^ ■i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i' i 'iiiii'iiiiiii'ii|i|ii'iTrmTT|i|i|i|i|ii»ii. i.i.i.TT li T^I«R.VR,Y fcsj^ciiltiiral Collep. ^i Class jVo..\c71^^,.^ , |i Cost. .^..i.vl'.S- liiliiiiilx'iIlN!iiiiiNii'iiiM»itxlilikUlL'i^N'i'i'i'7T7r,i.i|i.i.7rT^^ 170 \ \ BOOK 170.SM9 c 1 SMYTH # CHRISTIAN ETHICS 3 T1S3 OOObSbb? 3 J This book may be kept out TWO WEEKS only and is subject to a fine of TWO CENTS a day thereafter. It will be due on the day indicated below. '.5 \m 1926 1932 Zhe international ^beological Xlbrar^. EDITED BY CHARLES A. BRIGGS, D.D., £dward Robinson Professor of Biblical Theology, Union Theological Se m in a ry , Netv York ; AND STEWART D. F. SALMOND, D.D., Professor of Systematic Theology and New Testament Exegesis, Free Church College, Aberdeen. CHRISTIAN ETHICS. By NEWMAN SxMYTH. International Theological Library CHRISTIAN ETHICS BY NEWMAN SMYTH KEW YORK CHAELES SCRIBNEE'S SONS 1896 COPVRIOHT, 1S92, BY CHARLES SCKIBNER'S SONS 5'S'h'^ CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE The nature of Christian Ethics 1 I. Christian Ethics and Metaphysics 3 II. Christian Ethics and Philosophical Ethics 4 III. Christian Ethics and Psychology 7 IV. Christian Ethics and Theology 8 V. The Relation of Ethics and Religion 13 1. Their historical dependence. — 2. Their independence. — 3. They are complementary elements. — 4. Their transcen- dental postulate. — 5. Ethics fulfilled in religion ... 15-26 YI. Christian Ethics and Economics 26 VII. Philosophical Postulates of Christian Ethics . 26 I. Human nature constituted for moral life 27 II. The authority of conscience. — 1. The moral constant and variables. — 2. The history of conscience determined by conscience. — 3. The moral constant an object of choice. — 4. Means of moral comparison. — 5. The idea of worth. — 6. Failure to explain away the moral factor 28-43 VIII. Theological Postulates of Christian Ethics 43 IX. Special Requirements for this Study 45 PAET FIRST. THE CHEISTIAN IDEAL CHAPTER I The Revelation or the Christian Ideal The ideality of ethics 49 I. The Ideal as given in the historic Christ 52 II. Historical Mediation of the Christian Ideal 58 § 1. Through the Scriptures 60 § 2. Through the Christian Consciousness 64 1. The principle of spiritual continuity. — 2. Of progres- [ sive appropriation 64-71 § 3. The Relation of Scripture and Faith 71 V VI CONTENTS PAGB 1. Divers ways of the Spirit. — 2. The Scriptures and Chris- tian Consciousness not independent. — 3. The one teaching of the Spirit. — 4. Mutual relations of the Scriptures and faith. — 6. The original Protestant conception 72-76 - III. Significance for Christian Ethics of this View 76 1. False and true conservatism. — 2. The value given to hope 76-82 CHAPTER II The Contents of the Christian Ideal The good supremely to be desired 83 I. The Biblical Doctrine of the Highest Good 88 § 1. The Old Testament Conception 88 § 2. The New Testament Conception 93 I. The moral ideal in the kingdom of God. — 1. A present kingdom. — 2. The moral realism of Jesus' teaching. — 3. Its positivism. — 4. Particular elements of this concep- tion 96-108 II. In the Sermon on the Mount 108 III. In the doctrine of eternal life. — 1. Life a good. — 2. To be delivered from evil. — 3. Spiritual renewal. — 4. Com- pleteness of personal relationships. — 5. Moral qualities involved. — 6. A present reality. — 7. Blessedness its ele- ment 111-120 IV. Jesus himself the Ideal 120 II. The Ideal in the Christian Consciousness 123 I. An absolute ideal. — 1. Its holiness. — 2. Its righteousness. 123-126 II. An ideal co-extensive with life 126 III. An ideal comprehensive of good 127 III. Comparison of the Christian Ideal with others 129 1. Classic ideals. — 2. Oriental ideals. — 3. Partly Christian ideals. — (1) Esthetic, (2) Evolutionary, (3) Socialistic 129-143 CHAPTER III The Realization of the Moral Ideal The history of the ideal / . . ., 144 I. The Prehistoric Stage of Moral Development 146 1. Initial moral capacity. — 2. The corresponding principle of moral appropriation 147-155 II. The Legal Epoch of Moral Development 155 1. The moral commandment. — 2. The subjective principle of CONTENTS Vii PAGE moral appropriation in (1) the tribal, (2) the national, (3) the prophetic period, and (4) in the later individualized conscience. — 3. Results reached on the legal plane, (1) the idea of right, (2) of rights, (3) of sin as guilt, (4) a moral conception of God, (5) the sense of retribution, (6) of expiation. —4. Incom- pleteness of the legal epoch 155-182 III. The Christian Era of Moral Development 182 1. The Word before Christ. —2. Christ in humanity. — 3. The eternal humanness of God. — 4. Ethical significance of the In- carnation. — 5. The receptive principle in the Christian era. — ' 6. Its relation to other principles : — § 1. Authority of faith. — § 2. Psychological validity of faith. — § 3. Distinctive Christian use of the principle of faith 183-215 CHAPTER IV EORMS IN WHICH THE CHRISTIAN IdEAL IS TO BE REALIZED Individual virtue and social good 216 I. Classification of Virtues by analysis of the Christian Conscious- ness 222 1. Love as self-affirmation. — 2. As self-impartation. — 3. As self-finding in another 226-232 II. Genetic Determination of Virtue 232 1. The genesis of Christian virtue. — 2. The process of its for- mation. — 3. The growth of the new life 232-240 CHAPTER V Methods of the Progressive Realization of the Christian Ideal Moral development in a world of evil 241 I. The Method of Conflict 242 1. Not wholly a consequence of sin. — 2. A method to be spirit- ualized 245-247 II. The Method of Co-operation 247 III. The Method of Spiritual Possession and Use 249 CHAPTER VI The Spheres in which the Christian Ideal is to be Realized I. It proceeds from Personal Centres 254 II. It is to be realized in the Christian Society 258 VIU CONTENTS PAGE § 1. The Family 259 1. The family an historic growth. — 2. A means for further good 260-263 § 2. The State 263 § 3. The Church 274 1. Its formative ethical idea. — 2. Its relation to other asso- ciations. — 3. Church and State 274-291 § 4. The Indeterminate Social Spheres 291 PAET SECOND. CHRISTIAN DUTIES CHAPTER I The Christian Conscience I. The Specific Character of the Christian Conscience 293 1. As determined by faith. —2. By love. —3. By hope. . ..293-297 II. The Christian Education of Conscience 297 1. In the home. — 2. In society. — 3. In the Church. — 4. The individuality of conscience 297-303 III. Means for the Christian Education of Conscience 303 1. The public school. — 2. The pulpit. — 3. The Christian col- lege. — 4. The newspaper. — 5. Personal example 303-311 IV. Questions concerning Conscience 311 1. The personal instance. — 2. Works of supererogation. — 3. Collision of moral claims 311-319 V. Classification of Duties 320 1. From the action of the will. — 2. From the relation of the will to objects. — 3. From the objects of its action. — 4. From objects regarded as moral ends 320-326 CHAPTER II Duties towards Self as a Moral End Some self-love required by the commandment of love 327 I. The Duty of Self-preservation 331 (1) Maintenance of all functions of life, (2) self-defence, (3) temperance, (4) wholesome habits, (5) the Christian thought of death, (6) no right of suicide, (7) healthful condi- tions of life, <'S) inward integrity, (9) discrimination in sensi- ble enjoyments, (10) a true individuality, (11) self-control, (12) conflict against sin 332-356 II. The Duty of Self -development 356 III. The Duty of Realizing the Good in One's Self 364 CONTENTS IX CHAPTER III Duties towards Others as Moral Ends PAGE The Christian law of love 371 I General Duties which proceed from Love ; 375 1. Justice , 375 (1) Personal justness, (2) making things right, (3) giving men their dues, (4) use of the means of justice 377-386 2. Truthfulness 386 (1) To self, (2) to society, (3) a limited obligation, (4) a posi- tive law 386-403 3. Honorableness 403 II. Duties in the Special Spheres of Social Life 405 § 1. In the Family, — Marriage, — Divorce 405-415 §2. In the State. — 1. Interest in public affairs, — 2, Obedi- ence to law. — 3. Participation in politics. — 4. Special polit- ical obligations 415-421 § 3, In the Church. — 1. Personal right in the Church, — 2. Duties in the Church. — 3. The missionary obliga- tion 421-432 § 4. In the Indeterminate Social Spheres. — 1. The Christian conscience in friendship, — 2. The Christian industrial con- science, — 3, Professional ethics (1) of the scholar, (2) of the different callings 432-440 CHAPTER IV The Social Problem and Christian Duties The urgency of social problems 441 I. The existing Social Problem 442 1. In what it does not consist. — (1) Not simply social dis- content, (2) nor existence of poverty, (3) nor question of method 442-444 2. Positive determination of its nature. — (1) Anonymousness of modern life, (2) separation between capital and labor, (3) the human waste, (4) monopolies 444-447 3. Definition of the social problem 447 II, The Integration of Socialism 448 1, A fair share of the products. — 2. Private ownership of the means of production. — 3. Radical sociological defect of col- lectivism 448-456 IIL The Root of the Social Problem in Moral Evil 456 rV. Social Duties under the Existing System 459 CONTENTS PAGE 1. To recognize existing moral elements. — 2. To use ethical powers of the present order. — 3. To develop ethically the present system. — 4. To resist tendencies to industrial disinte- gration 459-464 V. Duties of the Churches concerning the Social Question 464 1. Not to be indifferent spectators. — 2. To study sociological laws. — 3. To be all things to all men 464-467 CHAPTER V Duties Towards God Specific duties towards God enjoined in the Scriptures 468 I. Duties towards the unknown God , 470 II. Duties towards the revealed God 474 1. Theology should impute to God nothing contrary to moral ideas. — 2. Further positive duties, (1) reconciliation with God, (2) prayer, and communion with God, (3) all conduct to be ■referred to God, (4) special religious acts and observances. 475-478 CHAPTER VI The Christian Moral Motive Power Ethics finally a question of motive power 479 I. The Christian Motive Power in History 483 1. The moral motives in the Old Testament. — 2. In the Gos- pel. — 3. In the continuous life of the Church 483-489 II. Analysis of the Christian Motive Power 489 1. The force of morally powerful truths. — 2. The personal influence of Jesus. — 3. The working of the Spirit of Christ. — Conclusion. 489-494 CHRISTIAI^ ETHICS INTRODUCTION " Let us learn to live according to Christianity," said Ignatius^ in the second century. No simpler or better defi- nition of Christian ethics could be given. It is the science of living according to Christianity. Its subject-matter is broad as human life ; its object is to bring all the materials of life under this supreme, formative principle, " According to Christ." Hence Christian ethics is not to be regarded as an individual discipline in virtue merely, but it consti- tutes also a social science. It was a prayer of social Chris- tianity that an apostle offered for the Romans : " Now the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be of the same mind one with another according to Christ Jesus." ^ Christian ethics is the science of living well with one an- other according to Christ. A believer in those early days, speaking to a pagan, said of the communities of Christians, "We do not speak great things, we live them."^ Christian ethics — this science of living great things — does not follow an abstract theory of virtue, but proceeds from a creative Person. It gathers the fruit of the Spirit of Christ. Con- sequently it will not be merely an intellectual exposition of the ethical maxims of Jesus and his disciples ; it will seek for the interpretation and reconciliation of human life and its problems in the wisdom of the Spirit of Christ. Christian ethics has been said by Rothe to be, " in the proper sense of the word — a history ; statistics and politics 1 Epist. ad Magn. c. x. 2 Rom. xv. 5. 3 Minucius Felix, Octavius, c. 38, 1 2 CHRISTIAN ETHICS of the kingdom of God." ^ This ethics springs from an historical revelation, and is to be realized through a Chris- tian history. It presupposes a Christian development of the world, — an evolution under Christian laws of life and for a Christian consummation. Its discussions must follow, therefore, an historical method. Christianity, according to which we are to learn to live, is an historical development, and the ethics of it are likewise the fruit of processes of Christian growth. Hence Christian ethics has been a progressive, and is still an unfinished, science. We are not yet made perfect either in our Christian life, or in our knowledge or science of the life. Moral philosophy has often been rendered too formal and fruitless because it has lacked the historical spirit, — a defect which characterized generally the ethics of the last century, and particularly the ethics of Kant. In his criti- cal hands moral science was emptied of actuality. Mod- ern scientific ethics has done excellent service in recalling moral philosophy from this lifeless realm of abstractions, and restoring to it vitality, color, and warmth as a moral history of real life. Christian ethics agrees with the scien- tific in starting from what Mr. Leslie Stephen insists is the proper ground of " facts of observation " ; ^ it differs from scientific ethics by searching for its premises and finding its laws in the observed facts of the Christian moral con- sciousness and its historical development.^ The object of Christian ethics, accordingly, is not to discover a philosophy of virtue, but to bring to adequate interpretation the Christian consciousness of life. We are to seek in this inquiry to understand in its principles, its relations, and its activities, the Christian moral conscious- ness of life. While Christian ethics is thus in its source and method an historical science, it cannot, however, be 1 Theologische Ethik, vol. iv. s. 14. 2 Science of Ethics, p. 36. 3 Schleiermacher defined Christian ethics as follows: "The Christian doc- trine of morals should be the presentation of the communion with God which is conditioned upon communion with Christ the Redeemer, so far as it is the motive of all acts of the Christian; it can be nothing else than a description of that manner of action which proceeds from the supremacy of the Christian determined, religious self -consciousness." — Chrisiliche 8%Ue, s. 33. INTRODUCTION 3 limited entirely to the historical revelation which has been given in the Scriptures ; for the new-creative life and power of Christ have worked, and are still working, in all the spheres of human life, towards a Christian goal of history; the Christian revelation is also a prophecy of the world to come. Christian ethics becomes thus a sci- ence not only of the biblical morality, but also of the whole moral development and aim of humanity according to Christ ; it is the science of the moral contents, progress, and ends of human life under the formative Christian Ideal. Christian ethics must look on towards an ethical eschatology, as well as proceed from an ethical history. It will be a comprehensive survey, from the moral point of view, of the founding, upbuilding, and promised completion of the kingdom of God. .; I. CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND METAPHYSICS All ethics involve some metaphysics ] for ethics is the science of well-being, and well-being involves being. Ethics presents as its subject-matter an adjective which qualifies a noun ; a moralist who should seize the adjective without reference to the noun — who would understand what is well without relation to what is being — grasps but the shadow and misses the substance. The profoundest problems of ethics and metaphysics are not separated in the simplest moral experiences of life. And the attempt to construct an ethical theory without any well-considered metaphysical basis is apt to issue not in a moral science without assumptions, but in an ethics which becomes confused in philosophical doubts.^ We have an ethical interest in determining, so far as we possibly can, whether there is any moral reality beneath 1 Mr. Leslie Stephen, for example, seeks to write a Science of Ethics inde- pendently of metaphysics. But in his concluding chapter, while struggling to keep clear of metaphysical problems, he lays down his own opinion of "ontologies" and "sound metaphysics"! (pp. 447-9). He remarks that he might be content " to build upon the solid earth. You may, if you please, go down to the elephant or the tortoise" (p. 44G). But how does he knoio that the earth is solid on which he builds ? That is a question of metaphysics. 4 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the moral appearance of our world. It is an ethical ques- tion which runs at once into metaphysics, whether all morality is simply phenomenal or not. The ethical inter- est of life is not satisfied by an easy avoidance of this question. Indeed, ethics and metaphysics may be regarded as the two sides of our way of approach towards the last realities of our existence. Christian ethics, therefore, does not reject all metaphysi- cal grounds for ethics. It starts rather with a Christian conception of being, and its theistic significance. It as- sumes that God is, and man from God. Certain general theistic assumptions will underlie our special discussion of Christian ethics. 11. CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS While Christian ethics finds, as has just been said, its immediate source and special sphere in the moral conscious- ness of that Christian humanity which is created anew after the Spirit, it is also to be observed that Christian ethics, in order that it may be scientific, must include the facts of man's natural moral life, and should not fall into contradiction with the reasonable conclusions of philosoph- ical ethics. For the second creation according to Christ fulfils the first creation, and the end of grace cannot prove contrary to the beginning of nature. The spiritual is to the natural as the grain which ripens in the sunshine is to the seed that dies in the earth.