is man. It rests not on the
form of humanity, not on the deeds of humanity,
but on the fact of humanity. The form may be
mutilated by accident or by age ; the deeds may
be sullied by calumny or by degeneracy ; but
even in ruins the man is still man. While that
humanity remains the love of the spirit abides, for
the love of the spirit is love for the spirit. It is
the love, not for any present, or past, or future
qualities, but for that which lies beneath all quali
ties, and makes all qualities possible — the fact of
a human personality, the being of a conscious soul.
What else than this is meant when it is said,
" We love Him because He first loved us " ? Divine
love — love in its most ideal form — exists originally
for the soul as a soul. It is anterior to all the
qualities which yet may arise in its object; nay,
it is itself instrumental in the production of the
best of these. And as it is earlier than their
origin, so it must, if necessary, be later than their
decay. If the soul should fall from its goodness, N

194 THE POWERS OF CHRISTIAN LOVE.
it will then but revert to that first position in
Avhich love found it. Love will take it up again
in its emptiness, in its privation, in its want of
all qualities which men call good or great. The
soul itself is more than all that it contains, and a
love that is founded on the soul will survive the
dissolution of its possessions ; heaven and earth
may pass away, but that love will not pass
away.

XI.
THE NEW HEROISM.
We found in the last chapter that Christianity
brought into the world a new form of energy. We
found that the old force men called love was here
transformed so radically as almost to become a
distinct creation. We found that in this form of
Christian transformation it was the source of four
new powers of the heart of man — a power of faith
in human nature as long as human nature was not
known to be false, a power of forgiveness when it
was known to be false, a power of hope by which
the first faith might be restored, and a power of
permanence by which the realisation of the hope
could be waited on long and patiently. We have
now to see in what manner these new powers of
the heart have influenced the Avorld as a world, in
other words, have moulded the secular life of men.
That they have influenced and moulded the secular
life of men is denied by none. That in point of
fact they have transformed ancient thought into
modern thought, is now one of the commonplaces
of history. But it is by no means at first sight so

ig6 THE NEW HEROISM.
clear how the change has been effected. It is of
course easy to say that it has been Avrought by a
spiritual regeneration. No doubt it has in what is
called the Church, i.e., the body of men that are
spiritually regenerated. But what of the world,
Avhat of the masses that have not received what is
called Christian regeneration ? It cannot be denied
that to some extent, at least, they have received
Christian civilisation ; it cannot be doubted that
those who do not possess the powers of Christian
love try to imitate their possession. The question
is, what is that influence which has produced this
tendency to imitate the product of a new culture,
to simulate by artificial means the growth of a
spirit which is as yet foreign to the nature 1
To estimate this influence we must bear in mind
the fact that the religion of Christ has addressed
itself not merely to the heart but to the imagination.
It has not only inaugurated a new life but a new
heroism. It is to the transformation in the world's
idea of glory that we chiefly owe the transition
from the old culture into the new. Let us consider,
at the outset, the effect of the mere discovery that
the heart has powers. To the ancient standard of
heroism the heart was a passive thing. Some
despised it as a source of Aveakness, some tolerated
it as a necessary evil ; none looked upon it as an
actual citadel of man. The most moral of all
ancient systems — that of Buddhism, is itself the
very best illustration ; it sought the goal of per-

THE NEW HEROISM. 1 97
fection in the extinction of desire. If systems of
religion and philosophy thought thus, it was much
more natural that common men should think so.
Religion and philosophy might affect to despise any
love of glory, but common men could not. Some
standard of glory they must have, and where were
they to get it ? The heights of the intellect were
beyond them, the desires of the heart were said to
be beneath them ; there remained for them only
the world of the senses. That world accordingly
they chose. They laid their ideal of glory in the
objects of sight and sound — in the glitter of arms
and the thunders of Avar. The great man became to
them identical Avith the strong man, and the strong
man with the man of muscular force. That there
was a strength Avhich did not manifest itself by
beating down, was a thought which had not yet
entered their minds. That the softness of the
human heart might itself attain the strength of
adamant was an idea they could not comprehend.
Aud so they wove the chaplet for the warrior's
brow, and kept the laurel for him who slew the
foe ; the courage of the beast of the field became
their type of heroic virtue.
At the very root of the type the new ideal
struck. The religion of Christ declared that the
greatest power in the world, the only power that
never failed, was the power of love. Such a
declaration ran right in the face of the old world's
philosophy and practice. Love is a form of desire,

198 THE NEW HEROISM.
and the philosophy of the East counted desire a
weakness. Love is a form of feeling, and the
philosophy of the West had called feeling a defect.
The religion of Christ opposed both. It declared
love to be potentially divine, and in so doing it
placed the highest possibilities of humanity in the
desires and feelings of the heart.
The first and immediate effect of this was to
magnify human life itself. In the old world the
glory of a man's life lay in something outside itself.
To the popular mind its glory lay in its material
enrichment ; to the philosopher and the religious
devotee, its greatness consisted in its material
impoverishment. To the faith of Christ the life
of a man Avas valuable, neither on account of what
it had, nor yet by reason of what it had not, but
simply and solely in virtue of what it was. And
the test of what it was, was the heart. The index
to the man Avas the state of his desires ; where his
heart was, there his treasure was to be sought.
Now the point for us to observe is that this was
really an exaltation of the idea of life itself.
Christianity neither advocated material aggrandise
ment on the one hand, nor material asceticism on
the other ; it merely said that man's true riches
lay within, and in so saying it proclaimed to the
world the inherent grandeur of being a living soul.
The most direct influence of this new revelation
was that exerted upon the idea of suicide ; it
transformed it from a noble into an ignoble death.

THE NEW HEROISM. 1 99
To die by one's own hand was with the Roman an
act of courage ; it is with the Christian a deed of
the deepest cowardice. The reason lies in the fact
that to the Christian the greatest power is heart-
power — power to bear. In his view it needs more
courage to live than to die. The highest strength
of which the Christian knows is the love which can
support trial. The doctrine of the Cross itself is
the proclamation of a new kind of glory. The
heroism of the Son of Man is the heroism of one
who has power to yield up his will to the Uni
versal Will, to whom living and dying are alike
forms of life — that life of love that bears the
burdens of the universe. In such a standard of
heroism there is no place for suicide. To die by
the will of God, and in acceptance of the will of
God, is a form of life because it is a form of love ;
it is a voluntary submission to the established
order of the world ; it is to say, Thy will be done.
But to die by one's own hand is to resist the
established order ; it is to say, My will be done !
It is to fly from a burden one fears to face ; it is to
confess one's inability to bear. It is thus that to
the eye of Christianity that which was the greatest
proof of courage has become the highest evidence
of cowardice. The death of the suicide was once
applauded ; it is now mentioned with bated breath,
and that which Pagan Rome referred to magna
nimity of soul is explained by Christian charity as
the result of mental weakness.

200 THE NEW HEROISM.
And the same principle which made it more
heroic iu a man to bear his own infirmities, made it
more heroic in him to bear the infirmities of others.
If Christianity threw a stigma over the idea of
suicide, it cast a yet deeper stigma on the practice
of infanticide. That practice originated iu the
Pagan ideal of greatness. If a man's life consisted
in the abundance of the material things he pos
sessed, a man was potentially great in proportion
as he evinced the likelihood of possession. Hence
the strongest lives were the most carefully pre
served ; it was to these the nation looked for the
achievement of its conquests and of its glory. But
the weak, the frail, the deformed, the liA^es that
came into the Avorld with a defect either of body
or of mind, were from this point of view not worth
preserving. They had no prospect of contributing
anything to the national glory, no likelihood of
ever being saluted as the conquerors of Rome's
enemies. They were more likely to be themselves
a burden ou their country and a retardation of the
nation's life. And so Rome thought that the best
thing she could do with them was to destroy them
at their birth. So far from being consciously in
humane in this act, she was prompted to the act
to some extent by the very impulse of humanity.
If a deformed Roman could have got his choice in
infancy, whether he should die or live, he Avould
Avithout hesitation have preferred the former alter
native ; in condemning weak infants to exposure

THE NEW HEROISM. 201
he only did as he would have been done by,
if in similar circumstances he had received the
right to choose. The fault of the Roman was
not his inhumanity ; it Avas his false ideal of
humanity. He thought he was doing good service
both to the State and to the child by cutting
short a life that should never develop into a
fighting man.
But Christianity- said, Let the child live. In
so saying, it was not actuated merely by humanity ;
it was guided by a process of reasoning. It differed
from Paganism, not so much in being more humane
O J O
as in haAdng a higher view of what constituted
o o
humanity. To Paganism, the most ignoble service
in life Avas burden-bearing, and therefore to free a
life from burden-bearing was the purest clemency.
But to Christianity the service of burden-bearing
was of all others the noblest. The very symbol of
Christian glory was the carrying of a cross. It was
a symbol not of weakness, but of power — the power
of love. The great agent of power in the old world
had been hate ; it was this which had nerved men
for the scenes of the battlefield. But here was a
power that could enable men to be courageous
without a battlefield. Here was a power which
literally could make a man strong in the midst of
weakness, which could give the life-long invalid a
place among the heroes of the universe. The
religion of Christ proclaimed that there was an
order of heroism which the Roman Senate had

202 THE NEW HEROISM.
never yet honoured with a triumph — the heroism
that belongs to the patience in tribulation ; for
those Avho had passed through this fiery furnace
it claimed the laurel crown. And just because it
deemed the bearing of weakness to be a field of
glory, it would not rob the decrepit infant of its
prospective triumph. It would not cut short at
birth a life Avith such possibilities of heroism before
it. It would not deprive the child of the chance of
that golden crown which the new civilisation was
to place on the brows of those who should be per
fect through suffering.
A still wider social influence of the new heroism
was the change it effected in the position of woman.
Before the advent of the Cross the feminine nature,
as a rule, was not appreciated. It had not sufficient
power of abstraction for the Platonist ; it had too
much power of emotion for the Stoic ; it had no
point of contact with the materialistic tendencies
of the popular mind. It is hardly too much to say
that the women who obtained a position either in
the Pantheon or in the State obtained it in propor
tion to the sacrifice of the typically feminine nature.
But with the dawn of Christianity woman came to
the front as woman. She had sometimes been at
the front as something else than woman — as a
minister to sensuous passions or a contributor to
political intrigues. But in Christianity she appeared
heroic in that which was her native garb. She
came into prominence in virtue of the very type of