^ The Christian character, in its perfect idea, is the nature of man completely ethicized through the indwelling of the Spirit. Christianity claims power to conserve and to complete all natural good in the kingdom of heaven. Hence the science of Christian ethics will comprehend the truths of natural science ; and its moral interpretations of life will harmonize with all our possible knowledge. Christian ethics, in its idea and aim, is something more than a special branch of moral philosophy ; it is ethics in the highest — ethics raised to the highest power — the 1 1 Cor. XV. 37, 46. INTRODUCTION 5 last and fullest moral interpretation of the world and its history. The facts of the natural history of man, and the sifted conclusions of philosophical ethics, will be its assumptions and its postulates. It will gather these up, and bring them to the light of the purest and most lumi- nous moral consciousness of all history — even the mind that was in Christ Jesus. These philosophical postulates with which we must begin in writing on Christian ethics, will themselves be subjected in turn to new, searching tests, and to severe verification, in the focus of the Chris- tian consciousness of man. The effort to understand and to reflect truly the regenerate spiritual mind of humanity will throw back light upon the natural moral conscious- ness of man. Scientific ethics so-called — the ethics of naturalism — does not render a complete induction of the moral facts of our history unless it proceeds to include also in its generalizations the ethics of the best Christian conscious- ness of life. Until that is done, ethical theories and maxims have not been brought to the light and submitted to the search of the clearest and highest moral authority known on earth. Yet nothing is more common than for writers Avho approach the inquiry into the moral history of our world from the paths of natural science, to ignore altogether the Christian significance and the Christian tests of moral ideas, as though the ethical consciousness of Christianity were but a moral episode in human his- tory — a phenomenon by itself ; as though the whole Christian consciousness, with its rich ethical contents, stood on some side-track of evolution, and were therefore something to be passed by in the scientific pursuit of truth with scarce a word of notice, or to be left as a special sub- ject for the investigation of those who are inclined to it. But this confident exclusiveness of naturalistic ethics is an unscientific habit, as it would be unscientific for a chemist to refuse to apply any test by means of which his combinations might be subjected to further analysis, or as it would seem absurd for an investigator to choose to make explorations by moonlight instead of by sunlight. 6 CHRISTIAN ETHICS Man's moral nature is to be read in all possible ligbts, and to be brought to the interpretation of its own holiest indwelling truth. Man at his highest moral power and in his intensest spiritual consciousness is the ethical fact to be investigated and explained. A satisfactory account of him at a lower moral point is not an account of man at his supreme moral height. A thoroughly scientific ethics must not only be adequate to the common moral sense of men, but prove true also to the moral consciousness of the Son of man. No ethics has right to claim to be thoroughly scientific, or to offer itself as the only science of ethics possible to us in our present experience, until it has sought to enter into the spirit of Christ, and has brought all its analysis and theories of man's moral life to the light of the luminous ethical personality of Jesus Christ. The conscience of man which is formed and enlightened by the Spirit of Christ is a psychological fact to be scien- tifically measured, and to be related to other facts. Pos- sibly some ethical assumptions and theories, which may seem to be sufficient interpretations or generalizations of man's moral life at lower stages and in less developed periods of his history, may be found to be inadequate when the fullest, highest, and clearest moral consciousness is to be explained. Christian ethics, therefore, by its interpretation of the most ethicized life of man may gain right and power to speak the last word amid contending theories of moral philosophy. Such authority to speak the final word can be denied to it only by proving that the Christian moral consciousness is not the most ethicized consciousness known to man ; that the regenerate mind is a degenerate mind ; that the Son of man is not man at his moral best. If on the whole, and fairly interpreted, the Christian ideal of the kingdom of God is the highest ethical conception — the moral type of society most fitted to survive — which the development of the world has as yet attamed ; if the Christian consciousness, taken largely, is the best product of the moral history of this earth ; then Chris- tian ethics, which is the science of this regenerate moral INTRODUCTION 7 experience of man, has authority as the highest court of appeal among the philosophies of morals. The relation of Christian to philosophical ethics is thus seen to be twofold; it presupposes and it judges them. What an apostle claimed for the spiritual man is true like- wise of the science of man's spiritual experience in its ethical deliverances : " But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, and he himself is judged of no man." ^ The spirit- ual man is here regarded as the man in whom the highest and truest life of man comes to self-consciousness, and therefore he can be judged by no man. Hence ethics is to receive its final form and clarified contents in the moral consciousness of the spiritual man. There is no further appeal from the judgment of the spiritual mind of humanity. Although philosophical and Christian ethics may be separated and pursued as independent disciplines, the dis- tinction between them, as Dorner has observed,^ is only empirical, and not a necessary opposition ; the difference tends to disappear in proportion as the philosophy of an age becomes Christianized, and the Christianity of an age becomes rational and real. No necessary and permanent antagonism can be admitted between reason and faith, and consequently the ethics of reason seeks for fulfilment in the ethics of faith. III. CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND PSYCHOLOGY * Ethics is sometimes treated as a branch of psychology. These studies are too vitally related to be held apart even for analytical purposes without peril of loss. An ethics without psychological assumptions is an impossibil- ity. These assumptions may be concealed; they may not have been thought out ; but there is no moral treatise, not even the most clearly scientific, which is not per- meated through and through by the psychology which the writer consciously or unconsciously, intelligently or witli- 1 1 Cor. ii. 15. ^ System dcr ChristUchen Sittenlehre, ss. 17, 24, 28. 8 CHRISTIAN ETHICS out knowledge, has adopted and holds. All the problems of human conduct involve theories of the will, and can- not be solved Avithout some inquiry into moral motives, — that is, without the aid of psychology. - Christian ethics cannot claim freedom from subjection to the processes and tests of modern psychology ; it will have also its own contribution to make to this study as it brings out the psychology of the regenerated conscious- ness. There may be some truths of psychological signif- icance to be learned from the processes of spiritual experience and the growth and increased fruitfulness of mental life under the influence of the Spirit of Christ. The results, moreover, of the experiments of physiologi- cal psychology (which in their way are interesting and suggestive, although as yet not illuminative where knowl- edge would be most welcome) are to be read in the light which may be kindled in the recesses of our being through the operation of the human mind and will in the freest and most powerful spiritual acts and self-determinations. At this preliminary stage of our discussion we wish to acknowledge the constant and intimate relation which will appear throughout between Christian ethics and psy- chological investigations. Instead of regarding it as a virtue to write an ethics without psychological assump- tions, we deem it to be the far more excellent way to gain an ethics which shall justify itself before any competent psychology. IV. RELATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THEOLOGY In the scholasticism of the middle ages ethics Avas treated in connection with dogmatics, and in subordination to the theology of the Church. The natural virtues, according to Aristotle or Plato, were clumsily joined to the super- natural graces according to Thomas Aquinas. Until the unity and continuity of the natural and the supernatural had been realized in some profounder and simpler Chris- tian philosophy, the true and intimate relation of nature and grace in ethics could not be apprehended. Conse- INTRODUCTION V quently the mediaeval ethics presented a series of labored efforts to divide the moral domain of life between the world and the Church, and to determine with many defini- tions the metes and bounds of the moral and the theologi- cal virtues. The dualism between the natural and the supernatural, which characterized the scholastic philosophy, ran also as a widening chasm through the ethics of the Church. Across it casuistry sought to throw its ques- tionable bridges; beyond the common duties which are required of all men, theology found room for works of supererogation and the " evangelical counsels " ; — for acts which are not absolutely required by the law, but which may be deemed advisable as possessed of some supermoral merit. The introduction and pursuit of moral philosophy as a distinct study marked in the early literature of Protes- tantism the rise of a new and powerful tendency which was not to be subjected to the authority of the Church. Rothe regards it as an epoch-making event when George Calixtus constructed a moral philosophy independently of the Church.^ Certainly it would be idle now to think of forcing ethics back under the control of dogmatic the- ology. The moral consciousness of our age has grown peculiarly impatient of Church dogma. But can ethics escape entirely from the touch of theological influence? What is the true relation between Christian ethics and theology ? In the gospels we observe that the teaching of Jesus is ethical and religious rather than metaphysical and theo- logical. His teaching involves, it is true, a divine meta- physics ; but it is directly ethical and religious rather than theological or systematic. Dogmas may be logically derived from many of Jesus' words ; but immediately, as he spake them, they were spirit and they were life. His words bring to light the primary and essential ethical rela- tions between God and man. The two commandments, in which Jesus summed up the law and the prophets, centre upon a word of simple and supreme ethical signifi- 1 Theologische Ethik, vol. i. s. 15, Anm. 2. 10 CHRISTIAiT ETHICS cance, — love. It is by no means to be overlooked that Jesus' moral teachings were at the same time religious ; that the morality of the gospels is pervaded throughout with the religious spirit ; but it is to be noticed that the -more distinctively theological truths, such as the Lord's unique relation to the Fatlier, and man's relations to God and knoAvledge of Him, are approached in Jesus' teaching on the moral rather than the metaphysical side ; are ex- pressed in the language of moral experience and measured in terms of ethical value. The religious teaching of the gospels is simple and universally intelligible because it is instinct with moral life and appeals directly to the moral consciousness of men. The more dogmatic teaching of the epistles rests on this religious-ethical truth of the gospels. Reason is called sooner or later to think out ethical-religious truths under metaphysical conceptions, and the dogmatic theology of the Church is the reasonable endeavor to harmonize the truths of Christianity in a system of thought. But what- ever may be the function of theology, the primary ethical elements of religion should be distinguished, and not allowed to become lost or confounded, in any system of divinity which may be built up philosophically, or taught with authority in the creeds of the Church. Christian ethics must be allowed to follow closely, and should remain true to the ethical-religious consciortsness, without prevention or prejudice from Christian dogmatics. More- over, whatever postulates Christian ethics may borrow from Christian theology, it must bring these to its own moral tests and judgment. We cannot consent to lower the Christian conscience before any churchly tradition, or to yield for a moment the Christian sense of right to any supposed dogmatic interest. The question, " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " is an ancient appeal directly to the religious conscience, which Christian ethics should always keep open and sacred. Even in the most authoritative period of the reign of Church dogma, this direct appeal to the Christian moral consciousness was never wholly closed and forgotten. Augustine was not INTRODUCTION ll unmoved by the living voice of God in the soul of his churchly orthodoxy; and John Calvin did not push his crushing logic along the ways of the divine decrees beyond all restraint of the moral Christian sense. A Puritan theologian of the seventeenth century, wearied of "the contentious learning" of his times, wrote a plea for " Practical Divinity " as " of far greater concernment unto all," and appealed directly to the "life of God in the soul of a believer " as the test of truth.^ Reformations have gro^vn out of the ethical protest of the Christian mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in the vitalizing influence of ethics. The Church will not long refuse to bring any article of its faith to the test of its most Christlike sense of love and fairness. It is reason enough for doubting and for re- studying any traditional teaching or received word of doc- trine, if it be felt to harass or to confuse the Christian conscience of an age. Nothing can abide as true in the- ology which does not prove its genuineness under the ever renewed searching of the Christian moral sense ; nothing is permanent fruit of the teaching of Christ which does not show itself to be morally Christlike. Even a primitive Christian tradition might be insufficient author- ity for imputing to Christ, and including in the doctrine of Christianity, any word of teaching which should prove to be contrary to the character and spirit of the Christ of the gospels. Still less can we allow in Christian ethics any dogmatic belief which would put in bonds the Chris- tian ethical principle itself; — as, for instance, the tenet that morality is dependent upon the divine will, that the distinction between right and wrong is a created distinc- tion, which God might have willed otherwise. Christian ethics cannot consent to commit suicide in any supposed interest of theology. 1 John Dury, An Earnest Plea for Gospel Communion, London, 1654. The whole passage referred to is too long to quote. The following sentences illus- trate its quite modern tone: "Godliness, therefore, which is the practice of divine Truth, is the measure of all intellectual truths ; for whatever matter of knowledge is not proportionate, subordinate, and subservient unto the produc- tion of the life of God in the soul of a Believer, is not to be received as a divine Truth " (pp. 5 sq.). 12 CHRISTIAN ETHICS This assertion of the authority of the ethical in its own domain, is not at the same time a denial of all dependence of Christian ethics upon Christian theology. A necessary and legitimate subordination and service of the former to the latter is to be recognized in two relations : (1) Chris- tian ethics finds material for its science in the truths which are presented in the person, life, and teaching of Christ. (2) Christian ethics has before it the task of bringing Christian beliefs to moral interpretation and har- mony. In this respect it is a servant of theology. As ethics in general cannot proceed in entire indepen- dence of men's beliefs concerning themselves and the uni- verse in which they live, so Christian ethics is to be an application of Christian beliefs to the conduct of life. We cannot construct a Christian theory of living without con- stant reference to the Christian ideas of being. While the imitation of Christ is to be distinguished from the intellectual conception of the nature or offices of Christ, still to follow Christ in his life implies some belief in the worthiness of the Christ to go before us as Master and Lord. And these Christian beliefs, as already observed, will be purified and enriched in following the Christ. There is light in love. While Christian ethics finds its subject-matter in the same Christian consciousness of man from which theology derives its materials for dogmatic construction, each of these sciences will regard the whole contents of the Chris- tian consciousness (including historic revelation) from its own point of view. Ethics holds the contents of Christian faith in immediate and constant relation to the will and character of the Christian man and the Christian society. Dogmatics is concerned with the Christian truths as mate- rials of knowledge to be combined with all our knowledge in a Christian conception of the world and God. The distinction has been made by Wuttke {Christian Ethics^ vol 1. p. 22) that ethics is predominantly a subjective science, while dogmatics is predominantly objective ; that the latter furnishes the materials of knowledge, while the former has to do with the relation of these known materials of Christian life to the will and the ends of conduct. There is INTRODUCTION 13 evident truth in this distinction, yet we cannot admit that the moral con- sciousness is simply subjective : there is a moral knowing as well as will- ing ; there is a knowing for willing and through willing, a knowledge to be gained in willing. The will and the mind are not two separate com- partments of being. An analysis of our mental states into their elements is not a true description of the living consciousness in the integrity and unity of its vital processes. The ethical consciousness is a knowing in willing, and a willing in knowing ; it has objective validity (if that may be allowed in any sense to man's knowledge) as well as subjective worth or obligation. Moral knowing is real knowing, if the life of man touches at any point the realities of things. Christian ethics naturally follows Christian theology, both because it assumes a certain acquaintance with the Christian truths, and also because it offers a further re- vision of theological conceptions in the light of the Chris- tian moral consciousness. All things are to be brought to the ethical test of the life of the Christ. " But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his."^ The ethics of the Spirit is the final judgment ; the life is the light of men. V. THE RELATION OF ETHICS AND RELIGION Scarcely any question in moral philosophy has been so repeatedly brought into discussion as the question of the dependence of morality on religion. It has been often claimed, on the one hand, that morality has its beginnings and derives its sanctions from religion and religious mo- tives, and is the consequence even of the revealed will of God. On the other hand, it is asserted that moral codes are social in their origin ; that men must learn to live together by some rule, that is, morally; and that even without the guidance and help of religious ideas and customs, social necessity would compel some moral organ- ization and control of communities of men. Positivists, moreover, have not been slow to discover defects in men's moral codes, ancient and modern, which may be attributed to the retardation or corruption of ethical ideas by relig- ious traditions ; and it has been claimed not only that 1 Rom. viii. 9. 