THE NEW HEROISM. 203
character which in the old world had constituted
the ground of her repression — her gentleness, her
meekness, her self-restraint. She derived her pro
minence from the fact that Christianity had taught
men where the highest courage lay. It had taught
them that the most arduous part of the soul's
battle was its struggle with itself, its effort to
restrain its oavu passions, its power to bear. It had
made them feel that the only strength adequate to
such a task was heart-strength, that in such a strife
mere intellect was powerless, that love alone could
support the strain. In this apotheosis of a new
and passive heroism the soul of woman was glorified.
The image of the feminine nature was lifted into
the heights, and men worshipped it. Mariolatry is
the earliest worship of woman to be found in the
world's annals. Juno was not adored as woman,
but as a female Jupiter ; Venus was not adored
as woman, but as sensuous loveliness. Mary was
worshipped as virgin purity. And this historic act
is at the same time symbolic ; it marks an universal
change in the attitude of the human mind towards
the feminine spirit. It indicates that under the
new regime the spirit of womanhood had become
everywhere the object of reverence. In bending
the knee to the Virgin Mother, men, under the
guise of a very crude symbol, were expressing their
adoration of that element in human nature which
had been so long despised — the restraint of passion,
the limitation of self-will, the power to acquiesce in

204 THE NEW HEROISM.
the surrender of sensuous aims, and to find a new
joy in submission to the common good.
But perhaps the widest of all the influences
exerted by the new heroism was that produced on
the idea of government. The relation of Church
and State has been in all Christian ages more or less
a subject of controversy. Some have held that the
State has a right to rule the Church ; others that
the Church has a right to dominate the State.
With this controversy we have here happfly no
concern. The question with Avhich we have to do
is one that has not received so much attention :
What is the relation between the idea of the Church
and the idea of the State ? We want to know —
not why church-government has at any time domi
nated state-government, but why at all times since
the Christian era the State itself has been gradually
changing the model of its own government into
closer approximation Avith the ideal of a Church.
In this sense it will be found that Christianity has
more really absorbed the State in modern times
than she ever did in the days of Hildebrand. It is
indeed no longer a physical but a moral absorption.
The Church has not engulfed the State, but the
church-idea of headship has become identical with
the state-idea of kinghood. The State is more and
more recognising that the true king is a servant —
the servant of all. The old idea of kinghood was
what was called an absolute monarchy — a monarchy
in which the will of the ruler constitutes the will of

THE NEW HEROISM. 205
the people. The new thought, the thought to Avhich
every day the governments of the earth are approxi
mating, is that of a monarchy in which the will of
the people constitutes the Avill of the ruler. In the
ancient regime the law descends from the heights
o o
to the valleys ; in the modern it ascends from the
valleys to the heights. In the former the king is
great because he utters the earliest voice ; in the
latter he is great because he utters the latest voice
of all, and sums up in his verdict the average sen
timent of the nation.
Now, what we have to remark is, that this latter
and more modern view of state-government is the
Christian ideal of cAwrc/i-government. When St.
Paul Avishes to emphasise the fact that Christ is
King over His Church, he calls Him the Head of
O 7
the body. Why does he use this metaphor instead
of the simple and direct title of king ? It is
because in the view of Paul Christ is king in a
special way — by bearing the sorrows of His subjects.
The head is king over the members of the body
because it bears the pains of the members. The
head of a human body is, so to speak, the latest
voice of the physical constitution. It receives its
impressions from the subordinate organs ; it regis
ters the movements of the common life. Its em
pire, in short, is constituted by its power to feel
Avhat the members feel ; remove that power, and
its reign is OA'er. In the ideal of the Christian
Church the metaphor is justified. Here the least

206 THE NEW HEROISM.
in the kingdom is always the greatest. "He that
would be chief among you, let him be your minis
ter," are the words in which is expressed the
Christian view of sovereignty. The man who would
be the head of the body of new believers must be
the man who is most weighed down by the sins
and sorrows of that body. He must be that man
whose heart is most knit to the united membership,
so knit that he feels its pains and struggles as if
they were his own. That is the man who is in the
Christian sense king. He is the king because he
o o
is the head, and he is the head because he bears the
life-burden of all. The power by which he sways
others is the power that first conquered his own
soul — love.
Such is the idea which, after taking possession
of the Christian consciousness, has gradually passed
beyond the boundaries of the religious world and
effected a lodgment in the sphere of political life.
We need not say that the change it has produced
and is producing within that sphere is radical.
In a constitution where the king is the voice of
the people, or, in Pauline phrase, the head of the
body, it is clear that the starting-point of all
development must be the individual man. The
head is the sum of the bodily members, and the
bodily members are the united sum of distinct
individual lives. In such a government as this
the all-important element is the unit. If the
development is to begin from beneath, it must

THE NEW HEROISM. 207
begin with the one, for the mass is but a congeries
of atoms, and the character of each atom must de
termine the nature of the mass. It follows that
in the new civilisation there must rise into pro
minence the rights of the individual man. The
new civilisation carries Protestantism in its very
bosom. Each man feels himself to be essential
to the whole movement of humanity. Need we
say, however, that the fact of each being essential
is inimical to the licence of any one. No individual
can keep his individuality by living to himself
alone. "He that loveth his life shall lose it," is
an aphorism which experience has proved true.
In the world of the human heart no man is a king
until he has become a priest ; he can never really
say i" live, until he is able to say i" am crucified.
The poAver of a human personality is in every case
proportionate to its self-forgetfulness. The man
who rises to distinction is the man whose being
is absorbed in some great interest. If he would
be great he must be lost in the love of something ;
his empire shall be the fruit of his sacrifice.
" Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom," is no arbitrary beatitude ; the spiritual
king is ever the spiritual priest — the man of
sacrifice. The life of an individual man is dif
ferent from the individual drop of an ocean. The
drop only reA^eals its identity when it is separate
from the ocean ; restore it to the bosom of the
sea, and its distinctive being disappears. But the

208 THE NEAV HEROISM.
life of the man only reveals its distinctiveness
Avhen it is cast into the bosom of humanity. In
its isolation it has no qualities. To bring out its
qualities it needs the contact with the lives of
other men, and its character will only reach its
fulness and its perfection when its self-life is
absorbed and overshadowed by the interests of
the universal Avhole.
But the Christian idea of a common membership
not only applies to the individual man in each
state ; it has an application also to the individual
states of each epoch. The religion of Christ con
templates as the goal of its morality the gather-
inor of the nations. It has been said indeed that
O
Christianity discouraged patriotism ; so it did —
that special kind of patriotism which was current
at the time of its appearance. The main obstacle
which the Gospel had to contend with was just the
spirit of a false patriotism. The Jew loved his
country so much that he could love no other country.
His only conception of au universal love was an
universal Judaism ; he promised to love the whole
world, when the whole world should become co
extensive with the kingdom of David. It was
impossible that the religion of Christ should regard
such a spirit with complacency ; it was inevitable
that its precepts should take a reactionary tone.
We can catch the echo of that reaction in the bold
language of a Paul : " There is neither Jew nor
Greek;" it is the utterance of a man who is wearied

THE NEW HEROISM. 209
with a false patriotism. Yet it would be erroneous
to conclude that Christianity is opposed to nation
ality ; it is no more opposed to nationality than it
is opposed to individualism. It is in the interest
of the individual that it desires him to forget his
self-love, and it is in the interest of the nation
that it desires the nation to forget its nationality.
So far from being opposed to a collective national
life, the attainment of such a life is the very goal
of its morality. The prospective paean Avhich it
chants over its final triumph is this : The kingdoms
of this Avorld have become the kingdoms of our
God and of His Christ. It contemplates not the
abolition of national distinctions, but the inter-
penetration of national interests. It looks forward
to the time when the political good of one shall
be seen to be identical with the political good of
all, Avhen nation shall not rise against nation, nor
kingdom against kingdom, but Avhen principalities
and powers shall be subject to one ideal — the
example of the Prince of Peace.
Recurring now to the new idea of state-govern-
ment — the identification of kinghood with headship
— it is worth while to consider how St. Paul gives
the thought a domestic as well as a national appli
cation. He makes it apply not only to the nation,
but to the household. The relation of the parties
in married life is a topic on Avhich he descants with
more than usual definiteness of detail, and it seems
to us that nowhere has the tenor of his remarks 0

2 1 0 THE NEW HEROISM.
been more generally mistaken. He says in so
manv words that the husband is the head of the
wife eA*en as Christ is the Head of the Church, and
that therefore the wife owes to her husband the
obedience which the Church owes to Christ. What
does St. Paul mean by this statement? Does ho
intend to emphasise the ATiew that the position of
woman in the household should be a subordinate
one ? If so, his teaching on this matter wras a
redundancy. No one in the world of his day would
have denied such a thesis ; it would have met the
approval of Barbarian and Roman, bond and free.
His precept would have been on the line of the
universal practice, and would therefore have been
acceptable to all. But Paul wrote his epistles to
correct. He would not haA~e deemed it worth while
to pen a letter for the sake of endorsing the social
customs of heathendom. He wished to exhibit
Christian morality in those features in which it
was distinctive with a view to illustrate his leading
position that the cross of Christ had made all
things new. Accordingly, when he delineates the
Christian view of the married state, it can only be
in order to show that it essentially differs from the
heathen view, that woman, in respect of subordina
tion, no longer occupies the same position in the
new household which she occupied in the old. The
question is, What is the difference ? St. Paul is
perfectly explicit in declaring that tho wife is to
be subordinate to the husband. So far as the

THE NEW HEROISM. 2 I I
terms of expression are concerned, the Christian
Apostle does not seem to have transcended the
level of Pagan culture. Yet he connects this ordi
nance of marriage in a direct and immediate sense
Avith the Person and work of that Christ for whom
he claims distinct originality. Wherein lies the
originality of a command which seems to leave
the life of woman in the same condition of depres
sion and servitude in which she had been placed
by the world of heathen antiquity ?
The originality consists in the new idea of the
nature of subordination which Christianity itself
introduced. Let us look again at this remarkable
passage. We shall see that so far from being au
unqualified assertion of the wife's subjection to the
husband, it is really a revolt from that old doctrine.
It affirms in words the law of the ancient regime,
but it gi\Tes such a meaning to the ancient terms
O O
that the new command amounts to the contradic
tion of the old law. What St. Paul says is, that
the husband is only head of the wife in a particular
way — as Christ is Head of the Church. Now, how
Avas Christ to Paul the Head of the Church ? The
answer to that question we have already seen.
Christ, iu the view of St. Paul, is the Head because
He is the Servant, the King because He is the
Priest, the Ruler because he is the Bearer. He
Avields the sceptre over the members just because
He bears the burdens of the members ; the sceptre
is itself the burden. It is in this sense, and in no