14 CHRTSTTATf ETHICS morality may be entirely independent of religion for its basis of obligation, but also that it might often profitably jdispense with added religious sanctions. Some educated tind ethical souls no longer require the support of religious beliefs for the honorable conduct of life, although, accord- ing to Mr. Spencer,! there still may be some lingering pop- ular need for the enforcement of moral duties by religious fears. Mr. Mill admits the great services which belief in the supernatural has rendered to morality in '' the early stages of human development " ; ^ but he remarks that ''early religious teaching has owed its power over mankind rather to its being early than to its being religious." ^ Positivism itself, however, while banishing the ordinary religious beliefs from the moral sphere, cannot rule its own kino-dom without sooner or later inventino- some makeshift for a religion. Comte, as is well known, at the close of his positive philosophy, gave back to poetry and the worship of humanity the religious motives and sanc- tions Avhich he had banished w^ith the age of theology. And Mr. Mill himself, notwithstanding his reluctance to follow Comte in the new cultus of humanity, nevertheless, in the same essay in which he would prove that morality is no longer dependent on religious beliefs, could not quite dispense with the name religion for the supremacy of the moral sentiments which he thinks are destined to survive as the worthiest and the most useful. " To call these sen- timents," he remarks, "by the name morality, exclusively of any other title, is claiming too little for them. They are a real religion ; " etc.* So positivism, after escaping from the age of theology, borrows the old name, and ends its days by dreaming of an ideal sentiment which is to be its religion. Naturalistic ethics, in spite of itself, cannot rest content without discovering or inventing something to answer for human life the purpose of a religion. But a philosophy which finds itself compelled to spell some com- mon nouns with capitals, in order that it may Avorship them, can hardly deny the moral necessity of some religion. 1 First Pi-inciples, s. 32, p. 117. 2 f'tnuy of Rdi(jion, p. 100. 3 Ibid. p. 83. 4 ma, p. 109. INTRODUCTION 15 1. If we turn to history in the desire to determine the actual relation between religion and morals, we observe (so far as we have historical materiab for our judgment), that some religion and some morality are usually found existing together among men ; there are few, if ai:y, clear and decided instances of the presence of either of these fac- tors without some existence also of the other. The two have grown together, and, so far as we can discover, have usually sprung up together. Throughout known history the two powers of human life, religion and morality, have been co-existent and co-o^^erative. It may be true, as Mr. Mill contends, that morals in Greece derived little benefit from, and indeed became exceptionally independent of, religious beliefs ; yet the political morals of Greece were religious at least in their recognition of the social order as ordained by the gods ; and the ideas of law and nemesis were not irreligious conceptions in the Greek ethics. In Israel religious and moral obligation coalesced, and the history of Israel is at once a history of the develop- ment of morals and of a j^i'ogressive revelation of God. The divine evolution of Israel proceeds on parallel lines of moral and religious growth. Indeed, these two elements, the moral and the religious, have been so interwoven and blended in the whole texture and color of the historical development and life of humanity, that it is not easy to separate them at any particular point, and to discern with 13recision what results should be attributed to the one factor and what to the other element. The earliest and least degrees of the religious consciousness contain implic- itly some moral potency and manifest some moral reac- tions ; and, conversely, an awakening of the moral con- sciousness is usually accompanied by a profound stirring of the religious depths of human nature. While religious teaching has direct influence on the morals of a people, it is equally true that any advance of moral ideas will become reformatory of religious doctrines. No religious teaching can remain, if its idea of God is discovered to be immoral. All attempts absolutely to divorce these two original and allied elements of man's being, his religious 16 CHRISTIAN ETHICS faith and his moral sense, seem to be impossible ; by some Power, creative of our nature, they have been so joined together that man cannot put them asunder. 2. This general interdependence of morals and religion we must not, however, press so far as to assert that either is derived from the other, or has no independence of the other. When we have admitted that there is an historical and an organic correlation between the religious and moral elements of human life, it does not follow that we can at once go farther and declare either that religion is only a larger reflection on the universe of man's inward moral feeling, or, on the other hand, that human morality is absolutely dependent for its power upon conscious belief in God and immortality, or any of the specific truths of Christianity. For no ethical characteristic of the present age is more familiar than the existence of high moral development and devotion to pure moral ideals in individ- uals who have broken with all religious traditions, and who hold in abeyance, if they have not lost, their faith in a personal God and their personal immortality. In individual examples, a large and lofty morality is seen to survive without obvious religious root or support. It is another question, however, whether this apparent indepen- dence of individuals from religious motives could have been sustained except in a society which had long been pre- pared and enriched for such exceptional moral growths by the influences of religious beliefs ; — these persons have drawn nourishment even from the decay of the faiths in which the seeds of their moral life were first planted: and it is a further and still more important question Avhether a vigorous and fruitful national morality could survive in a soil where all the springs of religion had become dry. We have in history no circle of facts large enough to justify the generalization that society can give up all religion and eventually prosper. The historic indications seem to point the other way. Loss of religious faith (as distinct from dogmas) among the people has never yet been a sign of increasing moral vitality. Yet while there is no moral INTRODUCTION 17 history of a people to justify the confident assertion that religion may be safely cast aside as an outgrown garment in the future progress of mankind, it may be admitted not only that individual instances may be adduced of the con- tinuance of moral excellence after the loss of religious beliefs, but also that a considerable degree of moral attain- ment and social firmness may be conceived as possible, at least for a while, even in the absence of definite or positive popular belief in a divine Governor or a future state. The political morality of the Grecian systems of ethics was not directly dependent upon the religious ideas amid which they grew up, and we can keep the one while discarding the other. Man is by nature a moral, as he is by nature a political being. " Conscience," as Dr. Martineau has remarked, " may act as human, before it is discovered to be divine." ^ We must recognize, therefore, alike in the interest of morality and religion a certain relative independence of each from the other. Each has life in itself ; each possesses its own sphere, and is clothed with its own authority. Neither can be absolutely identified with the other, or sub- ordinated to the other. Religion, while it must bring its whole conception of the world and idea of God to the test of the life of each succeeding age, is in itself more than morality, and will refuse to be reduced entirely to strict ethical terms. Religion represents a personal relationship — man's sonship from God's Fatherhood ; and the trust and obedience which religion enjoins are personal and vital relations which cannot be comprehended under any impersonal sovereignty of law or right. On the other hand, morality as the condition and law of social well-being may be studied and developed without constant reference to the religious questions of the origin or the ultimate significance of human society and man's sense of moral obligation. Moreover, it has often been indispensable to moral progress that the encumbrance of dead and burdensome religious beliefs should be thrown off, and that the science of human well-being should be pur- 1 Beli(/ion, vol. i. p. 20. 18 CHRISTIAN ETHICS | sued with independent ethical investigation. Whenever the Church hinders such free development of social science, it is in need itself of ethical reformation. The true unity of the religious and the moral requires that each power should work freely in its own sphere. 3. Religion and ethics, while thus relatively independ- ent, are complementary elements of man's life. Ultimately they belong together. Each originally implies the other, and in the perfected life both are made one. We cannot think any ethical question out without rais- ing some religious question. We cannot make any relig- ious belief real unless we put moral contents into it. Alike as a good to be desired, a virtue to be attained, or a duty to be rendered, religion itself becomes a part of morality, and belongs to a true and complete ethics of life. And, conversely, every moral term — such as approbation, duty, freedom, and any other ethical concept — has its religious side and passes easily over into a religious meaning. The apparent dualism is not real, for morals and religion are the two relations and aspects of one unfolding spiritual life, which, although thus logically separable, is not divided in the unity of the personal consciousness. 4. Ethics and Religion require a similar transcendental postulate. Man's rational consciousness alike on its moral and its religious side has a transcendent environment ; and our sense of absolute dependence and of absolute obliga- tion imply the same source of our humanity in the Eternal One from whom we have come. Philosophic doubt may refuse to receive any definition of the supreme Power or Origin alike of our consciousness of personal being and moral obligation ; a man may remain, if he will, an agnostic both in his ethical and his religious consciousness of himself; but the primary and essential fact is not to be denied that our human sense of being and of well-being touches something, whether known or un- known, beyond itself; faces some larger environment; exists in conscious dependence on some Being and Good which were before us, and which are greater than we. For purposes of analysis and investigation, it is true, INTEODUCTION 19 any subject may be isolated from its environment; — an organ or a piece of tissue may be separated from the body, or one body may be held apart from the entire system of organic relations in which it exists. But we can onl}' subject dead tissue to this analysis. We have to take the life before we can divide any organ with our scalpels, or examine tissue under our microscopes. Similarly the moral consciousness of man may be sepa- rated from his whole consciousness of spiritual being, and for purposes of analysis, and the ascertainment of certain definite results, it may be investigated without any refer- ence to its relations to the super-sensible and transcendent environment of man's spiritual life. But it is the dead, not the living moral consciousness, which can be so dis- sected. And when the results of the analysis thus ob- tained are confidently presented as the whole contents of man's moral nature, and their meagreness pronounced to be the entire truth which may be know^n of man's being and destiny, then we need only refer to the living moral consciousness in the actual life of humanity as the wit- ness for other and higher elements, not unknown to the " vital soul," which are real and vibrant, and not to be silenced in the heart of man. Indeed, it is a travesty of the scientific method in ethics to regard the individual man as a part of the " social tissue," and then to refuse to take the slightest account of such impulsions or impli- cations as affect that social tissue through its relation to some larger spiritual environment ; to refuse even to raise the inquiry whether that social tissue presents evi- dence of belonging itself to some greater, cosmical unity, or spiritual order of being, in which humanity exists, and in the all-encompassing relations of which we live and move and have our being. It would not be scientific to regard an organ as separate from the body, ignoring either the adaptations of the organ to the body, or the possible reactions of the body on the organ. Yet Mr. Leslie Stephen holds that scientific ethics has to do with observed facts, not with transcendental considerations.^ 1 Science of Ethics, p. 36. 20 CHRISTIAN ETHICS But the transcendental principles may be resident in, and reveal themselves as the vital implications of, the observed facts of the " social tissue," — as the life of the whole body pulses through each particular organ. We do not get rid scientifically of the transcendental simply by shut- ting our eyes to the signs and evidences of it. A question of the first ethical interest is, whether our human moral consciousness has any organic relation with a cosmical moral order? whether it is in its living movement and power wholly of this earth earthy ? Are we quite through with the known or at least partly disclosed truth of the moral life of humanity, when we have observed the rela- tions of the individual cells in the social tissue in which, by the evolution of life, they have been combined ? Are there no nerve forces running through this human tissue which bring into it excitations from without, by which every moment the internal processes are affected and even its structural formation may be modified ? We have not completed a true scientific study of ethics so long as we have evaded the investigation of any and every trace we may find of the existence of a moral ontological environ- ment, and the felt influences in the life of man of the larger moral universe in which his life may have part and share. We can pursue the study of terrestrial physics as a sepa- rate discipline, but we cannot have a complete physical description of this earth without some astronomy. The natural history of the earth runs back into the star-dust. We cannot understand the formation of the world, or its present stability, without assuming at least the first prin- ciples of heaven's law and order. So ethics without any transcendental assumptions is like physics without astron- omy. Ethics is not complete without some attempt to set human conduct and history in its real cosmical envi- ronment. Otherwise the most influential and persistent moral factors are left untouched and unexplained. An adequate and resolute science of ethics will require us, not to drop with contemptuous indifference the high task, but to think out to the uttermost the metaphysical and INTRODUCTION 21 ontological implications of ethics. Should the ethical field be abandoned entirely to writers who are content to close their eyes to all transcendental suggestions of moral expe- rience, then the whole higher interest of ethical inquiries, as it has been felt by the great moralists and philosophers from Plato down, would be forfeited, and forfeited too at the demand of a partial science to satisfy a partial method, at the cost of ethical courage, thoroughness, and persis- tenc}-. A moral philosopher like Mr. Green in his approach to ethical problems from the spiritual side, and his willing- ness to learn their spiritual significance, has as much war- rant for his appearance on the ethical field, and as much occasion for the use of his philosophic method of inquiry into ethical facts, as Mr. Stephen has for his naturalistic pursuit of moral inquiries. For the ethical field lies open in both directions, — towards nature and towards spirit, — and neither gate of it, that looking into the natural, or that opening towards the spiritual, can be regarded as closed by a truly scientific investigator. The moral ideal — our haunting human sense of some supreme good — contains in itself a certain super-histori- cal, if not supernatural truth and grace : it has always shone before men as an ideal not realized as yet — the vision of something diviner to be loved and followed — a dream of some perfection yet to be revealed beyond the conception of the human heart. The moral ideal as a fact within our experience is also a fact which has not been given entirely from our experience. The ideal of human- ity is itself above the past or present experience of human- ity. It rises over the exalted spirits of our race, like the dawn on the mountains, from beyond our horizons. Hence the contents of the moral ideal cannot be fully determined inductively from history.^ 1 Ulrici argues at length that it is impossible to derive the ethical ideas from experience; the idea, he maintains, of the perfect form, or the perfect man, is not derived throitf/h experience, although not without experience. — Goit und der Menfich, vol. ii. s. 81 ff. Mr. Green reasons that it is impossible to give a definition of the supreme good because a man " cannot know what his capa- bilities are till they are realized." —Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 204. There is 22 CHRISTIAN ETHICS Ethics cannot be comprehended in all its elemental facts, vital forces, and living processes, if the presence and felt influence in an age of ideal truth and being which history has not contained, are not recognized and revered. For humanity exists, self-consciously, as something greater than its present realization, and for ideal ends of being In the noblest moral consciousness there is some presentiment of worlds unrealized as yet. Humanity not only exists in itself, but also, to use the fine apostolic phrase, '' unto all the fulness of God." ^ Man's moral consciousness in its spiritual suggestiveness requires interpretation as a prophecy, besides critical un- derstanding as an historical record. Conscience is a reve- lation as truly as it is a history. Ethics therefore cannot be thought through without some exercise of prophetic in- sight. Moral science, as has been admitted, begins with observed facts, and should follow its own metliods of in- vestigation independently of religion ; but after all proper historical and critical data of ethics have been gathered and sifted, the spirit of the whole volume of man's moral history remains to be discerned and followed. The empiri- cal opens all around towards the supernal. Morality finds fulfilment in religion. Irreligion, whether in thought or life, is sign of arrested moral development, not of a com- plete moral science or an experience of life rounded fully out. 5. Religion, consequently, will be the fulfilment and the and must be something yet to be revealed, because not yet realized, in the idea of the summian bonum. The highest good is thus in part historical, and in part super-liistorical. Purely empirical ethics does not do justice, and on its narrow range of observed facts cannot do justice, to this uudefinable but powerful element in the moral idealization of life. i Eph. iii. 19. In this connection the words of Principal Caird are worth quoting : "Moreover, in this very fact that thought is the form of an infinite content is involved this further contrast with the tendencies of the lower nature, that whilst the latter are self-contained and self-sufficing, thought is the silent prophecy of an ideal which makes satisfaction with the present or the actual (or rather with the present or the actual into which no deeper signification has been infused) forever impossible. Appetite and desire have no ideal. . . . But that which makes man a spiritual being makes him also a restless being. Reason is the secret of a divine discontent." — Philosophy of RelKjion, pp. 2G7-2G8. INTRODUCTION 23 inspiration of ethics. It enlarges the conception of life, and it enhances the moral motive of life. This earth seems a small space, and this life but a mo- ment of time for such beings as we, with our powers of thinking and willing, our capacity for achievement, and our consciousness of love. The moral view of life is cir- cumscribed and broken off at every point, if this world be the whole sphere of our possible activity, and this life the end of all our quest for the supreme good. Men may walk indeed circumspectly on this solid earth, although they may have been born blind, and no stars shine for them from afar. And, as already admitted, we might find firm footing on the moral permanence of things, even though we had no spiritual vision or hope of worlds un- realized as yet. But religion opens larger prospects to duty. If ethics are regarded as the earthly science of life, then religion is the moral astronomy of it. While bent on the tasks of the former, we need the outlook and the uplift of the latter. The religious consciousness encircles and completes the moral consciousness of man around the whole horizon of his life, bending over every field of duty, as the heavens encompass and comprehend the earth. Not to have any outlook of religious thought and far prospect of a boundless hope as we pursue our daily tasks, were like living on an earth without a sky. One may do his daily work with little thought indeed of the overarching heaven ; but the sky is always there, — the far, pure back- ground for all man's life on the earth, — and some enlarging and quieting sense of it will pervade our daily conscious- ness of toil and labor under the sun. Duty is not a task given man to be laboriously done at the bottom of a dark mine ; rather it is a life to be healthfully and joyously led under the broad sky in the clear sunshine of God. In obeying duty, because it is dut}^ we may say in Schleier- macher's spirit, " The religious feelings are to be as a holy music which shall accompany all the action of man ; he should do all with religion, not from religion." ^ Though J See Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, vol. ii. s. 186. 24 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the immediate motive be duty, religion may be its bappy accompaniment always. It is obvious, moreover, that any enlargement of one's view of life will prove also to be an expansion and exhila- Tation of the moral motive of his conduct. Since relig- ion lends large horizon to duty, it is evident that it must also quicken and enhance the moral vitality of human nature. It will become necessary for us to inquire with some particularity in a subsequent chapter what are the moral forces in the life of humanity and its development; and whether a sufficient moral dynamics can be found in- dependently of all religious power. At this point, how- ever, of our introduction to our study it is enough to notice that the pre-eminent claim of religion, and of the Christian religion above all others, is that it is the moral power of God in history. Christianity is nothing if it be not the power of the Holy Ghost in the life of man. It claims to be the sufficient motive-power to energize and renew the heart ; and, through the resistless processes of divine grace, to bring to final issue in some perfect good the humanity which is now devitalized, broken, and de- spoiled of its ideal virtue by the lawless working of sin and the fearful triumph of death. Religion is thus related to ethics as hope is to perform- ance ; as faith in the future and its promise is to present failure and incompleteness. Granting, as we have done, that there may be a certain independence of human moral- ity from all religious sanctions, nevertheless it may fairly be asked whether if severe scientific truth should compel us to blot out the whole religious ideality and aspiration of ethics, humanity would then long care to preserve even those pure moral fragments of its life which would be left ; whether from the near interest and the immediate pros- pect the motive for noble achievement and for deathless love could be drawn with anything approaching that power and unconquerableness of spirit which have been wit- nessed in the faith of the martyrs, the zeal of reformers, and the joy of the saints, who have endured as seeing Him who is invisible, and who have looked for a better, that is, INTRODUCTION 25 a heavenly country. Certainly thus far in history the tri- umphal chapters of human progress have been written in faith. Without some moral faith which rises to the height and breathes the spirit of religious devotion, we have little reason to expect such future triumphal arches to be raised as we find consecrated to faith in that grand eleventh chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews, and to behold the evils and the sins of the world led in captivity beneath them. Natural moral science, pure and simple, untouched by religion and un tinged by a single ray of hope from beyond, has indeed its necessary work to do, its sober economic commission to fulfil. As it is called to weigh social utilities, to judge what is truly beneficial to the social whole, what hurts or invigorates the social tissue, it has a needed and valuable work to accomplish; it is its task to bring to practical tests and verification the moral maxims, the jurisprudence, the public sense of justice and right of whole communities of men. Religion will accept with gratefulness this aid of the economists, and no senti- ment of charity or piety should be suffered to interfere with this needed service of the most severely scientific ethics. But when all this is done, and well done, then the enlargement which the religious view of life only can afford, and the prospect which the spiritual mind alone can behold, are needed for a complete and inspiring ethical conception of life. Only from out the eternal can the temporal be largely and truly seen. The eye must be on a level with the sky to take in the whole earth and its dependence on the sun. One must rise above this world, must pass into the eternal life through faith, in order to judge this life as a whole. Only in the power and the peace of religion is the perfect vision to be gained. Ethics is finished in the religious comprehension of duty.^ The words in which Aristotle described the contemplative happiness in which he found the noblest life might be quoted as a protest from antiquity against all modern attempts to divorce ethics and religion : " But such a life 1 "Ethics must either perfect themselves in religion, or disintegrate them- selves into Hedonism." — Martineau, Religion, vol. i. p. 24. 26 CHRISTIAN ETHICS would be something higher than the merely human; for one would live thus, not so far forth as he is man, but as there is in him something divine." ^ VI. RELATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ECONOMICS There is an increasing tendency among economists to recognize ethical considerations in the action of economic forces. The reactions of the ethical motives on economic conditions are too frequent and too influential to be ignored in any induction of the laws of material welfare which shall be true to real life. It may be convenient, however, and scientifically necessary, in the determination of eco- nomic laws to keep the ethical elements, as far as possible, separate from strictly economic factors. And on the side of ethics great care should be taken not to miss economic truth. The student of Christian ethics should be a patient scholar also in the school of economic science. We must understand the material conditions and laws of human wel- fare if we are to become teachers of a social philoso]Dhy which shall not prove wanting amid the pressures of men's increasing needs. All sound economic science will yield its truth to be conserved in the Christian ideal of social well-being. Christian ethics comes to the laws of econom- ics, not to destroy, but to fulfil. The importance of this recognition of the service to be sought from economics by Christian ethics will appear more fully when we shall treat of Christian social ethics. VII. PHILOSOPHICAL POSTULATES OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS We proceed next to summarize more definitely the pos- tulates which we derive from philosophical ethics. These postulates, which are the proper subjects of treatises of moral philosophy, and which are vindicated in the discns- sion of Christian theism, enter as assumptions from Avhich we start in the study of Christian ethics. The grounds, 1 Nic. Ethics, x. 7. 10. INTRODUCTION 27 however, on which such assumptions rest, may be briefly indicated in the statement and definition of them ; they will be subjected, as already remarked, to further ethical verification, as in the course of our determination of the problems of practical morals we shall find that they show themselves fitted to the necessities of men's lives. Ethics will repeatedly bring all its assumptions to this vital test. There can be no severer verification of truth than such moral test of it in the crucible of human experience. I. We assume that human nature is constituted for moral life. Human nature has its existence in an ethical sphere and for moral ends of being. We assume that there is a natu- ral capacity or basis for ethical being and life which in the ascent of nature has been reached at length and is occu- pied by the human race. Nature we regard as constituted for the attainment, at some point of its development, of ethical consciousness and volition ; nature from the begin- ning exists to be ethicized and spiritualized. Matter exists ultimately for spirit, and spirit for the Holy Spirit.^ If it be objected that this is an assumption of final causes in nature, we answer that it is assuming no more teleology than is involved in any fair and adequate statement of the facts which are already realized in nature. For as matter of fact nature has reached the willing mind and the self- conscious will. This is the human end already attained ; to say that the end was involved in nature from the begin- ning is only to say that nature throughout has been true ; that the beginning does not belie the end of nature in humanity. Nature's first courses were laid sufficiently broad for its highest attainments. How far this intention, or truth of nature to itself from beginning to end, has 1 Rothe ■v^■itll profound insight urges that the question with materialism is not whether man brings a pure spirit into the world with him or not ; whether man, so soon as he sees the light of the world, is a purely sensuous or a sensu- ous spiritual being; but the sole question is whether a being that is a merely- sensuous animal from the beginning, of the peculiar constitution of man, in the process of the development of his animal life could remain a merely sen- suous (rei7isinnJiches) being, with the thoroughly peculiar psychical functions which this process sets in play? " We deny this," he says, " with absolute con- fidence, and this denial is our spiritualism." — Theolog. Ethik. vol. i. s. 459. 28 CHKISTIAN ETHICS been a conscious intention ; and whether that conscious- ness of the end from the beginning resides within nature, or in one Mind which thinks, and one Will that holds nature to its truth and aim, — this is another question ; this is a further inference which theism may draw from the observed order of the world; at present we are simply assuming as a fundamental postulate from philosophical ethics that nature was constituted for moral ends, and in man has become capable of moral life. No theory of man's physical beginning and the lowly origin of the human species can interfere with or take away the grounds of this assumption; for here and now, how- ever it was brought to pass, we stand on a moral plane of existence, and man is capable of a life which shapes itself according to ideal ends of being. Darwinism only offers '^ a larger teleology," — another tentative theory of the age-long way through which the creation has ascended to the moral order; but it does not contradict its actual rational and moral attainment. And the goal that has been gained in our present powers and capacities, is not to be involved in any mystery which may still be left, after all our science, enveloping the way in which we have come to our moral manhood. II. Christian Ethics assumes the sense of obligation, or the authority of conscience. The psychological inquiry concerning the nature and authority of conscience is itself modern as distinguished from classical ethics. Dr. Martineau has said, and broadly speaking the statement is true, that psychological ethics is peculiar to Christendom. In Christianity human nature, rather than nature, became the sole object of interest and investigation. The world existed for man's sake. The heavens were made to minister to man. The human soul v/as the one great object of the divine government. Hence landscape painting formed only the background of early and mediaeval Cliristian art. Naturally under this con- ception of the supreme importance of the human soul Chris- tian philosophy and ethics became earnestly subjective and penetratingly introspective in their methods and aims. INTRODUCTION 29 Modern psycliology may almost be said to be the necessary consequence of the ages of Christian faith, however inde- pendent of its parentage it may have become. In ancient Greek philosophy, on the contrary, man ex- isted as an integral part of nature, and Greek ethics was predominantly the study of man's life as a part of the order of nature in which he lived. Morality (as Dr. Martineau has remarked i) was to be determined " from the considera- tion of man as a natural object placed and constituted in a certain Avay." The Greek ethics was not a subjective af- fair of the moral sentiments; a man's virtue relates to the world around him, and is to be determined by a study of the conditions of liis life, especially as these are given in his state or city. Notwithstanding the idealism of Plato, and the fundamental Socratic precept, know thyself, the Greek ethics and philosophy, it has been rightly observed, " pre- serve a predominantly objective tone." But the Christian ethics, which superseded the classic, was characterized by a fondness for introspection. Earnest effort was made to lay bare the moral secret of the soul. Within the circle of Christian thought the emphasis has been laid on the law which is written in the heart, and on the inner light. The moral intuition has been followed, and conscience obeyed as the voice of God speaking within the soul. Con- science, as Principal Shairp defined it, ''is the absolute in man." 2 Since the recent predominance, however, of scientific methods and pursuits, this psychological habit of Christian ethics has been modified, and moral philosophy has been restored to the list of the natural sciences. Scientific ethics, so-called, is a return to the ancient Greek vicAv of man as belonging to nature, while it applies to this studv new and vastly improved methods of investigation. The older utilitarianism which first began to dispute with intui- tionalism on psychological ground, has more recentlv en- trenched itself in evolutionary theories of nature. Rejecting any present or immediate utterances of the soul concerning 1 TvpoH of FJhicnl Tliporv. vol. i. p. fi.3. 2 Principal iShairp and his Friends, p. 94. 30 CHRISTIAN ETHICS itself as necessarily final, and recognizing no ultimate source of knowledge in psychology (for that may be itself derivative), our modern scientific ethics has sought to trace the natural history of conscience from its nebulous i)eginnings to its present distinct luminousness, — to write a natural history of conscience from its crude prehistoric germs up to its fullest and fairest growth and blossoming in the sensitive honor and generous devotion of the noblest souls. The legitimacy of this endeavor, and its tentative suc- cess within its own lines, need not be denied in the in- terest of intuitional morals. It is true that man is an object of nature, and as such has a natural history. His moral and spiritual powers, whatever be their ultimate nature or further secret of being, have their antecedents and their environment in nature and the processes of nature. The Greek ethics did not occupy a false position, although it did not gain the highest point of view, when it studied man as an object of natural history. Nor should any light which physiology or other natural sciences may throw into the intricate and intimate processes of conscience be re- garded with suspicion, as though the more we may know of man's relationship to nature, the less sure we may be of his spiritual solitariness and supremacy. On the contrary, to discover more clearly how anything has grown, may enable us to estimate more truly its worth and to distinguish it more confidently from all other things. Without entering into a minute statement of the various ingenious and plausible attempts which have been made to write the natural his- tory of conscience, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice that they all involve this common postulate, that con- science is a compound social sentiment or judgment. It is the growth and unification of many earlier and simpler elements and conditions. 80 Mr. Stephen, improving? somewhat on Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, discovers that the distinction drawn between the social and the self-reijarding qualities cannot possibly be ultimate ; ^ and he defines morality as "a statement of the conditions of social welfare."^ He 1 The Science of Ethics, p. 9G. 2 jjjid. p. 217. INTRODUCTION 31 reaches at last this singularly simple definition of so complex a phenome- non as conscience : " The moral law being, in brief, conformity to the conditions of social welfare, conscience is the name of the intrinsic motives to such conformity." i "The conscience is the utterance of the public spirit of the race, ordering us to obey the primary conditions of its welfare." - The chief factor by which this individual-social con- science is developed, turns out to be the old and familiar friend of the utilitarians, in their efforts to conceal the apparent difference between self-love and sacrifice, — the power, namely, of sympathy. Sympathy is the tentacle by means of which the individual feels his relations to the social tissue ; and conscience is his fully developed sense of well-being in the social organism. Or, as Mr. Stephen puts it : ^ " The sympathetic being, that is, becomes in virtue of his sympathies, a constituent part of a larger organiza- tion " ; — as a reflecting body, to follow his further illus- tration, derives its color not only from its own structure, but also from surrounding bodies. Thus conscience in the individual is to be regarded as the reflection of the social sense of good, which his sympathetic nature, like a sensitive plate, enables him to receive. The individual conscience is reflection of the social sense of well-being.* This attempted social derivation of conscience contains an important truth for our ethics. Any purely individual- istic determination of conscience is in danger of stopping with a half-truth, and perverting by its incompleteness, the practical moral standards of life. There is no little truth in the terse saying of Mr. Green : " No individual can make a conscience for himself. He always needs a society to make it for him." ^ Neither morally nor spirit- ually, any more than physically, is the individual an atom, nor can the obligation of the individual soul be measured in any atomistic conception of it. "■ Only through society," as Mr. Green explains, " is personality actualized." ^ We 1 The Science of Ethics, p. 349. 