2 I 2 THE NEW HEROISM.
other, that St. Paul declares the husband to be
the head of the Avife. The headship which he
assigns to him is the headship of ministration. He
tells him to bear the burdens of the Avoman, to
carry her crosses, to protect her interests. He bids
him consider that she is a member of his own
body, a part of his own life, a sharer in his own
being, that it is impossible to separate her interest
from his interest, or her burden from his burden.
" He that loveth his wife loveth himself," are the
striking words iu AvhichVSt. Paul expresses his
sense of that essential equality which unites the
parties in the marriage contract ; the head is only
head because it possesses within itself the life and
power of ministration. So, too, when he turns to
the woman and says, " Submit yourself unto your
husband as unto the Lord," his sentence is not
an endorsement but a qualification of the old
regime. The submission " unto the Lord " is not an ab
ject submission ; it is a self-surrender, a joyous
and voluntary service. It is an allegiance which a
member of the body gives to the head of the body,
an allegiance not dictated by craven fear, but by
an inward necessity of being which makes life
impossible without the giving up of self. That
phrase, " as unto the Lord," instead of being an
intensification of the woman's bondage, is the
Magna Charta of her Christian freedom, the in
scription which, for all time to come, distinguishes

THE NEW HEROISM. 213
service from servitude, and marks the radical
difference between ministry and slavery.
Let it be observed, however, that the difference
is purely a mental one. Ministration may submit
to work outwardly more menial than that which
the slave performs. The contrast lies in the mind.
Slavery springs from command, and is therefore
bondage ; ministration springs from love, and is
therefore free. The immediate aim of the religion
of Christ was not so much to abolish any form
of slavery from without, as to transfigure it from
within. In dealing with any depressed caste,
whether it Avere the wife or the nominal servant
of a household, the first design of Christianity was
to convert slavery into ministration. Accordingly
it did not inaugurate its coming by demanding
that the slave should be set free ; it attached too
much importance to the cross to proclaim at the
outset the abolition of the cross. It proposed not
so much to lift the burdens of life from the labour
ing and heavy-laden as to give the labouring and
the heavy-laden the power to Avork and to endure.
It proposed to effect such a change on the idea of
labour, such a transformation on the thought of
burden-bearing, that men would come to feel the
yoke not only light, but glorious. It had a voice
alike for the master and for the slaAre, but it was
as yet only an inward voice. It told the slave
that in the very discharge of his servile duties he
mio-ht enter into the life of freedom, the freedom

214 THE NEW HEROISM.
of a heart that has accepted its burden and its
toil. It told the master that in the very act of
ruling he should feel that he Avas not free — that
his rule Avas itself a headship, and therefore the
bearing of a yoke. When St. Paul sent back
Onesimus to Philemon, he sent him back, from his
point of view, a free man. Onesimus, in the
voluntary return to the duties of his master's
service, was in St. Paul's sight a grander illustra
tion of the liberating power of the Gospel than
would have been presented by the spectacle of his
mere bodily enfranchisement ; that Avould have
been only a freedom of the flesh, this was a liberty
of the spirit. And let it be remembered that it
was through this liberty of the spirit that the
bondage of the flesh itself was broken. Voluntary
service brought the dignity of labour, and a sense
of the dignity of labour dignified toiling men. It
is the new thought that has broken the old chain.
Not by might, not by power, but by spirit, has
the slave been set free — the spirit of that new
heroism which, by revealing the majesty of self-
restraint and the divinity of self-surrender, has
placed on an equal ideal level the lives and lots
of men.

XII.
THE SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN
MANIFESTATION.
It will be seen from the last chapter that the new
heroism inaugurated by the Gospel is of very wide
application, extending to fields of study which seem
at first view to have no connection with it. This
leads us to consider the general question, What
are the boundaries of the Christian sphere ? We
are in the habit of dividing the pursuits of life
into the secular and the sacred ; where does the
sacred end and the secular begin ? In a work on
New Testament ethics the question cannot be
answered on abstract principles, nor even by an
appeal to modern experience. We must ask what
the original Christian record has itself to say upon
the subject. Let us go back, therefore, to the
beginning of Christianity's moral teaching — the
Sermon on the Mount. It is evident that there
were present to the mind of Christ on that occa
sion twro opposite schools of moral thought —
the Pharisees and the Essenes. The sphere of
Pharisaic morality Avas the \ATorld ; the sphere of

2l6 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
Essene morality was the desert. The aim of
the Pharisee was to " shine before men ; " the aim
of the Essene was so to hide his " lamp under a
bushel" that it might shine only before God. To
the Pharisee the value of virtue lay only in its
being seen ; to the Essene the value of virtue lay
in its being felt, in its being hid within the breast
as a perpetual sacrifice of the outward man.
Now, the view of Christianity as to the sphere
of the moral life is in relation to these two schools
at once reconciliatory and destructive ; it finds
a meeting-place for both by destroying the dis
tinctive elements of each. Christ says that the
important feature in His morality is not the place
Avhere it shines, but the manner of its shining :
" Let your light so shine before men that they may
see your good works and glorify your Father in
heaven." The sphere of Christianity is here said
to be one not of place, but of motive. Christ says
that in the system He is about to inaugurate, the
Pharisee and the Essene, the life of self-manifesta
tion and the life of self-crucifixion, can meet side
by side, so that a man may shine in being cruci
fied, and be crucified in the act of shining. He
says in effect, Do not imagine that there is any
contradiction between self-forgetfulness and self-
manifestation ; it is only when you have forgotten
yourself that you will really display yourself.
Would you be able to shine before men ? So
shine that you may glorify another. Would you

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 217
have men see your good works ? Let your good
Avorks be to you not an end, but a means — the
means of glorifying your Father in Heaven. You
will only become a true Pharisee when you have
become a true Essene. Your personality will
only wake into real power when it has felt its
own nothingness in the presence of a power of
all-excelling glory. Let your motive be to radiate
light for others, and the light which you radiate for
others shall play around your own person and make
it bright and beautiful ; he that shines for God
shines also for man.
Here, then, we have a very definite principle
announced on the very threshold of the Christian
temple, a principle Avhich determines beyond all
possibility of dispute the boundary-line that divided
the secular from the sacred. That boundary-line
it declares to be not geographical, but mental.
The same locality, the same outward act, the same
scene of human occupation, may at one and the
same moment be secular to me and sacred to you.
The difference between the sphere of the Pharisee
and the sphere of the Christian is not one that can
be indicated on a map. Outwardly their sphere is
identical ; they both manifest their light " before
men." The difference lies in their mental attitude ;
the shining of the Pharisee was conscious and
artificial ; the shining of the Christian is unconscious
and spontaneous.
It will be seen that on this view the relation

2 18 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
Avhich subsists between the secular and the sacred
bears a very marked resemblance to the relation
which pertaius between the prosaic and the poetical.
It is not correct to say that the physical world con
sists of two classes of objects ; one prosaic and the
other poetical. To a really prosaic mind, all the
scenes in the world are prosaic ; to a truly poetic
soul, all the scenes in the world are poetical. You
cannot tell the true poet that God made the
country and man made the town ; he would not
believe you. He would tell you that in the
meanest objects of the town — in busy street, and
dusty lane, and squalid alley — he can find sug
gestions as full of Divine inspiration as ever were
yielded by ancient mountain or forest primeval.
Whatsoever the spirit of the poet touches it turns
straightway into gold. Even so is it with the
spirit of Christianity. It claims the blessing of
inheriting the earth — i.e., of being limited to no
special sphere for its manifestation. It says in
language to the same effect, that it has the world,
life, death, things present and things to come,
that he Avho is spiritual " ruleth all things." Nay,
it is this, and nothing less than this, that is meant
by the liberty of the spirit. The liberty of the
spirit of Christianity is its power to roam at will
into spots apparently opposed to it — to enter the
commonplace, the prosaic, the secular haunts of
men and receive not a stain upon its Avings. It is
the power to transfigure the world into its own

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 219
brightness, to make its clay gold, to turn its water
into Avine, until, its secular element being lost, it
shall be changed into the Spirit's own image from
glory to glory.
Now, this is just one of the points in which the
religion of Christ is distinguished from all other
religions. It may be said of all other religions
that they curtail the sphere of human liberty, and
nearly all curtail that sphere in the same Avay —
by drawing a fence between God and the world,
between the temple of worship and the scene of
common toil. To prove this Ave need not go to
the Brahman or the Buddhist, Avhose faith is pro
fessedly founded on a despair of actual things.
Let us keep to a region where the natural condi
tions would seem to have been more favourable to
a reconciliation of religion and common life— the
faith of Judaism. It might have been thought
that if any class of men would recognise the
liberty of the spirit, it would have been the Phari
sees ; their object was actually to shine before men.
But the very fact that this was their object made
them separatists from the woild. It was the sense
of their own superiority that made them wish to
display themselves. It was their conviction that
the world, as a world, moved in a lower sphere
than theirs that impelled them to show how great
Avas the gulf fixed between them ; their effort to
shine was made in the interest of separatism. The
Essene, on the other hand, made no effort to shine

2 20 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
at all so far as the world was concerned ; he hid
his Hght under a bushel in order the better to
realise his own humility. But Avhat caused the
Essene to feel humble was not so much his sense
of sin as his sense of materialism. He believed
that the flesh, as such, was the antagonist of the
spirit ; and therefore he, as well as the Pharisee,
was in heart a separatist. The two opposite sects
of Judaism were thus ultimately joined in one
conclusion ; both by different roads arrived at the
same conviction — that to become religious men is
to manifest the decrease of one's right to individual
liberty. In contradistinction to these views, the religion
of Christ claims for its followers an extension of
the right-of-way. "Ye are the salt of the earth,"
are the words in Avhich it inaugurates this claim.
It declares in these words that, apart from the
Christian spirit, the earthly or secular element is
a source of corruption. It does not by nature
contain that salt, or preserving material, which
arrests the progress of decay, and keeps alive the
substance in which it dwells. Accordingly, there
is in it by nature no element of life, and therefore
no source of permanent joy. But when the Chris
tian spirit enters into this secular mass of corrup
tion, it brings into it the preserving material; it
becomes " the salt of the earth." Henceforth the
secular world is no longer a dead world ; it is full
of life and spirituality. The flesh does not any