2 /j^v?. p. 351. 3 jj^id p. 257. 4 To act reasonably, a social being must take that course of conduct " which gives the greatest chance of happiness to that organizatiou of which he forms a constituent part." Ibid. p. 258. 5 Prolegomena, p. 351. 6 ijyid p. 200. 32 CHRISTIAN ETHICS shall have occasion to observe further on, how the social conception of man's being and duty enters into the idea of the highest good. If we sum np the contributions which we may receive from these various endeavors of recent writers to trace the natural history of conscience, they may be stated as fol- lows : (1) A clearer recognition of the fact that man morally and spiritually is a growth, and not the result simply of some stroke of creative power. (2) In man's growth all his being has been involved, and each part and power of his nature has been developed in relation to all other parts and powers of his nature. (3) The highest and most distinctively human issues and powers of this devel- opment of man have their antecedents and conditions in less human and more animal capacities and processes. (4) Man's moral consciousness has some continuity with all man's preceding life and growth. (5) Man's moral life takes up and transforms previous nou-moral elements and experiences. (6) The moral development of the indi- vidual cannot be held separate from the moral develop- ment of the race ; there is a moral solidarity of the race ; the individual conscience is conditioned by the social con- science. (7) With more or less distinctness and precision the history of this growth into moral consciousness from its germinal emergence out of the pre-existing soil of the non-moral may be conceived and traced ; or what we have called a natural histor}^ of the rise of conscience may be written with sufficient plausibility to give it value. (8) Any further determination of the nature of conscience from psychological analysis must now be conducted under the light which may be thrown upon the formation of con- science from this natural history of it. In view of these researclies and results older theories of intuitionalism undoubtedly require modification. And it is possible that the result of such investigations into the naturfll genesis and the natural laws of conscience may prove in the end, not that conscience is any the less dis- tinctive and supreme, but that nature from the beginning may have been more pervaded with tendencies towards INTrwODUCTION 33 the moral than we had supposed. Increasing knowledge of the natural laws and growth of conscience may yield as a last word a better moral teleology of nature. For we may discover how from the beginning the creation was constituted for the evolution of moral being, and ordained for the reign of moral ideas. We may now return to the method of psychology and inquire what are the deliverances of the moral con- sciousness, as we now possess it, concerning itself; and further what validity these immediate utterances of our moral nature maintain in comparison with the natural history of the growth of conscience at which we have just glanced. It is as important to bring physiology to the bar of psychology as it is interesting to bring psychology to the investigation of physiology. The one method of examination is as necessary and as valid as the other. The fruit is a commentary on the tree, as well as the tree an account of the fruit. If on the one hand posi- tivists would subject conscience to their evolutionary theories of its origin and growth, it is equally necessary on the other hand to re-examine such theories in wdiat- ever light conscience, when it is finally kindled and afire with truth and God, may throw back down the age-long processes of its preparation. The testimony of moral psychology — the results of analysis of man's actual moral consciousness — may be briefly summarized (so far as is necessary for our intro- ductory purpose) in the following particuhirs. 1. We find existent in known moral experience two factors, the one of which is the moral constant, tlie other a moral variable, or succession of variables. The meaning which one man expresses, and the next man understands, in the use of the word ought, represents a moral constant of human experience. So far as we are able to follow through its manifold changes, or to trace back to its earliest human conditions, the ethical experi- ence of our race, we find this moral element persistent and continuous in it. Whatever we may imagine pre- 34 CHRISTIAN ETHICS historic conditions of man's life to have been, or whatever science may conjecture were the animal conditions ante- cedent to the origin of man, when once any moral con- sciousness has been gained, this element of obligation, this moral conviction for which language has distinct and separate words of obligation, appears and makes its presence felt and influential ; and this characteristic human sense of obligation is a continuous and persistent force, the moral constant of our human history. 2. Not only has man's history been the rise and discrim- ination of that which is moral from all non-moral elements and forces of nature, but also these non-moral factors have been moulded and fashioned in man's life by this distinctive moral energy of his being. In other words, the natural history of conscience has been itself deter- mined by conscience.^ We cannot find a place, a time, a movement, in the evolution of conscience, when some pre-existing conscience or moral tendency was not present, guiding the evolution, and determining the moral type. Man's moral being has been morally created or evolved. The moral at the end of the process proves the tendency towards, and capacity for, the moral all through the evolution, and at any remotest conceivable beginnings of it. Within the known limits of experience the moral constant, as we find it in our individual experience, has been the vitalizing and expanding energy of man's moral growth. The human conscience, in short, is itself morally formed from within, as well as naturally evoked from without. Conscience is in a sense a self-creation, having its life in itself. A previous non-existence of any moral element or vital- ity in nature must be supposed, if conscience is to be regarded simply as a composite of material forces; but such primitive non-existence of the moral constant is cer- tainly so prehistoric as to be matter only of scientific conjecture ; and if we hold our thought to the strict law of causality we shall find no place for it as a conceivable 1 Green remai'ks with truth that " the history which thus determines moral action has been a history of moral action." — Prolegomena, p. 110. INTRODUCTION 35 hypothesis. For since the moral in distinction from the non-moral is now clearly here, it must always have been, potentially or actually, somewhere and somehow. The question is not raised just now whether this pre- existence of the moral energy was in nature or without nature — an immanence of the moral in nature, or a moral transcendence of nature; or whether indeed it is not and has not always been both immanent and transcendent. The point now taken is that the natural evolution of morals, so far as we have any positive knowledge of it, or indeed are able rationally to construe it, has itself been morally determined. Analysis of our existing moral con- sciousness and investigation into the past moral life of man, so far back as we can follow it with any certainty, discloses these two factors of the development and power of conscience : a succession of moral variables — elements and influences more or less moralized; — and a moral con- stant assimilating and organizing the variable conditions of its life. We observe certain non-moral, or partly moral feelings, acts, influences under the formative power of the distinctively moral vitality of human nature. This moral constant may indeed reveal itself in different degrees of illumination and power ; — it may be as dim starlight at one hour of history, and bright as the noonday in another age; — but the moral in man is the inner reflection of " the Light w^hich lighteth every man, coming into the world." 1 The question concerning the origin of conscience resem- bles the inquiry which has been pursued concerning the origin of life on the earth. Even though spontaneous gen- eration be regarded as hypothetically possible, nature under the minutest scrutiny has no instance of it to show. Life, so far as we have any positive science of it, always presup- poses life. Throughout the known history of life there has been a vital constant unresolvable into anything other than itself, revealing itself in its distinctive oi-ganic energy, and putting forth ever fresh and increasing vitality, in the midst of the variables of species, and without break of 1 John i. 9. 36 CHRISTIAN ETHICS living continuity among the ceaseless transformations of forces. It has been the same with the vitality of the moral consciousness of man. We know not a solitary instance of the spontaneous generation of conscience. Other, non- moral materials may have been taken up into the organiza- tion and enrichment of the moral life of man ; but the rise and growth of conscience have always proceeded in the presence of some pre-existing moral vitality ; we have no positive science of the conversion of non-moral into moral being, except through the mediation of already existing moral power ; spontaneous generation, in short, is as pure a fiction in morals as it is in biology.^ 3. This moral constant may become itself an object of choice. It is the good in which the rational conscious- ness centres, on which the will may rest. The idea of good, or perception of worth, may be said to furnish in and from itself the desire which is satisfied in the moral choice of it. Psychologically it is not true that all objects of desire are pleasures, — that pleasure is the only thing desired or chosen. For an object or end of activity may be itself desired, and the pleasure accompanying the choice may be a sign or justification of the choice of it as reason- able, but not necessarily the object of the choice, — the thing immediately desired and willed.^ Outward things have many relations to our life, and in any of these relations may call forth the energies of our wills. An object may become an object of will in any relation in which it becomes an object of perception. And although it be maintained that all the manifold relations of objects to our being are accompanied in our perception of them with possible or actual sense of pleasure or pain, it does not follow that their pleasurableness or painfulness is the only aspect of them which may call forth our activity or fix our desire upon them. A perception of their fitness to our life, or their harmony with our ideas 1 For fuller discussion of this position, see Smyth, Religious Feeling, ch. iii. 2 Mr. Green has rightly insisted on this distinction between objects of desire, and the pleasures of desire, in his Prolegomena, pp. 165, 178. INTRODUCTION 37 of our ends in life, or their value as means for the accom- plishment of previous choices, — a perception of any one of various relations in which they may exist for us, — may be the immediate reason why they are desired, and the determining motive of our choice. Or they may be chosen directly and solely for the promise of some specific pleasure contained in them ; but these different reasons for choice, and these distinguishable states of mind in the act of will- o ing, cannot be identified or regarded as essentially the same. In other words, all relations of objects to our judg- ment and our choice cannot be expressed in terms merely of pleasure or pain. Moral satisfaction as itself an object of choice, is distinct from any other pleasure which may accompany the act of choice, or be regarded as a possible consequence of it. Moral approbation as an object of desire is an object suffi- cient unto itself. So far as it affords pleasure it yields a peculiar and distinctive kind of pleasure, not to be con- fused or confounded with any other pleasures.^ Hence it follows that the moral constant of human experience in- volves a perception of the good as in itself an end to be chosen, and as such of absolute worth. From the sense of obligation there is kindled in the intellect the clear idea of moral worth. 4. The moral constant, which yields the idea of worth, affords thereby the measure, or means of volitional com- parison (preference), between motives which otherwise would be incommensurable. Two things are involved in this proposition : first, that there are different kinds of motives which are not directly comparable ; and secondly, that through the moral constant, with its idea of worth, they may be brought to some common measure within the unity of personal consciousness. Utilitarian morals re- duces the moral motive itself to pleasure, — the greatest sum of pleasures, or the highest kind of pleasure ; it 1 Mr. Mill's admission of a difference in quality between pleasures is really a fatal admission for hedonism. — Utilitarianism, j)}-). lOsq. For by what stand- ard of value shall the qualities of pleasures be determined ? Hedonistic ethics logically requires the reduction of all pleasures to quantitative measure- ments. 38 CHRISTIAN ETHICS assumes that all pleasures can be summed up in one con- ception of pleasure, and that a direct measure of compari- son between all desirable objects exists in our conscious- ness of pleasure. But this is pure assumption. On the contrary, it would appear upon a close psychological analy- sis not only that moral pleasure is distinct in kind, and that conscience affords a unique satisfaction ; but also that there are several classes of pleasures which arrange them- selves, when directly brought into line with each other, as a series of incommensurables, having no common divisor, and admitting of no further reduction. Intellectual pleasures, for instance, are not a multiple of any physical satisfactions. No bodily sensation can be used as a com- mon divisor of the pleasures of the imagination or of intel- lectual acquisition. We cannot contain higher pleasures in multiplied terms of the lower, or compare directly the sweetness of a taste of sugar with the delight experienced in reading a poem. The one may become the sign for the other — words signifying bodily sensations have been transfigured into metaphors of the spirit ; all spiritual life has its sensible environment and analogies. But directly the two are not on the same plane ; the lines are parallel and near, but not identical. They can be brought into relation and com^Darison, not because they are points in the same line, but because they are parallel lines within the domain of the same thinking, willing consciousness ot being. The unity of the sensible and the supersensible, of the physical sensation and the moral pleasure, does not consist in any common matter which they share ; but it is given in the oneness of the personal life which proceeds on both these lines. The two are correlated in the per- sonal unity of our life. Utilitarianism in making all pleasures directly comparable as things of the same kind, assumes a spurious commensurability of objects which differ in our consciousness of them. Equally fallacious is it, and unsupported by close psy- chological analj^sis, to imagine a greatest sum of pleasures which may be chosen as the supreme good. For pleas- ures of different kinds can no more be added together in INTRODUCTION 39 one sum than the angles of a geometric figure and the chemical affinities of two elements can be added in one equation. Sunlight and earthiness may indeed be organ- ically united in the vegetation which shall be the flower and fruit of both ; so likewise bodily sensations and pleas- ures, and mental and moral light, may be organically unified in the rich personal being and life of man : but a sum of pleasures mathematically computed in an equation of the greatest possible happiness is as inconceivable as a sum of sunlight and dirt. The greatest sum of pleasures, which figures in utilitarian ethics, is a pure fiction of philosophic speech. Utilitarianism is a fictitious appli- cation of mathematics to psychology. It w^ould put to- gether arithmetically what nature relates and combines only through organic and vital processes. Plato said truly that God geometrizes ; but the Hebrew Scripture speaks also of the living God. Nature is mote than geometry; it is also life. And the processes of life are spiritual as well as arithmetical. As matter of fact, no human soul has ever succeeded in reducing its life of desire and choice to the series of equations of pleasures which utilitarian ethics invents. If it be true even of the different kinds of sensible pleasures that they cannot be added up in any common measure, still more evident is it that moral satisfactions are incommensurable in kind with all other pleasures. The delight which the hero finds in doing his duty nobly, even at the cost of life itself, is not comparable with any satisfaction of appetite. The peace of the saints in the love of God is not to be expressed in words of physical satiety .1 1 A similar effort to reduce the springs of human action to some system of quantitative measurement was made, from an opposite quarter, by Spi- noza: " I shall discuss human actions and appetites just as if it were a ques- tion of lines, planes, or solids." — Ethics, Part iii. Int. The only difficulty with the endeavor is that human conduct is not a matter of lines, planes, and solids; and, although there is an order of freedom, of which some philo- sophic account may be rendered, different qualities of motives cannot be directly measured on a quantitative scale. Some third term of comparison must be found, by which to determine the variant worths of motives in the scale of preferability. Moral statistics may afford rough averages of prob- abilities of conduct, but occultations of virtue cannot be calculated like eclipses of astronomical bodies ; there is no exact science of freedom. 