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 22 1
more lust against the spirit, nor do the pursuits
of the flesh tend any longer to corrupt the spirit ;
the spirit gives them its own saline property, its
own principle of life. The man will cease to get
harm from those things which Avere formerly per
nicious to his interests ; he will tread upon scor
pions, and they will do him no hurt. The food
which was poison to the child shall nourish the
man. His liberty of diet shall increase in pro
portion to the growth of his constitution. He
will have a passport into regions of the world
Avhich are morally barred to the worldling himself,
for that which degraded the unspiritual shall exalt
the man of the spirit.
This idea, which, as Ave have said, is inaugurated
in the Sermon on the Mount, runs like a thread
of gold through every part of the New Testament.
It is the keynote alike of St. Paul and of St. James
— the Apostle of the Gentiles and the leader of
Judaic Christianity. Nay, is not this the idea
which St. Peter has in view when he says that
God in Christ has begotten us " to an inheritance
that is incorruptible " ? He says in effect, The
new inheritance to which we are begotten is alto-
o-ether unlike the inheritance of Judaism. There
we could only avoid corruption by avoiding con
tact ; here we are incorruptible by any contact.
There we Avere kept pure by the mandate,
"Touch not, taste not, handle not;" here Ave
may touch and taste and handle without receiv-

222 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
in"1 a stain. There our prohibitions Avere multi
plied in proportion to our religious zeal ; here
the spirit of religion within us has annulled all
prohibitions. We have reached a truth that has
made us free.
But now, we have to remark that it is just in
its spirit of liberty that Christianity receives its
spirit of sacrifice. Of all the powers it possesses,
that which it prizes most is its power to deny
itself the exercise of its full freedom. " All things
are lawful to me," says St. Paul, " but all things
are not expedient," i.e., not good for others. He
himself was able with a clear conscience to eat
flesh offered to an idol. He knew that au idol
was nothing, and therefore he would allow no
man in this question to deny his right to liberty
of action. But while he claimed the right, he
O '
claimed also the power to sacrifice his right. He
claimed the power to exercise an act of grace
analogous to that act of grace by which his Lord
had "emptied Himself," to say of his liberty as
Christ had said, " I have power to lay it down."
The act of grace or emptying process consisted
in an ability to put himself in the place of his
Aveak brother, to think with his heart, to see with
his eyes. It consisted in an act of substitution,
by which he forgot his own opinion of the idol,
and lived only in that view of the subject enter
tained by his weak brother. He took upon him
self his folly, he became poor to make him rich.

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 223
That abstinence from bread for the sake of his
weak brother was itself a sacrament ; it showed
the broken body and shed blood. It grandly
illustrated the sacrificial power of the Christian
spirit. Paul had cast himself down from an
eminence — the eminence of his own spiritual cul
ture ; he had thrown himself into a form of belief
AA'hich he had long surmounted, and into sympathy
with a stage of development which he had far
passed by. In so doing he had in the highest
sense exhibited the nature of the Christian sac
rifice. He had emptied himself, had poured out,
so to speak, a portion of his own consciousness.
He had tried to substitute himself for another
Avho was inferior to himself, to think Avith his
mind, to suffer in his experience. He himself
looked upon his act as nothing less than a repe
tition of his Master's cross within his own soul.
What does he mean wlien he says, " I am cruci
fied with Christ," " Buried in baptism unto His
death," "Always bearing about in the body the
dying of the Lord Jesus"? What does he mean
when he cries, " I protest I die daily," " We avIio
live are alway delivered unto death"? What,
in fine, is the thought in his mind when he
declares that he has fellowship in the sufferings
of Christ, and that he has been " made con
formable unto His death"? Is it not clear from
such words as these that he believed the principle
of the Cross of Christ to be applicable not merely

224 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
to the martyrdom of physical dying, but equally
so to the daily aud hourly sacrifice of living.
He felt that the spirit of the Christian sacrifice
in all its forms Avas the spirit of self-forgetfulness.
He saw that the root of the whole matter Avas
that intellectual sympathy Avhich, by the empty
ing out of its own glory, could put itself in
another's place, and minister to another's needs.
He perceived that the necessity for such a spirit
Avas not limited to great events, but Avas felt even
more in the commonplaces of life, and hence in
the very humblest of daily acts he beheld the
possibility of a Christian sacrifice: "Whether ye
eat, or drink, or whatsoeA'er ye do, do all to the
glory of God."
Singularly enough, it is in relation to these
commonplace elements of life that the problem
of Christian sacrifice has in our days again pre
sented itself. It is in the question of temperance
that modern life is again raising the issue as to
o o
the moral rights of man. With the exception of
the fact that the modern issue is a social, Avhile
the ancient was a religious one, the point in dis
pute is very much the same. You, let us say,
have never beeu under any temptation to exceed
in the use of stimulants. You do not need to
abstain ; you have never in any respect been
hurt either morally or physically by what you have
imbibed, and therefore you deny any man's right
to force upon you a pledge of abstinence. But

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 225
then there is a member of your household who
is subject to the temptation from which you are
free. Here the question arises : Is it right that
you should use your freedom to enslave another ?
Is it right that you, being unaffected by this
special temptation, should yet put the temptation
before an inmate of your dwelling whom you
know to be affected by it? From a Christian
point of vieAV the answer cannot be doubtful.
Paul would certainly say : Empty yourself of your
freedom in the presence of your weak brother.
Come down to his state while you are with him.
Make yourself a slave for his sake, that you may
lead his captivity captive. Become for the time
poor, to giAre him the chance of being eternally
rich !
But the argument is by many pushed much
further. It is said that as humanity is itself an
united membership, the strong should in every case
resign their freedom in the interest of their weak
brethren. The decision of that question is not
within our present province. We shall only re
mark that it depends on the decision of another —
Would the total abstinence of the strong produce
the cure of the weak ? Are the weak the slaves to
a habit, or are they the slaves merely to a fashion ?
If the latter, the conclusion is easy ; if the former,
it is difficult to see how the sacrifice of freedom
would avail. Christianity gives us the law, but
not the fact. It tells us that our freedom must not
p

2 26 SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
enchain our brother, but it does not tell us whether
in this case our freedom does enchain. No system
of morality can give us that information ; it must
be tested by another sphere than that of ethics.
It must be learned by observation, by experiment,
by a study of human nature, by a comparison of
statistics, by a knowledge of the facts of history.
Paul did not pretend to be inspired in such subjects
as these, and he would probably have said of this,
as he said of another matter of detail : " Let every
man be persuaded in his oavu mind."
Turning then from this special application of the
Christian law of freedom, let us look for a moment
at the law itself. What is the principle on which
a man at any time should consent to surrender his
right to a possession ? Many will answer, that by
his profession of the .religion of the Cross he be
comes an heir to the spirit of sacrifice, and should
henceforth count it a glory to give up whatever is
his own. A more complete delusion or a more
entire misconception it would, Ave believe, be diffi
cult to imagine. Christianity is not ultimately the
religion of the Cross at all, but the religion of the
O ' O
crown. At no time does it proclaim its end to be the
sacrifice of the individual man ; sacrifice is never its
end, but always ita means to an end. The end of
Christianity is not the pain, but the profit of the
individual (Matt. v. 29). It only demands the
sacrifice for the sake of the profit : " It is profitable
for thee that one of thy members should perish, and

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 227
not that thy whole body should be cast into hell."
The plucking out of the right eye, and the cutting
off of the right hand, are both processes of pain, but
in the Christian system it is not their pain that
makes them valuable ; if by the law of nature the
end could be achieved Avithout the pain it would
please Christianity better. The entire design of
the immolating process is to have the diseased
member separated from those parts of the body
which are as yet unaffected by disease. The pain
is necessary, but it is only incidentally necessary ;
it is necessary as the fulfilment of a physical laAV,
but not as the execution of a moral requirement.
The moral aim of Christianity is to promote the
well-being of all human souls, and it would attach
no value to any cross which did not tend to the
enlargement of mankind.
If it be so it follows that there is no good to be
derived from sacrificing for the sake of sacrifice.
St. Paul has a clear perception of this truth when
he says : " Though I give my body to be burned
and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing."
It profits him nothing because it profits others
nothing. A sacrifice whose glory centres in itself
has not a Christian glory. The Christian glory is
love, and sacrifice is only valuable as an instrument
of love. Moreover, as St. Paul says, our love must
" abound in all judgment." It must not be a love
that will sacrifice its own on a mere possibility; it
must be a love that has measured the needs of its

22S SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION.
object and knows exactly what is required. Chris
tian morality, no less than Christian theology, is
thus dependent on the advance of secular knoAv
ledge. Its sphere is circumscribed, not widened,
by ignorance of the world. Its field of ministration
is narrowed in proportion as it ministers in the
dark. Human freedom only gains a right to sacri
fice itself Avhen it gains a vision of that for which
it dies. Such a vision is not gained easily. If I
Avould know whether I am ministering to a mind
diseased or only to the disease of a mind, I must
study in all its fulness the nature of man. I can
not prescribe the remedy till I have made the diag
nosis ; I cannot make the diagnosis till I have
learned the constitution of the patient. The same
self-sacrifice which in one case has cured the sick
ness may in another only feed the distemper, for
humanity varies with its conditions, and the food
of one age may be the poison of the next. There
fore it is that Christianity does not prescribe any
food ; it reveals the laws of moral health and leaves
the spirit of man to adapt itself to these. Of all
the secondary causes for the permanence of Chris
tianity this reticence as to matters of detail has
been the most conspicuous and the most powerful.
Why is it that this religion has been able to sub
sist through civilisations so diverse, through times
so dissimilar in their modes of life and action?
It is because this religion has in all ages made its
appeal to that which underlies every mode and

SPHERE OF CHRISTIAN MANIFESTATION. 2 29
forms the basis of every action. It has made its
appeal to that element in human nature which
never varies — the sympathy of man with man. It
has not defined the form which human sympathy
in any age shall assume ; it has allowed every age
to choose its own form. It has not laid down the
limits of what does or does not constitute the
sacrificial well-being of our brother man ; it allows
these limits to be fixed by society itself. But it
is its very gentleness in this respect that has made
it great. Refusing to identify itself with the
special aspects of any era, and holding fast by
the abstract principle which binds all eras into
one, it has preserved its unity amid the changes,
and retained its empire amid the vanishings, of
earthly power. We shall look more fully in
the next chapter at the secret of this absolute
dominion.

XIII.
CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
" Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word
shall not pass away." " For verily I say unto
you, until heaven and earth shall pass, one jot nor
one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law until
all be fulfilled." Such is the striking claim put
forth by the Founder of Christianity Himself in
behalf of the moral system He came to inaugurate.
We say " the moral system," for it is of morality
that these words are spoken. Christ claims for
the new ethical code, which He declares to have
been all along at the root of the old ethical code,
a permanent duration through all changes and all
times. He declares its permanence to rest upon a
firmer basis than does the stability of the material
universe. Heaven and earth seem to be of all
things the least affected by the march of time ;
we speak of the everlasting hills and the eternal
stars, of the unwearied sun, and the brook that
goes on for ever. But Christ says that all this is
only a metaphorical permanence, and as if in anti
cipation of the science of our own age, He declares

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 23 1
that heaven and earth shall pass away. They rest
upon something which is contingent, which might
have been otherwise, and which, therefore, may be
otherwise again. The law of nature gives no
promise of its own continuance, no pledge beyond
analogy that it will repeat itself to-morrow. But
Christ says that there is a law which rests upon
no such contingency — the law of the moral life.
The thought He suggests is this : You can imagine
that a time may come when other systems shall
circle other suns, Avhen the laws which now bind
the material masses of creation shall be replaced
by new laws, when the very elements of this
present constitution shall melt with fervid heat.
But you can never imagine a time when the laws
of My spiritual kingdom shall be other than they
now are. You can never imagine a time in Avhich
justice shall be other than just, truth less than
true, love the reverse of lovely. No circling of
new systems can alter that. No change in the
old laws can ever make right cease to be right,
or wrong be else than wrong. The physical law
is true, but the moral must be true ; its contrary
is unthinkable, its denial is death. " Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but My word shall not
pass away."
The expression on which our attention fastens
is the phrase, " My word." We said at the close
of the last chapter that the abstract character of
the Christian morality has been one great cause

232 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
of its permanence. We are here called upon to
supplement, and in some sense to qualify that
statement. The Christian morality is here said
to be, not simply an abstract law, but an abstract
law announced and illustrated in a human life ;
that which in Judaism was " the law " becomes
in Christianity "My Avord." The permanence of
Christian morality is the permanence of a person.
It is the fadelessness of a concrete image — the
image of a man. It is the power of a moral
personality to continue undimmed when all the
associations of his earthly existence have passed
away, when a new heaven and a new earth have
risen upon the eyes of men, and a contrary mode
of science has reversed the conclusions of the
olden time. Through all these changes the form
of Him whom Christians call the Son of Man is
found sitting unharmed, His eye undimmed, and
His natural strength unabated. This is the dis
tinctive feature of the moral permanence of Chris
tianity, the fact to be recognised and the problem
to be explained.
Let us try first to recognise the fact. Let us
understand wherein lies the peculiarity of the
Christian position. It is not that a certain system
of morality is habitually associated with the name
of an individual life ; the same would hold true of
the systems of Buddha, Confucius, and Moham
med. The difference lies here : Buddha, Confucius,
and Mohammed are associated by name with their

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 233
systems ; Clirist is his system. If Buddha, Con
fucius, and Mohammed were forgotten, Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Mohammedanism would still
survive ; if Christ were forgotten, Christianity _as
such w^uld^cgjisetohe. The result" of the dif
ference appears in a fact of history. The person
alities of Buddha, Confucius, and Mohammed have
not kept pace even with their respective systems.
We can still describe minutely the rules which
they taught and the doctrines which they pro
pounded, but the men themselves are little more
than phantoms. We cannot tell whether Buddha
existed. We cannot see what made Confucius
interesting even to his own age. We cannot
decide whether Mohammed were a devotee or an
impostor. The moral streams of Buddha, Con
fucius, and Mohammed are no longer modern
streams, yet they are modern in comparison with
the lives that profess to be their fountain-heads.
Far otherwise has it been with the stream of
morality we are here considering. It retains its
early freshness, it keeps its ancient fulness, it
preserves an unbroken connection with the Foun
tain Avhence it flowed. If it looks less modern in
one place than in another, it is precisely in those
regions Avhere it has left the Fountain-head be-
O
hind. The nearer we go to 1he source the more
do we find ourselves in harmony with our pre
sent environment, and when we have reached the
source itself our harmony is complete. The person

234 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
of Christ is no anachronism to the nineteenth
century. It is as youthful to-day as it Avas on the
shores of the Galilean lake. It is more adapted
to the civilisation of our age than it Avas to the
culture of that age in which it first appeared.
The powers which opposed it have become ana
chronisms ; the spirit of Judaism is obsolete, and
the forces of Paganism are superseded ; but the
personality of the Christian Founder has impressed
itself upon the heart of the world and been borne
along by the progress of the Avorld's culture ; this
power has not passed away.
There is one very remarkable circumstance to
be taken account of in estimating the force of this
argument ; and it is this : our vision of the person
of Christ is now independent of His original his
torical surroundings. It is no longer necessary to
associate Him with a special country ; He has
risen "far above all principalities and powers."
The peculiarity of this position will be made evi
dent by contrast. Try to think of Mohammed
apart from Arabia, or of Buddha apart from India,
and you will find your thought reduced to a nega
tion. The personality will not be transplanted
into a modern soil ; if you Avould render it visible
at all, you must lift it along with its surroundings.
But it is altogether otherwise with the personality
of Christ. The land of His nativity has virtually
passed away. The special forms of culture in
which He moved are far more effete than are those

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 235
forms of culture in which moved the lives of
Mohammed and Buddha. Yet it is not too much
to say that the vividness of Christ's personality has
rather gained than lost by the removal of His local
associations. The facts of history have singularly
illustrated the words ascribed to Him by the fourth
Evangelist : " I, if I be lifted up from the earth,
wdll draw all men unto Me." All the scenes of the
earthly life of Jesus have to the modern mind at
tained an universal character. The mountain on
which He was tempted, the lake on which He
taught, the desert where He fed the multitude, are
no longer a Palestinian mountain, lake, or desert;
they are found in nature everywhere. The scene
of His domestic affections is no longer a room in
the house of Bethany ; it is seen wherever the altar
of family love is reared. The Cross on which He
suffered is no longer the wooden Cross of Calvary ;
it is felt in every sacrifice of will made in the
cause of duty. These are weighty facts, which
speak for themselves and challenge observation.
The Christ after the flesh is as much an Asiatic as
either Mohammed, or Buddha, or Confucius ; yet
the moral personality of that Christ remains un
dimmed in a civilisation which has eclipsed theirs.
Many have; come from the West as well as from
the East to sit down in His kingdom; He has
had other sheep not of His own fold. What are
the elements in this life .which have given it such
an absolute dominion? We do not ask for an

236 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
explanation of these elements ; to do so would be
to assume the human origin of Christianity. It is
not explanation, but analysis we seek. We want
to know what are the features of that moral por
traiture which have contributed to make it a por
trait for all time, which have left upon the canvas
of history an impress so indelible as to become the
perpetual mark of boundary between the annals
which men call ancient and the events which they
rank as modern.
It will be remembered that in the opening
chapter of this volume we showed that the origi
nality of the Christian religion lies not in its
absolute novelty, but in its absolute power of
uniting and of reconciling things that before its
coming were already old ; that Avhich makes it
new is its discovery of a harmony between systems
of ancient antagonism. We have now to remark
that the key to the absoluteness of Christ's person
will be found in the same direction as lay the
key to the originality of His religion. It seems
to us that in strict speaking Ave should not say
that the life of Christ reveals a type of character ;
it would be more correct to say that it combines
all types. The moral glory of Christ's person is
no more an eccentric kind of goodness than the
intellectual glory of His person is an eccentric
kind of truth. We have seen the truth which
He taught to have been a combination into
harmony of those types and symbols of human

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 237
thought which before His time had been the
Avatch words of opposing schools. We are now to
see that the goodness which He exhibited was
not a superhuman goodness in the sense of having
no analogy to any moral type in man, but that
it was superhuman just for the contrary reason —
because it united in a single life those moral
schools of humanity which, for want of a common
basis, had mutually proscribed each other as
schools of error.
To one who reads the life of Christ for the first
time, the immediate impression produced is that
of a Being whose goal was self-restraint. We feel,
looking on the surface, that the most comprehensive
description of Him is that given by the Apostle of
the Gentiles : " He pleased not Himself." We see
a life dedicated from its birth to a service of sorrow
— its infancy, persecution, its childhood, obscurity,
its youth, toil. We see that life from the hour of
its maturity taking upon itself voluntarily that
destiny which hitherto had folloAved it, claiming
the Cross as its peculiar mission, and crucifixion as
the end of its being. In every utterance of that
life we hear the breathing of a self-denying spirit.
He avIio would be in communion with it is com
manded to become partaker of its Cross, to renounce
itself, to be meek and lowly in heart, to turn his
cheek to the smiter, to go two miles wdth him who
insists on one, to surrender an additional garment
to that which the litigant claims. All this seems

238 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
to point to one conclusion — that the Spirit of Him
whom we call the Son of Man was essentially the
spirit of Stoicism, a revival of that individual ex
tinction which had enabled the philosophers of an
earlier day to treat things that are as if they
Avere not.
Is this, then, a true impression of the moral life
of Jesus ? Yes ; so far as it goes it is perfectly
true. But deeper study shows us that it is not
the whole truth ; it only describes one hemisphere
of the Christian life. The Son of Man had in Him
an element of Stoicism — the element Avhich con
stitutes the truth of Stoicism ; He did not make
His OAvn personal advantage the end of His being,
" He pleased not Himself." But now we are forced
to look on another side of the picture, and a side
which singularly enough is furnished by the writer
to the Hebrews in the Arery same passage Avhere he
seems to eulogise the Stoicism of the Son of Man :
" Who for the joy that Avas set before Him endured
the Cross, despising the shame." The point which
arrests attention is the suggested motive of the
suffering: "For the joy that Avas set before Him."
We are made aware by these words that in the
view of the first Christians, Christ, in spite of His
voluntary Cross, was not a Stoic, that though He
sought not personal advantage, He did seek per
sonal joy. If the Cross is the end of His being, it
is only because the Cross is itself contemplated, not
as an evil, but as a possible good, a potential source