40 CHRISTIAN ETHICS If, however, all these several kinds of pleasures, includ- ing moral delights, are not directly comparable, how, it will be asked, are we to understand the fact that many preferences of actual life bring two or more of these in- commensurables into comparison, and a choice is made between them ? The martyr chooses moral satisfactions in preference to physical comfort. The student prefers the pleasures of prolonged study, with a moderate income, to the pursuit of wealth and luxury. So far as a choice may be made between pleasures of the same class or kind, — between pleasures, for instance, which may have a common measure in similar bodily sen- sations, or between pleasures which have some common mental term, — the problem presents less difficulty. But our preferences play also constantly between different kinds as well as degrees of pleasure ; and character is expressed in the predominant choice of one kind of pleas- ure over a different kind. What, then, is the missing relation? What the third term through wdiich they are brought into relation and comparison ? The answer has already been indicated. It needs to be amplified only that it may not be overlooked. The com- mon term of relation between objects of desire or choice, which are in themselves incommensurable, is the worth of these different things to the person and his ends of being. They enter into comparison as different elements of one life, and in their relative worth as means to the ends of that life. As they possess or manifest in experience dis- tinctive worths for the growth and completion of the per- sonal soul and its life, these things which are as different as a bodily sensation or a mental activity, as a state of slumber or a spirit in prayer, may be compared by the reason ; and according to their value under different cir- cumstances for the ends of being they may become objects of rational preference to the will. In short, motives different in kind are morally comparable. The moral con- stant in man's consciousness of ethical good is the common measure of motives. They may be ranged according to their degrees of preferability on a scale of worths. INTRODUCTION 41 This idea of worth may indeed itself be conceived in different ways ; but in some way it must be used as a common measure, or relating term, for pleasures which otherwise could not be brought into any preferential order; it cannot be itself reduced to, and identified with, any one of those pleasures. It expresses some relation of motives to ends. Some idea of relation to the end of being forms the ethical measuring-rod. One pleasure is worth more to me than another, and therefore I should choose it. Why ? Not because it contains more pleasure, but because it is pleasure of a greater value to me. Not because its degree of pleasure is greater, but because its kind of pleasure is higher. But why is it higher? This I can only ansAver by showing some common measure, which I find in man's consciousness of the worths of things to him, by which different kinds of pleasures may be com- pared. In other words, I can find a human commensu- rability of motives in some idea of worth, which idea may be described in various phrases, but which I cannot in my consciousness of it resolve into anything other or simpler than itself. Lotze holds that the idea of worth implies always some relation ; that it is a relative term (Pract. Phil. s. 7). It is true, as we have been arguing, that the idea of worth expresses the relation of an object to an end of being ; an object has worth in relation to that end ; different objects may be compared by means of their relative worths to the end of a life : the moral absolute is the supreme end, or idea of the highest good. It by no means follows, however, that the idea of worth in this moral relation of objects to ends can be identified with the feeling of pleasure. It is true that I cannot dissociate the idea of the worth of an object to me from my feeling of pleasure in it ; its worth to me affects my feeling, and is signified by my sense of pleasure ; but the pleasurable feeling, which expresses the worth of an object to my life, by no means exhausts, it is not identical with, my recognition of the worth of that object to me. On the contrary, the object as worthy is cause of the pleasure by which its worth is felt and recognized. The quality of the object (its worth to me) is manifested by its effect in pleasurable feeling. Absolute worth would be the cause of a feeling of absolute pleasure in the subject affected by it. To regard pleasure as identical with moral good is to mistake the sign for the thing signified. There is a special kind of pleasure (sense of moral approbation, feeling of moral satis- faction), which accompanies and signifies the attainment of moral good ; different degrees of this pleasure may mark different degrees of excel- 42 CHRISTIAN ETHICS lence in acts or objects which are of moral worth to us. The full attain- ment of the morally good would be blessedness. So Lotze reasons that while the worths of different things cannot be conceived independently of our relation to them, still the pleasure we find in them is at the same time "a recognition of the objective beauty, excellence, or goodness of that which occasions our pleasure." In other words, while the quality of worthiness or unworthiness in anything exists for our feelings, it exists independently of our feelings. 5. The idea of worth, (which w^e find to be a distinctive characteristic of rational consciousness, and Avhich is the means of volitional preference, between things that differ in their relations to the ends of personal life,) serves still fur- ther to characterize and to define what we have called the moral constant in distinction from the moral variables of human history. The idea of worth is a simple and ultimate idea — a moral constant of experience ; but the judgment of the relative worths of things to the ends of life, is complex and changeable — a moral variable of history. Morality has involved not only a changeable perception and judg- ment of what may be the values of different objects to man, but also a sense of obligation to determine his life in accordance with their worths. We ought to graduate our preferences on a scale of moral worths. Conscience, or the moral constant in man, is thus seen to admit of variable contents under its permanent obligation. The materials for conscience may change, may become enriched and clarified, while the obligation of conscience remains unchangeable. This is only saying that conscience is a constant of a life which is capable of development, of a nature which admits of expansion. 6. The endeavor to explain away the moral factor of life in the supposed interest of scientific unity, fails of its philosophic intention; for it loses the unifying idea of moral worth and breaks up human life into a series of incommensurables. In the effort to escape the apparent dualism between body and mind, the flesh and the spirit, any non-moral account of the rise of man's moral being falls back into an atomistic conception of human nature, and renders the life of man and tlie course of history but INTKODUCTION 43 a heap of accidental and unrelated properties and events. We might not inaptly apply the adjective polytheistic to the psychology of hedonistic ethics ; for its problem is how to reduce to any intelligible mental and moral unity its world of many gods, its innumerable pleasures and desires, and manifold fortuitous associations of widely differing objects of human regard. Much modern phi- losophy, in its eagerness to escape dualism, misses the real unity of the spirit and its life, and falls unawares into polygenesis in its theory of the origin of the soul, and into polytheistic ethics in its association, without any supreme principle of moral worth, of many pleasures and indis- criminate sums of things to be desired. The effort to escape this moral polytheism by reference to some order of nature, or general solidarity of human interest, resembles the escape of religion from the worship of many gods to the dominion of one fate ; there ensues a dissolution of all per- sonal motives into some vast impersonality of good. The clear recognition, on the other hand, of the moral constant as an integral and eternal element of personality, escapes this reversion to atomism in philosophy, and remains true to the human consciousness of the moral value of our being and its ideal ends. Whether more may not be learned from conscience con- cerning its origin and the signs which it brings with it of man's destiny, will appear further as in the course of our discussions we shall have occasion to hold the natural conscience up to the light of the most developed ethical consciousness of Christianity. But the assumption, which we have been justifying, of the existence and authority of the moral in man, is one of the postulates of Christian ethics. VIII. THEOLOGICAL POSTULATES OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS The ethical beliefs and standards of Christian men, as has already been observed, are intimately associated with their conceptions of Christian doctrine. The doctrines^ however, which we need to bring as postulates to Chris- 44 CHRISTIAN ETHICS tian ethics are simple, few, and comprehensive. Having already indicated the general relation of ethics and theol- ogy, we need do little but summarize at this point certain theological postulates which will appear in the subsequent course of our inquiries. I. We assume from apologetic theology the positions of Christian theism. II. We assume the process of a divine self-revelation in man, through nature, and in the course of history, culmi- nating in Christ. This postulate Avill be more specifically defined subsequently. III. We assume an ethical idea of God. This postulate is of such consequence that it should not be passed over without some further preliminar}^ reflec- tion. Dorner regards the ethical idea of God as the start- ing-point of Christian ethics.^ One result of the study of theology from the moral side will be the gain of a more advanced and adequate ethical conception of God. We need not, however, assume at the outset the complete ethi- cal conception of God which we may hope to win through the study of Christian ethics ; but we must begin with an idea of God's nature sufficiently ethical to enable us to go on our way unhindered by our theology. And we must refuse at any point to carry over from dogmatics a con- ception of God or his government which is unmoral, or which might debar us from further progress in our ethical pursuit of Christian truth. We assume in general at the outset of any Christian ethics that the divine nature is moral, and that the moral is in essence the same in God and man. We exclude as unmoral any conception of God which exalts his will above his goodness, which finds the ultimate ground of right in might, and renders moral distinctions dependent on an omnipotent arbitrariness. We should find no justi- fication for writing another page of ethics, if we started with the assertion of Duns Scotus that right and wrong are created by the free will of God. Ethics on that supposition might be a science of what is right now, but it could not 1 System der Christ. Eth. s. 48. INTRODUCTION 45 be a search for eternal righteousness. We assume that love is lord in the divine will, not that the will of God is sovereign over his love. God's omnipotence, as Dorner would say, exists for his love. The moral constant which we have discovered in human nature, we believe to be also a moral constant of the universe because it is the essential nature of God. If it were not independent of all will, it would not be independent of our will. If it were not God's eternal nature, it could not be our absolute human obligation. Moreover, it should here be observed that we shall not trouble our Christian morals with any dogmatic ideas of the divine government or decrees which are not ethically conceived and ethically luminous. Any dogma Avhich theology sends to ethics must present preliminary credentials of its good moral standing in order to be received and welcomed. The sole sovereignty to be allowed in this field is moral sovereignty. IX. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS FOR THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS These introductory remarks will serve also to suggest some of the difficulties to be met in an endeavor to com- prehend the moral consciousness and life of Christianity. In one sense this can never be adequately accomplished in any system of Christian ethics. New books are periodi- cally needed in this department, because the Christian consciousness is always a growth in grace and knowledge. The last book on Christian ethics will not be written before the judgment day. For the ethical life and moral judg- ments of each generation will continue to furnish material and light, but not rest or pause, to the Christian spirit of the succeeding age. Tlie facts of human life change ; social conditions become more complex ; and problem succeeds problem in the ethical perfecting of the race. Christian ethics therefore should be a growing knowl- edge and prophetic understanding of the increasing life of Christ in the world. Even more than dogmatics is ethics called to be a progressive science of the Christian life until 46 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the end. The moral constant of history — conscience and its great conviction of authority — is itself capable of intensification and illumination in the experience of men ; the light in man, being always the same celestial Light, may yet shine clearer unto the perfect day — the " beam in darkness " may grow ; and with the increasing years the moral variables also multiply and combine in ever new and more heterogeneous transformations. Until the Ideal be- comes real, until the kingdom of heaven fully comes, Chris- tian ethics wdll be called time and again to take up anew -its high prophetic task of the moral understanding and interpretation of life. This power to bring life to true moral interpretation is something more than a scientific attainment. Moral insight was always a prophetic gift. Nor can any one age, nor any single mind, however gifted or inspired, hope to discern, or to bring to full expression, the whole moral significance of human histor}^ All moral as Avell as religious prophesyings are in part. So long as the supreme good remains realized only in part, it cannot be known in full. Each age opens a larger prospect, and each prophetic spirit in the chosen succession of God's interpreters stands on higher vantage ground. Isaiah in his visions beholds a land of promise fairer and more ideal than Moses saw from Pisgah's height ; the Baptist prepares the way for a diviner coming of the Messiah than Isaiah and the prophets had dreamed ; and the least in the king- dom of heaven is greater than he. " For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy " ; ^ and in that testi- mony all the Christian ages are to have their part and word. The true teachers of Christian ethics are the noblest and happiest lives from every generation. All the saints in their apprehension of the love of God which passeth knowledge, are its witnesses and prophets. Its Spirit has the gift of many tongues. The languages of all peoples who shall learn to walk in the light of its truth, shall contribute to its final richness and fulness. And any humblest Christian character may bring some power or grace of it to new and fairer revelation. We are to 1 Rev. xix. 10. INTRODUCTION 47 find the wealth of the materials for our study in the whole inheritance of the lives of the disciples from the days of the apostles of old to the last endeavor of Christian man or woman to follow Christ and to make the world more Christian. This prophetic character and these interpretative re- quirements of our science of the Christian life, indicate also certain conditions and qualifications which are neces- sary for the pursuit of this study. Every science requires of its students special gifts and training, besides the general endowment of intellect which is needed for the mastery of nature by mind. Similarly the study of Christian ethics makes its special demands upon its stu- dents. It may justly ask for some personal sensitiveness to ethical conditions, and quickness to respond to moral truths. To understand Christian ethics one should be able to put himself into some mental sympathy with Christian ideas and harmony with the Christian con- duct of life. For an adequate knowledge of Chris- tian ethics there is needed a moral nature that shall lie largely open and be quickly responsive to the influence of Jesus and the enthusiasm of the Christian ideals. Ethical truth in general is truth addressed not to the intellect alone, but to the whole personality. While Christian truth may be required to justify itself to the reason, and no real faith can be irrational, it should not be forgotten that its ethical teachings appeal to the whole life and the undivided and integral personality. Chris- tianity teaches that every man is a son of the Father in heaven, and that through his sonship, and by a life worthy of that original human sonship from God, he is to know the Father. Something then of this human sense of son- ship, something of this luill to know the Father by doing the will of God, is necessary for our understanding of truth and particularly of the highest ethical truth. God's truth speaks indeed to the reason, but while speaking it faces our whole manhood; the Christian revelation is revelation of duty and of God to our life in its length and breadth, and for our whole consciousness of personal being and worth. PAET riEST. TEE CHRISTIAN IDEAL CHAPTER I THE REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL The moralist is the man with an ideal. He cannot appear among men as a moral teacher unless he brings some idea of good which he would stamp on human life. The moral lawgiver is always the man who has had some pattern shown him on the holy mount. The moral enters and lingers in our consciousness in some vision of the ideal. We perceive some better thing to be thought or done ; and while, like Peter, we are thinking on the vision, the task in which the vision may find fulfilment and interpre- tation, will come and await us at the door.^ Descriptive ethics may be a narration simply of those customs and traits which have already gained moral exist- ence on the earth ; but normative ethics will bring to life at every point some idea of what shall be. This ideality of ethics is to be recognized whatever may be our theories of the nature of the morally good. For however it may be conceived, it is a good to be made real, an ideal to be realized in human life and society. The first and last business, therefore, of ethics is with its ideals. The ideal is man's moral capital ; and it is to be put at interest in life. The ideal is alike the starting-point and the goal of ethics. In any moral system worthy of the name, some thought of good to be attained is started up, and is to be pursued until it is hunted down. Though the study of ethics is to be conducted as an inductive inquiry, and the contents of the moral ideal are to be scientifically deter- mined, nevertheless morality presupposes some idea of the 1 Acts X. 17. 49 50 CHRISTIAN ETHICS good, and the whole course of ethical induction will be directed towards the determination and definition of the good which is to be willed by men and realized in society. Without initial bankruptcy of ethics and poverty of spirit in the end, moralists cannot sign over to metaphysics the first question of human concern, What is the supreme good, the summum honum ? What is the best for which a man is born and should live? What is the largest and richest good which all his days here a man should seek to gain? What, in short, is your ideal of life ? What pattern do you bring from your mount of vision according to which human life with its many threads should be woven ? ^ Life without an ideal is unmoral. It has no ethical worth, as brute existence has no moral value in itself. Days without ideals — visionless days — are dull days. Men are mere plodders on the earth who seek no moral ends beyond the present. Some conception of supreme good — comprehensive of life as a celestial horizon — per- manent and pure as the heavens above the earth — befit- ting the soul as its atmosphere of light — sufiicient as an eternal prospect for its life, — is the moral necessity of man's being. He may exist, he does not live, who has no moral ideal. We are distinguished from the animal creation beneath us, with which in so many relations we are closely bound, by this moral power of forming ideals. Take from us our human ideals and you rob us of the sign and assurance of our being's worth and immortality. All lower nature exists but as the servant of the Omnipotent, because it has as yet no conscious participation in the ends of God in the creation ; but the children of God are no longer servants ; they are called friends, because the Son knoweth what the Father doeth. The Son of man, who was the Son of God, knew the Father, and was known of him ; he was the 1 So Aristotle began his ethics by accepting the definition of the good as "that which all things aim at"; and he remarked with practical wisdom, " Has not, then, the knowledge of this end a great influence on the conduct of life? And like archers, shall we not be more likely to attain that which is right, if we have a mark? " — iVic. Ethics, \. 