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 239
of blessing. Here is a new and seemingly contrary
aspect in the life of the Christian Founder. He
appears all at once to exhibit an opposite proclivity.
He has made a transition from the type called Stoic,
Buddhist, Brahmin, to the type named Epicurean,
Confucian, Jew, Mohammedan. The Christ, who
at first view stood before us in the attitude of an
Asiatic, stands before us now in the attitude of one
who sees something good in life, who believes in
the rewards of life, who hopes for the joy of life.
Has He not here passed over from the camp of the
mystic to the camp of the utilitarian and the
Hedonist ?
And when we come to the recorded life of Christ
we find that His words and acts are capable of
being read in this new light. When, for example,
in Matthew v. He deprecates the retaliation of
physical injuries, and discourages the contention
for physical possessions, are Ave sure that His sole,
or even His main, motive is a sense of the value
of self-restraint ? If Ave look at His words in the
light of future utterances, we may be quite sure
that it was not. When He says, " My kingdom is
not of this world ; if My kingdom were of this
Avorld, then would My servants fight," He expresses
in the plainest terms the principle on which He
lived and acted. He says that the Christian must
consider what is worth striving for. It will be
the duty of the Christian at all times to fight for
his Master's Kingdom, but let him be sure what

240 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
his Master's Kingdom is. If the Kingdom of
Christ were meat and drink, houses and lands, it
would be the duty of the Christian to fight for
these things. But the Kingdom of Christ is not
meat and drink, not houses and lands, not any
thing visible and tangible ; it is the reign of right
eousness. Can it, then, be said that a Christian
soldier is restraining himself in not fighting for
that which is no part of His Kingdom ? Is it not
clear that in Christ's view the injuries contem
plated in" Matthew v. do not even touch the true
self of the man ? They are to be borne not because
they give pain, but because they do not affect the
Avell-spring of Christian joy. They have no power
to hurt on account of the presence of an inward
glory — a peace that passeth understanding.
Let us pass now to a still more remarkable
passage, relating, as it does, not to a mere bearing,
but to an actual selection of the Cross. In Matt.
xi. 29 we read: "Take My yoke upon you, and
learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart :
and ye shall find rest unto your souls." The
Avords may be viewed in many connections, but
the standpoint from which Ave here survey them
is somewhat unusual. Christ here presents Him
self to us in the aspect of what in modern times
would be called an utditarian moralist speaking
from his own experience of life. He declares as
a matter which He has proved experientially that
the Cross is valuable, not because it is painful, but

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 24 1
because it is useful. He says that the value of
His OAvn suffering has been its power to make Him
calm amid storm, peaceful amid war, untroubled
amid perplexity, and He asks all mankind to make
trial of His method with the Adew of obtaining
His result. Let us observe, too, that if the method
be utilitarian, the goal is Epicurean, in the first
and purest days of that philosophy. So far from
seeking to sacrifice the individual, as the Stoic
does, He declares His leading aim to be identical
with the aim of the first followers of Epicurus —
the production of calm in the individual soul, the
fostering of a quiet repose amid the cares and
solicitudes of a Avorld of sorrow. " Ye shall find
rest unto your souls."
Here, then, is an anomaly. In one and the
same life, and in the same acts of that life, there
are seen two types of morality which in the
previous history of the world had been deemed
incompatible types. What is the connection
betAveen these types ? What is that bridge in the
life of the Son of Man Avhich has united two
hitherto incompatible ideas — the idea of an in
dividual crucifixion and the thought of an in
dividual joy ? The first of these was once the
badge of the Stoic, and the second Avas once the
goal of the Epicurean ; Christ has claimed and ap
propriated both. We want to know what is that
element in the nature of Christ which has made
such an union possible. Wherein consists that

242 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
reconciling medium which has bridged the distance
betAveen the two moral worlds and made the life
of self-surrender identical with the life of joy ?
It consists in the fact that the life of Christ
embraces yet a third type of character capable of
uniting the other two. That type is not to be
found either in Stoic or in Epicurean or in any
of the philosophers as such. If we would see the
germ of it we must go down to the domestic life
of the masses, or to the philosophers become men.
It may be best described as the t}rpe of the heart.
It is the ideal Avhich Plato sought to reach in
tellectually, and which for that reason he failed
to reach. It is the life which constitutes the life
of home, which lights and consecrates the domestic
altar, which makes fatherhood, motherhood, and
brotherhood, possible realities. Its nature is most
clearly indicated in a single word — love.
Now, we can readily see how a perfect and un
obstructed love would at one and the same moment
be both an individual joy and an individual sacri
fice. Love, where it is unobstructed, is always
a joy. It is the deepest of all joys — the joy of the
heart. And yet Avho can fail to see that this
love is a species of death? It only exists by
reason of a complete surrender of the very thought
of self; the man loses himself in the beino- of
O
another. The joy of love is the actual fruit of
sacrifice, and would have no being apart from
sacrifice. It is the joy of a spirit that has ceased

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 243
to behold itself in the glass of consciousness. It
is the joy of a spirit Avhich has lost its personal
care in taking up the care of another, and which
has found its own burden to fall in the lifting of /
a burden Avhich is not its own.
When we have grasped this principle we have
learned the secret of that marvellous balance of
extremes Avhich meet us in the character of the
Son of Man, we have arrived at the explanation of
the Christian paradox : " Take My yoke upon you,
and ye shall find rest." The yoke which He asked
His followers to take was the burden of humanity.
He told them to enter into His own spirit of
universal love. He did not conceal from them
that this yoke would bring a load of universal care,
but He said that the universal care would destroy
the individual care and to the personal life bring
rest; the new yoke would be easy and the neAV
burden light. He said that He did not advance
this doctrine as a speculative theory, but as a
practical experience: "Learn of Me." He had
tried it, He had proved it, and therefore He was
able confidently to commend it. It is the same
thought which pervades the valedictory utterances
ascribed to Him in the Fourth Gospel :— " These
things have I spoken unto you, that My joy may
remain in you, and that your joy may be full."
"Peace I leave wdth you, My peace I give unto
you; not as the Avorld gives give I unto you."
The last clause expresses His own sense of the

2 44 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
paradox involved in His words. His lot in life
was not certainly what the world would consider
peace, or bequeath as a heritage of peace. He
spoke these words uuder the very shadow of a
Cross. How are avc to explain them ? Shall avc
say that He was simply looking forward to the
crown of a future Avorld ? To say so is to affirm
that He bequeathed to His followers a peace Avhich
as yet He did not Himself possess. Christ's peace
was in the Cross, and it was in it for this reason,
that His Cross was made, not of Avood, but of love.
The cause of His suffering Avas the source of His
individual rest. He had become oblivious of all
personal pain, because love had given Him a pain
that was impersonal ; the throbbing of the pulse of
humanity stilled His own.
Here, then, Ave have the first exhibition of a new
power — a power of universal love, of love for man
as man. Its earliest manifestation consists in
making the subject of it a king ; it brings him a
cross of humanity, and in so doing it frees him
from his own. Hence it is that in this third aspect
the Son of Man appears before us more in the
attitude of the Platonist than in that of either the
Epicurean or the Stoic ; at least He here effects
what the Platonist tried in vain to accomplish —
the founding of a great republic in Avhich each
man would be free. We have already seen Avhy,
in the case of the Platonist, the effort Avas in vain :
he, like all the rest of the Old World, approached,

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 245
not humanity, but a Caste of humanity— the Caste
of the intellectual. The power of love, as we have
seen, was here a very limited power ; it could only
promote sympathy amongst those already equals ;
it Avas a sympathy, not of persons, but of ideas,
and therefore it did not demand sacrifice. But
the object of Christ's love was humanity itself;
not intellectual humanity, not aristocratic humanity,
but suffering humanity, in every grade and of
every orderk The class to which He appealed Avas
that of the labouring and the heavy-laden, a
category Avhich, comprehending as it does the
whole family both of active and of passive sufferers,
is absolutely coextensive Avith the universal life of
man. Here is a field for a republic of which Plato
never dreamed. To every man of eA^ery shade of
mental endowment Christ offers a sense of king
hood. He offers it to all who shall follow His own
method — the sacrifice of self by love. He says
that priesthood is the true road to kinghood. He
claims to be Himself a king on the ground of His
sacrifice, and not in spite of it. " Art Thou a
king ? " asks Pilate, struck apparently with the
outward meanness of His condition. The answer
is striking and graphic : " For this cause was I
born, and to this end came I into the world, that
I should bear witness to the truth," i.e., by martyr
dom. It is as if He had said : You think that
My kinghood is disproved by the burdens that I
bear. I tell you that it is the bearing of these

246 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY
burdens that makes Me a king. The new power
which I bring into the world is a power of love,
and therefore a power of sacrifice. This cross
which I carry, so far from being an obstruction to
the realisation of My kingdom, is itself the very
sceptre of that kingdom. That which I have won,
that which I offer to My followers, is not the power
to avoid the calamities of life, but the power to
lift these calamities. I offer to make each man
king in proportion as he becomes a priest, bears
witness in his own life to the truth of sacrifice.
He shall be free and fearless and independent in
proportion as he has died to self-interest, lost the
thought of self in the thought of another, sue-
O O '
cumbed to the burden of love ; that is the power
Avhich has made Me a king !
These, then, are the facts of the case ; let us
try to gather them up into one inference. The
thought which must strike us above all others in
the enumeration of these facts is the number and
\Tariety of those human instincts to which this life
appeals. Within its brief compass there are com
prehended impulses of human nature AA'hich apart
from this life are converse. Here are reconciled
the love of life and the desire of death, and man
is taught the truth, that to die unto himself is in
the truest sense to live. Here are united the. gift
of ministration and the thirst for power, aud man
is made to know that the service of love is the
greatest empire. Here are joined the streams of

CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY. 247
pleasure-seeking and asceticism, and man has the
fact revealed to him that there may be a joy in
sacrifice. Here, in a word, we have the meeting
of duty and interest, law and liberty, weakness
and strength, dependence and rule. Is it surpris
ing that the result should have been what it is ?
Is it strange that a life combining so many types
of human nature should have been capable of out
lasting so many human changes? It is not the
fact that this life contains different types of char
acter that has made it universal ; every man's life
does that. To say so is only to say in other words
that we are all more or less inconsistent with our
selves. There is no man that does not at times
reveal features at variance with the natural bent
of his character. The strongest men have some
weak moments ; the weakest have moments when
they are strong. But we do not say at such times
that either of these classes has illustrated the union
of contrary types ; they have illustrated only the
inconsistency of human nature. Their action pre
sents itself as an incongruity, and we experience
the sensation of beholding two lives in one body.
In Christ the phenomenon is altogether different
in kind. The difference lies in the fact that when
in Him two types meet they at once unite. There
is not borne in upon the mind the faintest sense of
inconsistency in looking at the diverse types ex
hibited by the Son of Man. We feel that some
how, somewhere, there has been a combination, a

248 CHRIST, THE ABSOLUTE MORALITY.
fusion, a reconciliation of once antagonistic ele
ments into a consistent and harmonious whole.
The impression on the eye of the spectator is not
one of incongruity, but of symmetry, of melody,
of proportioned beauty. Within this life of the
Son of Man all the great types of the sons of men
are as perfectly fused as are the minor and major
notes in a piece of music. AVe ask again, Is it
surprising that its influence should have been abid
ing ; surely humanity itself must pass ere this life
can become an anachronism ? There is nothing
local about the ministry of Jesus. It is Avider in
aim than the scenes through which it moved. It
addresses no circle more limited than humanity,
and therefore humanity has heard it, and will con
tinue to hear it. The absolute nature of that
message which it brings will in the next chapter
engage our attention.

XIV.
CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
The ultimate test of an absolute religion is the
demand it makes on its followers. If that demand
be local and temporary, or if it be such as after
events prove to have been local and temporary,
the religion is shoAvn to have been only one of the
many forms of public opinion which originate and
end Avith the conditions of a certain time. Moham
medanism is now rapidly fading from the face of
Europe, because the demand of Mohammedanism
is for Europe an anachronism. Mohammed may
have been the Prophet of God for the Middle Ages ;
for the Europe of the nineteenth century he can
be so no more. The inability of the moral require
ment to reach the conditions of our own day
furnishes an incontrovertible proof of the special
and transitory circumstances to which it owed its
origin. Of all religions the most absolute in its demand
is Christianity ; it expresses itself from the outset
without compromise and without qualification
We say " from the outset," because this is a

250 CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
remarkable circumstance. It might naturally be
expected that the founder of a new faith would in
the hour of its foundation be lenient. We should
expect him to present the new faith to his dis
ciples in the fairest possible light ; to soften down
its difficulties, to smooth its asperities, to make it
seem easier than it really was. With Christ it is
all the reA'erse. That which He reveals to His
followers before all other things is the vastness of
His own claim upon them, the greatness of that
moral demand Avhich He has to make on their
conscience. He does not cloak nor dissemble it.
He does not say that it may be averted or avoided
by any system of Jewish ceremonialism. He sums
up the requirements of the Sermon on the Mount
— requirements Avhich seem already to be super
human enough — in one tremendous precept which
comprehends and transcends them all : " Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father Avhich is in
heaven is perfect."
It may seem strange that a faith which made its
followers so humble "as did the Christian religion O
should for a moment have encouraged so exalted
an aim. It appears at first view an inconsistency
in men impressed above all things with their own
nothingness to set before themselves an object of
imitation so unspeakable and so transcendent as
the Supreme Being. But the paradox is altogether
removed when we remember that principle of the
Christian morality to which in another connection

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 2 5 I
we have already alluded — the humbling power of
a great ideal. We have seen that in this morality
the sense of darkness only begins Avhen the light
has come. The impression of moral depravity is
here deeper in proportion as the standard of
morality is high. If it be so, then the humility
of the Christian disciple is the direct result of his
lofty aim. It is just because his standard of
morals is an absolute standard that his life is a
humble life. It is his boundless view of the dis
tance between what he is and Avhat he ought to
be, that makes him refuse to see the steps of his
own progress. If his view were more contracted
his self-confidence Avould be more strong ; his
humility lies in the fact that the law imposed on
him is this : Be perfect, as your Father in heaven
is perfect. Passing, however, from this point, we come to
the more important question. Is this demand of
Christ within the reach of man's compliance ; is it
something which humanity can perform ? The
charge of impracticableness has sometimes been
urged against the Christian laAV ; it has been said
that it asks from man more than he can do. And
Ave must confess that there is a sense in which this
is true. No individual man could keep the Chris
tian laAV any more than he could keep the Jewish
law. Not only so ; but we hold such an impracti
cableness in the Christian demand to be essential
to the individual Christian. His Aveakness is his

252 CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
strength. His humility springs from his percep
tion of an ideal above his head. If that ideal can
be loAvered to him, or, which is the same thing, if
he can be raised up so as to reach it, he shall
thereby enter on another type of morals than that
marked by the earthly form of Christianity ; in
Pauline phrase, he will henceforth be justified by
works and not by faith.
In this sense, then, we may admit the charge.
We may admit that Avhen Christ says, Bv ye
perfect, He asks something which the individual
soul cannot give. It does not follow, hoAvever,
that it cannot be given by humanity. The greatest
philosophic dogma, perhaps the only philosophic
dogma, which Christianity has incorporated Avith
its moral system, is the existence of a life in man
beyond the individual life— a life to Avhich the
individual life bears the same relation as a member
of the body does to the body. We hold that when
Christ demands perfection it is the perfection of
the Christian organism that He demands. You
and I can never be more than individual members
of that organism. We are not the whole body ;
Ave are only a hand, a foot, an ej'e, or an ear. No
perfection as members could make us perfect as a
body ; the most beautiful eye could not say to the
hand : I have no need of thee. The perfection of
the body is reached through the mutual supply by
each member of that Avhich is lacking in the other.
This we understand to be the substance of the

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 253
earliest and ablest commentary on Christ's demand
for perfection — the commentary of St. Paul. Why
does he say : " Till we all come unto the unity of the
faith, unto the measure of the stature of the perfect
man ? " Would it. not have been more natural to
haA^e said : of perfect men ? Certainly, if that had
been his meaning. But that clearly was not his
meaning. He did not mean to say that each of us
Avould some day be a model of perfection inde
pendently of any light and support from the
other, but, on the contrary, through the light and
support which each lent to the other he had a
hope that one day the many men would consti
tute together one perfection, that those diversities
of gifts which in themselves indicated incomplete
ness would form in their combination one great
spirit comprehending the fulness of Him that filleth
all in all.
That this is St. Paul's meaning is put beyond
doubt by his own express declaration. In speak
ing of Christ under the metaphor of the head of
the body, he says, "Ye are complete in Him." It
is as if he had said, In yourselves ye are each of
you but fragments. Not one of you, taken apart,
has more than a single spark of the Divine life.
In your isolation you are all miserably incomplete.
But in your union the incompleteness shall vanish.
As members of a common organism united in one
head the fragmentary nature of your lives and
characters shall disappear, and in the combinatiou

2 54 CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
of each part with its counterpart you Avill receive
the symmetry of the finished whole.
This same Adew is taken by a somewhat later
expositor of the Christian system — the writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews. In Hebrews xi. 39,
40, he says, "These all having obtained a good
report through faith received not the promise, God
having provided some better thing for us, that
they Avithout us should not be made perfect."
The thought here is very suggestive. The writer
is speaking of the good and great men of the old
world. He is telling how they had only an im
perfect light to guide them. He holds up their
victories as an example to his own days, because
they had fought under disadvantages. He speaks
of them as having been imperfect men, and as
having died in their imperfection. Yet, strange
to say, he looks upon them as having been "made
perfect" after death, not as we should expect by
the fact of sublimation in a future state, but by
the revelation of a new fact in the world of time.
That neAv revelation is the exhibition of humanity
in Christ, no longer as a mere disconnected series
' O
of individual lives, but as the connected members
of a complete organism, penetrating each other,
supplementing each other, and justifying the exist
ence of each other. The character of these old
worthies was not justified until Ave of later days
appeared ; without us they were not perfected —
i.e., the ground of their perfection was not revealed.

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 255
But when we of the Christian age appeared — in
other words, when the entire bodily organism of
humanity came into view, the loAver organs were
seen to be as essential as the higher to the
maintenance of the universal life, and the men of
ancient days claimed their necessary share in the
production of that completeness which belonged to
the great Avhole.
Such is the Christian doctrine of human per
fection. We have called it a philosophic doctrine.
It seems to us to form the single bridge between
Christianity and ancient philosophy on the one
hand, and betAveen Christianity aud modern science
on the other. It was held contemporaneously
with St. Paul by Seneca and the later Stoics, and
it is probable that the Apostle of the Gentiles
rather adapted than suggested it. Here, howe\Ter,
its form was more intellectual than moral, more
speculative than practical. It is when we turn
to our own days — the days Avhen philosophy has
assumed the garb of science — that the real ana
logy appears between Christian doctrine and secular
thought. For this doctrine of St. Paul is the
belief of a school Avhich is generally reckoned the
reverse of Pauline. The doctrine that humanity
is not merely a series of individuals, but the life
of a connected organism, is the leading ethical idea
of the nineteenth century. It is the one positive
element in the negations of Auguste Comte. It
is the one ideal feature in the empiricism of

256 Christ's absolute demand.
Mr. Herbert Spencer, of Mr. Leslie Stephen, and
of Mr. G. H. Lewes. It is, indeed, this element
Avhich gives to the doctrine of evolution its main
charm. Its attraction lies in the message which
it brings, that Ave are not moving in isolation, but
in masses, that no man's life is in itself a perfect
whole, that the being of each is linked by an iron
chain to the being of all, that our virtues, such as
they are, have had their origin in the development
of the past, and shall receive their finishing touch
only in the indefinite future. This, we say, is that
doctrine in the gospel of evolution Avhich has made
it to all minds attractive, to some minds divine.
Yet let us remember that this doctrine is not
peculiar to the gospel of evolution ; it is in it, but
it is not exclusively of it. It belongs to an earlier
gospel than science ; it is the central thought in
the teaching of St. Paul. It is no disparagement
to the science of the nineteenth century that it has
borrowed such an idea, nor does it tend in any
sense to weaken her conclusions. The fact, how
ever remains that the leading principle of the
modern science of ethics is identical Avith the lead
ing principle of Pauline morality : the vision of
human nature, not as a collection of units, but as
the effluence of an ideally perfect life, of which the
individual units are but the fragmentary forms
and members.
Recurring now to this Pauline doctrine of per
fection, Ave are disposed to give it an absolute