2. 2. REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 51 Christ who saw and followed the divine idea, the eternal ideal of man. This ideality of morality, therefore, however historical or inductive may be our methods of determining its con- tents, we would put in the first place and keep dominant throughout the entire course of Christian ethics. Hence the first part of this treatise will be concerned with the Christian Ideal. What is the best object, according to Christianity, for which a man can live? What is the Christian conception of the highest good? In order that we may find the right answer to this pri- mary inquiry of Christian ethics, we shall need first to observe carefully the manner in which the Christian Ideal is given, — the historical processes through which it has been revealed ; and then, secondly, its contents, so far as they are known, may be determined. We shall consider, there- fore, the nature of the revelation of the Christian Ideal ; we shall then proceed to more explicit description of its contents. And beyond that will lie still further inquiries concerning the methods of the increasing realization of the Christian Ideal on earth. We begin, accordingly, with the determinative fact that the Christian Ideal has been given historically. It has not been won by a mere process of abstraction, or through some philosophic distillation of real life into moral senti- ments. The Ideal has not been ideally, but historically, communicated and taught. The Christian conception of life was no new s]Deculation of the philosophers, no dream of the wise man, no prophetic imagination even of the glory of the Highest. The Christian Ideal was given to men in an historical embodiment of its glory.^ The Chris- tian Ideal in its first revelation to men was not that which they had thought, or imagined, or reasoned, it was that which they had seen and heard : " That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also," say the eye- witnesses of the Christ.^ Hence the Christian Ideal, 1 " At the summit of the Christian development of thought stands no the- ory, but a personality creative in the moral realm." — Jodl, Geschichte d. Ethik, Bd. i. s. 50. 2 i John i. 3. 52 CHRISTIAN ETHICS while capable of expansion in the light of the Spirit, is in its core historical. We start in Christian ethics not to walk on the clouds ; we find firm footing in the historical realization of the divine idea of man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This historical form of the revelation of the Christian Ideal involves these particulars, which we proceed to dis- criminate : I. The Ideal is given to men in the Person of Christ, who Avas the real example of it, and the influence of whose Spirit is a creative power of it in the lives of other men. II. This Ideal, which Avas given in a personal realization of it, is presented or mediated to us through the Christian life and testimony which the Master's coming and the Divine Spirit have called forth and inspired, and which witness to it and declare it. III. This Ideal has also been partially realized, and applied to life in many directions, during the course of the Christian history which has proceeded from its influence. And it is still further to be realized and interpreted in the progress of Christian life and thought. As the chief of the apostles, though he had known Christ after the flesh, could say, " Yet now we know him so no more " ; ^ so Christianity, which has known the moral ideal in the historical Christ, knows it also henceforth, and with increasing manifestation of its grace and truth, after the Spirit. It is to be spiritually dis- cerned and followed. The present and continual law of the apprehension of the Christian Ideal is through moral oneness with the spirit of it: " But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." ^ I. THE IDEAL AS GIVEN IN THE HISTORIC CHRIST For our ethical purpose we need not become embarrassed in the critical questions which may be raised concerning the New Testament writings. For the immediate percep- tion of the moral ideal, which shines in Christ, it is not 1 2 Cor. V. 16. 2 Rom. viii. 9. KEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 53 indispensable for us to know whether interpolations, or some unhistorical traditions, may not have passed into, and become blended with, the apostolical testimony to the Christ which the Church has received. What concerns us ethically is the character which shines directly from the gospels. We discover a clear and radiant reflection of a wonderful moral personality in the gospels. ^ The believer may argue that the reflection of the Christ in the New Testament requires faith in the historic Jesus as its cause ; that the idea of a Person so transcendent could only have proceeded from actual vision of its divine Original ; — as the image of the sun in a pure lake is proof of the presence of the sun in the sky. Moreover, from our ethical apprehension of Jesus we may proceed to deduce certain conclusions concerning his person, or metaphysical being, which we must suppose as the natural basis or ground of a character so ethically unique and perfect. This Son of man, Ave may conclude, must have been, as no other, the Son of God; — but although our present line of moral inquiry will run very close to these more theological interpretations of the life of the Christ, we need not con- fuse the two, and we may pursue our ethical course Avithout being compelled to tarry with many critical questions, or to define theologically at every point our moral appre- hension of the ideal whicli has been given to us, clothed in flesh, and full of grace and truth, in Jesus Christ. We start from the fact that the Christian Ideal has its source and its realized example in the Jesus of the gospel history. This statement, however, involves two truths which need more closely to be considered: we recognize in Jesus both an original, and an originative, moral power. 1 The remark of Strauss that " the Jesus of history, of science, is simply a problem, but a problem cannot be an object of faith, an example of life " {I)er alte unci der neue Glaube, s. 79), is not ethically true, is not true to the historical ethical idea of Jesus, and his influence in Christian experience. Whatever historical difficulties, or critical questions, may exist, the ethical example of Jesus as an object of faith was clearly and positively given in the apostolic witness to him, and it is a known and distinct Light in the Christian consciousness, to which the world is ever returning. 54 CHRISTIAN ETHICS The moral ideal which we discover in Jesus was original in him, and it has been creative of a new morality in his name. Light, itself from God, and not derived from man, dwelt in him : " There was the true (original) light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world." ^ And this original light has been creative of a new life and a new moral world. The latter of these two assertions will not be seriously disputed. Christianity presents a changed conception, a new type, of virtue. It is not of the same variety as the Aristotelian or the Platonic idea of virtue. The Christian character, when it was first seen among men, appeared as a new thing, as a distinct moral type. The first Christians were known as those belonging to "the way."^ That way was unlike any other way of life which men had pursued. Whatever may be the relations of the Christian type of character to the past, or however one may seek to explain the historic conditions of its appearance, the distinctness, definiteness, uniqueness of the Christian type, must be conceded.^ It is, however, another question how far this confessedly new type of virtue — this new world of Christianity — requires as its sufficient cause the advent of a new moral personality, or the descent into humanity of a new moral Life and morally renewing Power. Although the full answer to this inquiry belongs to dogmatic theology, we cannot entirely pass it by in our endeavor to reach the ethical ideal of Christianity. We proceed, therefore, next to consider this larger question, concerning the originality of the Christian Ideal, so far as we conceive it necessary to do so from the moral point of view, and. for the sake of ethical firmness and clearness in our subsequent determination of the Christian conception of the highest good. In what sense was Jesus' morality original ? Obviously 1 John i. 9. 2 Acts ix. 2. 3 It is so reco.2:nized in the New Testament; it is spoken of as a new birth ; the Christian is the new man, the man wlio has been crncified, and who is dead to the world, who also is risen with Christ. John iii. 3; Eph. iv. 24; Col. iii. 10; Gal. ii. 20; vi. 14; Col. iii. 1^. KEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 55 it did not spring up without any vital connection with the ethical-religious soil which the history of Israel had pre- pared for it. Nor in the moral literature of the ethnic religions is it difficult to find single threads which may be matched with ethical precepts of the gospels. Jesus as a moral teacher cannot be regarded as original in any sense which would take the truth of his teaching out of the moral conservation and continuity of history. It is the historic Christ to whom we look as the fulfilment of man's moral ideal. When we listen to many of the purer and higher notes of humanit}^, and then hear the immediate voice of Jesus, we do not hear One speaking as in a new tongue altogether strange and unintelligible words ; rather it seems as though in all the best who were before Him we had been listening to echoes of some divine teaching, and at last we hear in His words of eternal life the one divine voice which is the original and the fulness of all the echoes of it in the centuries. While the moral originality of Jesus' teaching cannot be regarded as a break in the ethical continuity of his- tory, the uniqueness of his whole moral influence is not explained, the ethical life of his gospel is by no means accounted for, by anything that had gone before it. The ethics of Jesus witness to some new access of light ; the Lord's moral teaching has in it the living power of an immediate revelation of truth. The evidences of this kind of moral originality, the evidences of a new moral revela- tion in the mind of Jesus, lie on the surface of our gospels. The proof of Jesus' moral uniqueness is to be found along two historic lines of investigation : first, the moral creative power which has gone forth from it leads back to it as its sufficient cause ; secondly, the person of Jesus, as it is mirrored in the gospels, is self-revelation of his ethical uniqueness, or super-humanness. The Jesus of these gospels was the revelation of the divine to himself. He found in his own immediate self-con- sciousness light from above. The Christ does not seem to find his way in reflected light, but to walk with sure, sunny self-consciousness in the immediate light of a Divine pres- 56 CHPwISTIAN ETHICS ence. He sees, he knows, he speaks, he acts, not with hesita- tion, not after much reasoning, not in grave doubts, but surely, instantl}^ with absolute clearness of vision, as One w^ho is of the day and who knows tho Father. There is a moral immediateness in the whole teaching of Jesus, to which some approximations may be found in the momen- tary inspirations of the prophets and seers, but which in its constancy and steady clearness of revealing power is with- out human precedent, and original as a personal revela- tion from God. We may follow and watch the Jesus of the gospels as he walked among men in the light of his own clear spirit, as he dwelt in the absolute certainties of his direct perceptions of God's truth, while the question- ings of Pharisees and Sadducees, of friends and foes, flung their shadows across his path, and gathered life's sinful perplexities to confuse his wisdom. This daily life of Jesus will become to us the evidence of its own indwelling Light; we can hardly help perceiving, what John saw clearly, that '' the life was the light of men." The nearer we approach through critical and historical studies to the real Jesus of history, and the more closely we succeed in bringing those moral teachers who have resembled him in any respects into broad and full comparison with the his- toric Christ, the more we shall find ourselves compelled to agree with those officers who had been sent to bring Jesus, and who had let him go untouched: "Never man spake like this man." ^ The transcendent originality of Jesus stands out from the whole background of history still more strikingly when we look up from the broadening radiance of the Christian ages to the Christ from whom the new illumina- tion of the world has proceeded. If we trace backwards the courses of beneficence, reformation, subjection of peo- ples to moral order, conversion of empires, and renewals of decrepit civilization through modern liistory, we come to him who was born King, and over whose cross was wiitten in every language the name of King. For our present purpose it u sufficient to maintain that 1 John vii. 4G. EEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 57 Christian ethics owes its authority to a unique historical Cause, and finds the incarnation of its ideal in the person of the Lord Christ. There is given for Christian ethics to contemplate no mere speculation concerning virtue, no dream of the highest good ; it follows the teaching of the personal Life which has been the revelation of the ideal humanness, and which is the continuous inspiration of the virtue that seeks for perfectness like the perfec- tion of the Father in heaven. Christian ethics will be consequently the unfolding and application to human life in all its spheres and relations of the divinely human Ideal which has been historically given in Christ.^ Canon Westcott makes a valid distinction between a historical ' ' ten- dency towards," and a " tendency to produce, the central truth of Christi- anity " (^Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 59), The figure of a tangential force might be employed to illustrate the relation of the life of Jesus to history. It enters into history and becomes coincident with certain historic tendencies ; yet it enters at its own angle, and from without the circle of existing human forces. The angle of inci- dence of Jesus' life on humanity is plainly distinguishable. It may be measured in terms of his teachings, such as the verilies of his gospels, and by his mighty acts, as well as in the whole tenor of his personal influence, and his self-consciousness of his peculiar relation to the Father. The entire Messianic and redemptive consciousness and influence of Jesus indicates that his life entered into ours from above. The doctrine of the Person of Christ, which the Church has worked out in its creed, is a rational endeavor to understand this personal uniqueness and moral originality of Jesus. But to follow the moral into the theological doc- trine of the nature of the Christ would be for us to go beyond our present bounds. It belongs to dogmatics to show^ how far the moral originality of Jesus requires for its sufficient cause a metaphysical uniqueness of Jesus, — his divine Sonship. We may note in passing that there is nothing unscientific, or contrary to any rational idea of the continuity of nature, in the idea of new moral and spiritual force touching nature and becoming an influence in history, although it is received at some point in the course of evolution as a tan- gential impact. The continuity is not thereby broken, although acceler- ated or altered motion may result. Rather the continuity of nature, when 1 For a fuller and more theological discussion of the divine originality of Jesus, see the author's Old Faiths in Neio Light, eh, v. For an instruc- tive comparison between Jesus and contemporary Judaism, see Delitzsch, Jesus and Hillel. For a profoundly exhaustive discussion of the relations between Philo and the New Testament doctrine of the incarnate Word, Dorner's Doctrine of the Person of Christ should be studied, especially by those who catch at superficial resemblances to the Christian teaching in the Alexandrian wisdom and miss the deeper dififerences. 58 CHRISTIAN ETHICS its course is deflected, requires for its own preservation this supposition of its reaction under new impact from the larger universe around it. Tlie supernatural, or cosmical, divine power may manifest its entrance by temporary disturbances at its points of impact ; then it becomes natural, or connatural, and works on in the unity of all the forces of life. So motion may be conceived of as force communicated to matter ; so the access of life to matter ready for its impact may be regarded as the new impulse which becomes another law and produces a higher order of nature. So the life of the Christ coming from above, and signalized at first as a supernatural advent, works on and becomes naturalized in the spiritual forces of humanity. Since Christ the kingdom of God is within man. Mr. Wallace, in the concluding chapter of his volume on Darwinism, shows at length that new causes do not break the continuity of nature (pp. 463 sq.). The ethical Ideal, which was immediately given in Jesus Christ, is mediated to the successive generations of men through the continuous and increasing life which is called forth and controlled by it. This ethical Christian experi- ence, and its continuity, is realized in a twofold process : it has been conserved and transmitted through Christian testimony and tradition, in the historic continuity of the Church; and it is also vitally reproduced in the life of each Christian man. We pass next, therefore, to the con- sideration of both these forms in which the Christian Ideal is continued and developed, — its external mediation, and its ever new spiritual reproduction in personal experience. II. THE HISTORIC MEDIATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL The Christian conception of good is brought to us both in the Christian consciousness, which is the continuous and ever living work of the Spirit of Christ, and also in those written Scriptures which are received as an authori- tative expression of the mind that was in Christ since they proceeded from an immediate experience of him under special promises of his Spirit. Before we can proceed to the specific determination of the Christian virtues and duties, we must come to some clear understanding concerning the authority to which appeal may rightly and finally be made for our whole Chris- tian conception of life. The general statement just given REVELATIOX OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 59 concerning the historic mediation to us of the Christian Ideal requires us to enter more particularly into the rela- tion of the Scriptures to the Christian consciousness. It will Be noticed, however, that in our form of statement, we have put the Scriptures in the line and order of the whole historic working of Christ in the spiritual conscious- ness and life of humanity ; for only in that order is their authority to be maintained and defined. The Scriptures themselves are products of spiritual experience : the Old Testament the product of the expe- rience of an anticipatory Messianic revelation ; the New Testament the product or deposit of a distinctive expe- rience of the Christ. Only as the Scriptures are products of the Spirit in human experience can they become norms or intelligible rules for human life. It can hardly be insisted too urgently that the inspiration of the sacred Scri|)ture is itself put in peril, if it be held separate from the whole work of God's Spirit in humanity, if it is not comprehended as an element and factor in the whole spiritual experience which men have gained of God and the Christ. The doctrine of the Spirit in the Bible is a special part of the still larger doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the life of the world. The question concerning the inspiration of the Scriptures is an important, yet subor- dinate part of the whole question concerning the working of the Divine Spirit in human history, and particularly within the Christian consciousness of the Church. If the word Church be taken largely as inclusive of the common and historic consciousness of Christian humanity (and not narrowly as identical with any external form or ecclesias- tical order), the remark may be repeated without hesitancy : " It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more diffi- cult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church." 