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 257
sense. We do not understand it merely to mean
that in this sublunary sphere of things the in
dividual man cannot hope to be perfect. We
understand it to mean that in no sphere of things,
sublunary or otherwise, could the individual as an
individual ever be perfect, that a perfection of self-
sufficiency would end in the destruction of morality,
that, in short, the only hope for the perfectibility
of the whole is that the individual should consent
to be simply a part. We take St. Paul, in fact,
to be here not describing the present state of
human morality, but enunciating that universal
and eternal law which must apply to all moral
beings throughout all creation — that the perfection
of the organism as a whole is made up of the
mutual supply which the members give to one
another of their varied and diverse gifts.
If this be St. Paul's view, it throws a curious
light upon the Christian conception of a future life
— a light in which it comes strangely near to the
modern doctrine called corporate immortality. As
this doctrine has of late engrossed a large share
of literary and scientific notice, and as it really
belongs to the sphere of morals more than to that
of theology, we shall endeavour briefly to state
on what grounds and to what extent Ave should
be prepared to accept it.
Stated in round terms, the doctrine of corporate
immortality is the belief that the individual will
only live in the race. On this formula St. Paul
R

258 christ's absolute demand.
and modern science are at one. So far then there
is no difference of opinion, that is to say, to the
signing of the formula. The disciple of Chris-
tianity and the disciple of Comtism are alike pre
pared to subscribe to the doctrine of a corporate
immortality, and are ready to subscribe to that
doctrine in the same words : " The individual will
only live in the race." But when we turn from
the sound to the sense of the formula we find that
it is being read in two different ways, whose dif
ference amounts to a direct contradiction of mean
ing. Let us begin Avith the interpretation of the
Comtist and those who in this respect are his
followers. What he means by the life of the indi
vidual in the race is the annihilation of the indi
vidual. In his view all that survives death is the
race. The individuals of each age are but as drops
in a stream. They pass away to make room for
new drops, and their place is found no more. But
the stream itself goes on, not in spite of, but by
reason of, this transitoriness ; it lives by the death
of its constituent elements. In the interest of
morality the Comtist calls upon the individual to
realise this fact. He calls upon him to fix his eye
upon the continuance of the stream, and to con
sider that its continuance is purchased by the
successive coming and going of such drops of
being as his own. He tells him that he ought to
be content to die in order that the race may live.
Let him give up the petty personality which he

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 259
calls himself. Let him seek corporate immortality
— the immortality of the collective life of man.
Let it be enough for him that when he has had his
little day, and has ceased to be, his life shall yet
have done something to further the continuance of
that great organic Avhole of which his own being
was but a passing phase.
Now this is a form of the doctrine of corporate
immortality which, for our part, we cannot accept.
We reject it, not in the interest of self-love, nor
yet in the interest of a theological system, but
in the interest of that very morality to which this
doctrine specially claims to appeal. It professes
to evoke our spirit of self-sacrifice. It is because
we believe that such a doctrine would interfere
with the spirit of self-sacrifice that we are im
pelled to deny it. Let us understand the position.
I am to hold lightly my own life ; on what ground ?
Not because it is mine, not because it is bad, but
simply and solely because it is individual. Be it
observed, that logically I cannot stop here. If I
am to hold my own life in contempt by reason of
its mere individuality, it is evident that the same
reason must lead me to hold lightly all other lives.
Is this the spirit of sacrifice ? I am content that
I should die, and I am content that others should
die ; I am satisfied that all concrete life should
perish in order that an abstraction may live. This
may be Stoic heroism, but it is not Christian
sacrifice.

260 Christ's absolute demand.
But there is a second form of the doctrine of a
corporate immortality — that form in which Ave
believe it to be held by St. Paul iu particular, aud
by the writers of the New Testament in general.
According to this reading the formula that the
individual will only live in the race has been
framed, not in the interest of the race, but in the
interest of the individual. What it is taken to say
is this : Our great hope in the immortality of our
individual lives lies in the conviction that each of
us is bound to the other, and therefore that none
of us shall ever be alone. We hope that in the
future we shall not be less, but more, individually
strong than in the present, but our expectation
rests on our belief that in the future Ave shall
feel, not less, but more, our need of one another.
And a moment's reflection will convince us that
this view of the subject is at all events a true
reading of human nature. For, let us only ask,
wherein consists our difficulty of conceiving the
state called heaveu ? We shall find that it lies in
our inability to imagine a state in which the
individual shall be perfect and entire, Avanting
nothing. It is not the perfection that appals our
judgment ; it is the effect of that perfection upon
the moral life. I am told to think of heaven as
a place of unselfishness, and of its inhabitants as
ministering spirits. What is unselfishness ? What
is ministration ? These Avords have a meaning in
O
the present world, where men are not equal, and

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 26 1
where the fulness of one has to supply the want of
another. But Avhat meaning can they have in a
Avorld in Avhich by supposition neither you nor I
have any need of each other, and there is no room
for helpfulness on either side ? Surely in such a
state of things as this the existence of ministerinc
O O
spirits is like the existence of useless organs in a
physical body, or the manifestation by a human
mind of faculties for which there is no sphere of
action. Now, it is just here that St. Paul steps in with
his doctrine of corporate perfection — a doctrine
which in a moment makes the moral life of the
Christian heaven intelligible to the spirit of man.
He tells us that the unity and perfection of the
Divine Life will always lie in the fact that each of
its members will always have its OAvn special gift
and its own special need. I shall always have
something which is not possessed by you ; you
will always have, something which is not possessed
by me. I shall always get support from you in
that wherein you are superior to me ; you Avill
always get help from me in that Avherein I am
superior to you. Our perfection will be our union ;
our imperfection will be our need of union, but
the imperfection shall itself be golden. We shall
be unable any longer to be selfish, for the very
reason that Ave shall have ceased to be self-suf
ficient; the body of humanity shall be perfected
by the mutual support of its members.

262 CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND.
Need we say that this conception of the cor
porate immortality opens up a new view of the
future life of man — a vieAV which for the first time
brings that future within the circle of the moral
philosopher. For it must be confessed that the
popular conception of the Christian heaven is one
that defies all ethics. Professing to describe a
state of saintship, it only delineates a scene of self-
sufficiency in which each man sits upon his own
throne, and none has aught to ask of his brother.
We say that such a conception sets ethics at defi
ance, for it describes as a state of saintship a
world where no man gives or receives. But the
Pauline view of a corporate immortality, Avhich,
old as it is, is only now receiving recognition,
reveals a new heaven wherein dwelleth righteous
ness. It shows us that the idea of a future world
Avithout individual want is a dangerous dream,
because a dream born of selfishness. It tells us
that the time shall never come when the individual
man shall have no more to desire ; that eArery one
of us shall have sufficient poverty in his nature
to afford to one another the luxury of ministration.
It says that in no future of the soul shall the
Sermon on the Mount be obsolete ; that in no
region of the universe shall mercy and love be
anachronisms ; that in no sphere of creation shall
benevolence lose its right or beneficence forfeit its
power. In the light of this doctrine we learn for
the first time why it is that to the ministrant souls

CHRIST S ABSOLUTE DEMAND. 263
of the World it is said : " Inherit the kingdom."
It is because from the foundation of the world
the kingdom is prepared for them. In the eye
of the Christian Founder the true city of God is a
city of spiritual commerce. Each is weak Avhere
his brother is strong ; each is strong where his
brother is weak. Each gives to the other that
special kind of riches in which the other is poor;
and from the mutual interchange of strength there
at length emerges a perfect Divine Republic — a
city which hath foundations Avhose builder and
maker is God.
Here, in the recognition of a point where Chris
tian morality becomes an eternal necessity, these
studies may fitly close. Perhaps at the end of
our journey the strongest impression left on our
mind is the permanent character of the ideas we
have been considering. We are made to feel irre
sistibly that in whatever departments the religion
of Christ needs reneAval, here, at least, it keeps its
morning glow. The advance of Biblical criticism
may have torn many texts from their context and
robbed many books of their reputed authors. The
advance of modern science may have made impos
sible many forms of thought which once were held
identical with the laws of truth itself. But neither
the advance of Biblical criticism nor the progress
of modern science has contributed in the least
decree to modify our conception of Christian ethics.
The morality of the New Testament is unopposed

264 Christ's absolute demand.
either from without or from within. It excites
no sense of incongruity with the modern aspects
of the universe. Its main positions are accepted
by the evolutionist as parts of his own system,
and its leading precepts are still the standard by
which men of every school judge the deeds of their
brothers. The morality of the Christian religion
has retained its youth to our days.
Such, we say, is the first and strongest impression
left on the mind by a survey like this in which we
have been engaged. There is, however, a second,
which, if less strong, is not less suggestive, and it
is this : the possibility that out of this unshaken
element the things which have been shaken may
be reconstructed. There is one fact which must
often have struck us throughout these studies, and
that is the ease with which the moral shades into
the theological. Abstaining, as we have done, from
all doctrinal discussion, Ave have yet at every step
seen the precept illustrating the dogma. Justifi
cation by faith, the Christian principle of prayer,
the regenerating work of the Spirit, the kinghood
and priesthood of the Son of Man, the membership
in the divine body, the existence of a future life in
which the saints shall rule — all have received an
exposition from the interpretation of the moral
nature of man. We do not say that this moral ex
position has exhausted the meaning of any formula.
The sight, the scent, and the touch combined do
not exhaust the meaning of the flower. Every man

Christ's absolute demand. 265
Avho thinks knows that behind all that he has seen
and felt there is yet sleeping in the flower a world
of undiscovered beauty, undiscovered for want
of the appropriate sense to discern it. Even so,
if we believe any system to be a divine system, we
shall, in proportion to the strength of that belief,
expect that its symbols shall conceal more than
they manifest. But if the moral exposition cannot
claim to be exhaustive, it claims within its limits
to be true. It has a guarantee for its truth which
is superior to testimony and higher than miracle ;
it is seen by its own light, and it is seen from
within. Its evidence is perceived at once as a
fact of human experience, and it is legible by its
own light. So far as it goes, therefore, it is
reliable ; the only question is — How far does it
go ? Is it capable of reconstructing in its own
form, and in a consistent symmetry, the stones of
that temple of Christian theology Avhich have been
shattered by storm and worn down by time ? Is
it capable of raising from its ashes that life of
enthusiastic faith which made the martyrs of the
first Christian age ? We believe that it is ; and
our belief is grounded on the persuasion that the
faith of the first Christian age was itself not intel
lectual, but moral. It is built upon the con
viction that St. Paul, the greatest and almost the
earliest Christian martyr, approached the problems
of theology from the standpoint of morality,
approached them from the side of his own sense

266 chuist's absolute demand.
of sin, his own moral struggle, his own aspiring
conscience. In the revival of that primitive con
science, in a regress to the days of the moral
instinct of humanity, Ave see the promise and
potence of the Clirist that is to be.

the end.

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