1 This question concerning the authority of the Scriptures (so far as for the purposes of Christian ethics we are called to determine it) is this : How far are certain Scrip- tures which issued from immediate apostolic experience ^ Lux Mitndi, p. 338. See below, p. 74. 60 CHRISTIAN ETHICS of Christ, and wliicli were the first-fruits of his Spirit, to be regarded as an authoritative rule for subsequent Chris- tian character and conduct ? AVe proceed, accordingly, to inquire how historically -the Christian ideal has been brought to us through certain sacred Scriptures ; and, secondly, how such communication of the Christian Ideal through the Bible stands related to the present and future mediation of it through the same Spirit in the Christian consciousness of men. § 1. THE MEDIATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL THROUGH THE SCRIPTURES 1. The Moral Ideal in the Old Testament. The Old Testament marks the period of its imperfect, yet real and growing vitality and power. The morality of the Old Testament was incomplete, in many respects defective, and neither in its outward sanctions nor its inward motives a final morality for man ; yet it was real morality, striving towards better things, growing from a genuine ethical root into the light and fruitfulness of the coming season of divine grace. The method of the mo- rality of the Old Testament is educational and progressive ; its whole character is preparatory and prophetic.^ We should not fail to recognize, however, among its prepara- tory imperfections the good fruit which remains in the prophetic literature ; w,e shall have occasion further on to note the political ethics of which the prophets of old might be our present-day teachers. If the ethics of the Old Dispensation had not passed into the fulfilment of the New, the Hebrew prophets and poets would still be the world's most inspiring teachers of high ethical hopes and ideals, and the moral code of Israel would be the school of righteousness, reverence, and law, to which the generations should go for the loftiest instruction.^ 1 The right conception of the grachiahiess and progressive methods of both moral and religious revelation in the Bible is no modern idea, although it has sometimes been lost sight of in post-reformation theories of the Scriptures. See Lnx Mitndi for interesting citations from the Church fathers on tliis point, p. 329. 2 See the author's Morality of the Old Testament for fuller discussion of this subject (pp. 127 sq.). KEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 61 2. The Christian Ideal in the Xew Testament. These writings — the New Testament Scriptures — be- come ethically normative by virtue of their direct reflection of the mind of Christ, and their special receptivity of his Spirit. The immediate light from Christ in these writings makes them the primary authorities for his Church. The ultimate reason for their selection from current Christian literature or tradition was a most legitimate because a very natural reason : these writings were seen to be the nearest and clearest reflections of Christ which the Church pos- sessed. They came closer to Him, and had more immedi- ately His authority than all other early Christian litera- ture. The spiritual supremacy of the writings which con- stitute the New Testament canon, was the result of the uniqueness of the position in which their writers, or the cir- cle of believers in which they originated, stood to the Lord Jesus Christ. Eye-witnesses testified of Him. Com- panions of the first disciples and chosen apostles received their testimony. These sacred writings are the first-fruits of the Spirit of the risen Lord. They contain the inter- pretations of the life and the teaching of Jesus which were current in the apostolic circle of witnesses to him, among the men who had been chosen, trained, and fitted to wit- ness to the truth as it Avas in Jesus, and to whom he had given the promise of such illumination and power of his Spirit as they should need to fulfil the work which he had committed to them, and to preach his gospel to the whole world. The normative authority of their writings (includ- ing such as may have proceeded from them through others connected with them) arises from the immediate relation of these chosen witnesses to the Christ, and fi'om the consequent Christian quality which the Church recog- nizes as residing peculiarly in their writings. It is impos- sible that any other writings can be sacred in the same sense as are these immediate testimonies to Jesus. But their au- thority is theirs only as it was Christ's, and as his authority is directly reproduced in theirs. Their authority springs 62 CHRISTIAN ETHICS from their special and unequalled relation to the source of all Christian truth. The source of infallibility of a Scrip- ture in the last analysis can be only Christ, and the Spirit of tlie Christ ; the degree and power of the authority of any inspired Scripture depends upon the closeness and certainty of its relation to the teaching and the Spirit of Jesus. A Scripture becomes of doubtful canonicity the more the immediate Christian source and quality of it, either by critical studies or difficulties in its contents, is ithrown into doubt or obscurity. This is only saying that there cannot be two normative authorities in religion or in morals, two rules of faith and practice ; one the Christian rule, and the other a Scriptural rule ; one the personal authority of Christ, and the other the authority of his witnesses ; one the reign of the Chris- tian Ideal as exemplified in the Person of Christ, and the other the letter of tlie Scriptures which declare that Ideal. There is but one final authority, but one regulative power of faith and practice, — Christ himself, and the Spirit of Christ. It does not detract, therefore, from the proper authority of the New Testament as the immediate reflection and specially prepared and attested witness to Christ, when we discern in it, as we have already discovered in the Old Testament, signs of a growth in knowledge of Christ, and a progressive Christianization of thought and life by the Spirit of Christ. Such signs are naturally not so marked, such progress of doctrine not so pronounced in the New Testament, as in the Old; for a higher stage of revelation has been reached ; the whole conception of life has been lifted up in Christ, and the thought of the Christian dis- ciples moves off at once on a radiant height. Some signs, however, of progress in doctrine, and some indications of advancement especially in the application of Christian ideas to the practical problems of life, may be discerned even within the writings of the New Testament. We may trace in the book of Acts and the Epistles signs of growth in knowledge of Christ, and also of an increasing clearness and firmness in measuring the various practical relations of human life by the new law of the Spirit. KEVELATIOX OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 63 This progress in moral as well as religious knowledge of the Christ will become obvious if we compare the chief personages who became successively, in the providential order of the New Testament history, the teachers and leaders of the primitive Church. And this general advance in appreciation and application to life of the truths of Christ, which may thus be discovered in the visions and the tasks given to the successive apostolic leaders of the Church, can be traced also if we compare carefully the earlier and later writings of the same apostles. Thus the fourth gospel and the epistles of St. John are distinctly less Judaic in their language and thought, are more simply human and universally Christian in their tone and teach- ing than the Apocalypse which possibly may have been written by the same apostle in his earlier Jewish Christian years. Similarly, St. Paul's later epistles show that he has reached calmer heights, breathes a clearer and more lumi- nous air, and beholds larger prospects of redemption, than when he began to preach to the Gentiles. He knows the Spirit of Christ more profoundly, he comprehends more fully the world-wide and even cosmical significance of the gospel, as his experience broadens, and his mission- ary life brings him into new relations with all men, and his apostolic course nears its assured and triumphant end. These sacred writings, it is evident from what has just been said, are to be taken as a whole and in the moral and spiritual teaching which issues finally from them, in order that they may constitute a normative authority of faith and practice. The Christian Ideal, which was embodied in Jesus Christ, is presented to us, not by Paul alone "or by John, nor by either of these writers in any single epoch of his growing apprehension of Christian truth, but by the concurrent and full and final witness of all the prophets and apostles. The Bible as a whole, and in its final ethical- religious development of truth, is to be regarded by Prot- estantism as the authoritative outward rule of faith and practice. 64 CHRISTIAN ETHICS When we have recognized this process of moral develop- ment in the teaching of the Scriptures down to the very end of the New Testament canon, the question forces itself upon our attention, Has this development of Christian truth stopped at that point? Or is there any further unfolding of the moral ideal which these sacred writings have authoritatively reflected ? Admitting that the growth of distinctively Christian ethics began with the apostolic teaching, Avhy should we regard the process as closed with their moral precepts ? Is there not some further principle, complementary of the authority of these Scriptures, which we are to recognize in the progressive impartation and realization on earth of the Christian ideal ? It becomes necessary for us, therefore, before we can proceed further, to define the relation of Scripture and faith. Want of insight and of clearness at this point may involve our whole system of ethical judgments in confu- sion. There is peril of falling on the one side into a bondage to the letter which would prevent a free and broad application of Christianity to life ; and on the other hand there is danger of plunging into a hasty indepen- dence of outward authority and Scriptural guidance, in which the individual would soon become lost from the common heritage of faith and wander into lonely helpless- ness and confusion. § 2. THE MEDIATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL THROUGH THE CONTINUOUS SPIRITUAL LIFE AND PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN CON- SCIOUSNESS OF MEN 1. There is a principle of spiritual continuity in Chris- tianity. The power of Christ has entered as a force which remains in human life, and which is continuously produc- tive of its natural effects in human history. The spiritual continuity of the life and influence of Jesus in the Chris- tian world-age is an observed and persistent fact of Chris- tianity. We must admit the existence and constant operation in our world of an organizing and vitalizing REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 65 Christian principle, whatever may be our conception of its nature or its laws. An evidence ever before the eyes of men of this spiritual continuity of power in Christianity, has been, and still is, the organic life and consciousness of the Church. In successive forms, through all controversy and change, essentially the same though always renewed, the Church has been "the Spirit-bearing body of Christ." And the Christian consciousness, which finds expression and which persists indestructibly in the creed and worship of the Church, is the one continuous consciousness of the new humanity which was created in Christ Jesus, and which through many variations, repeated transformations, and ever new adaptations to its environment, preserves its typical Christian character, and witnesses through all the ages to that one and the self-same Spirit by which it has been quickened and in whose power it has its life. There has been no more striking fact since the world began, and none more divinely significant, than is this historic fact of the unity and continuity of the Christian type of manhood in the Spirit of the Lord. Moreover, this historic fact of continuous and ever new Christianity is found to correspond with and to fulfil the promise of the Christ to his disciples. His gospel ended with the assurance of the Holy Spirit. His last word was a pledge of his perpetual spiritual presence and power on earth. There can be no doubt that it was Jesus' thought and intention that his life should be continued in spiritual grace and energy in the lives of his disciples, and his presence be always potential in the communion of his Church. The Christ expected to be influential and author- itative in this world, and with increasing power and do- minion until he shall come again. He has been spiritually present, inspiring, organizing, reforming human lives and institutions, and making all things new. So far the promise of the Lord and the truth of history seem to match, forming one increasing pattern of divinity, and revealing one purpose in the continuous and unfolding order of Christianity. 66 CHRISTIAN ETHICS 2. The Christian consciousness is not only a continuous, but also a progressive appropriation of the Christian Ideal. In one age some appreciation and appropriation of the true idea of Christian life and society has been gained, and then there has followed a new idealization of the good which had been realized. The ideal becomes real among men only to ascend and to appear in some higher spiritual manifestation. It is as though Christian history were itself a repeated manifestation and ascension of the Son of man ; — the ideal which has been realized in some historic good is still further exalted and glorified in Chris- tian thought and devotion. The progress of faith is a manifestation, an ascension, and a coming again, ever repeated, of the Christian ideal among the disciples. The general law of Christian progress may be stated as a realization of existing Christian ideas, and then their further Christianization after the Spirit of the Lord. To maintain, as we do, that there is possible progress in the ethics of Christianity carries with it, also, the implica- tion that Christian theology is not to be regarded as a closed science. Without traversing the whole field into which the discussion of progress in theology might lead, it is necessary for our ethical purpose to determine in what directions progress beyond the Scriptures may be admitted in Christian thought as well as in the applica- tion of Christian truth to life. For the latter cannot be admitted without assuming the possibility of some progress in the knowledge of truth for life, or some progress, also, in theology. Hence we proceed to indicate the nature and direction of such progress, so far as is necessary in order that we may reach the premises which our further ethical discussion will require concerning the relation of the Scriptures to our progressive Christian moral con- sciousness. There can be no progress of the Christian consciousness away from the fundamental facts or vital truths of Chris- tianity. Progress in doctrine and in ethics proceeds from the initial facts and truths of Christ's life and teaching, but it will not break its continuity with them. This is EEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 67 only saying that the progress throughout will be typically and essentially Christian. Advance in any knowledge may take place in two direc- tions ; it may be either extensive or intensive ; it may consist in a larger comprehension of facts, or in a clearer insight into their nature. Within the limits of the canon of Scriptures progress in both these kinds is admitted. But it is assumed by many that, since the Scriptural canon was closed, progress in theology has been permitted to the Church only in the latter kind. The only progress, it is held, which can be admitted in consistency with the integ- rity of a completed revelation is progress in its inter- pretation. It is at least conceivable that God may have given a positive revelation of some truths, and left other truths to be brought out in the processes of Christian life after the close of the more immediate or supernatural revelation of his will. The only relevant question is, not whether in consistency with the supposed integrity of canonical Scripture such continued divine education of man can be pursued, but whether it has been pursued. Have we made progress in both kinds, by means of the increase of the Christian materials of knowledge, and through clearer Christian insight, since the New Testament days ? When the question is reduced to this decisive issue, there would seem to be but one answer to be given to it. Progress in theology has been made in two ways. (1) New materials have been added to the science of Christian theology since the days of the apostles. For instance, with regard to the kingdom of God in the world, history has furnished us with new and enlarged materials of knowledge of which apostles were profoundly ignorant. The nineteenth century has many important facts to com- prehend in its doctrine of the kingdom of God and the laws of its extension, facts beyond any possible knowledge of the first missionary apostle. And even though there had been granted to St. Paul farther and more prophetic discernment of the reaches of Christian history than his uncertain and sometimes wavering thoughts concerning 68 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the second coming of the Lord would indicate that he had obtained, still even a high degree of prophetic vision con- cerning the future cannot be equal to the knowledge of definite and actual experience: a thousand years of the Lord in dim prophetic foreshadowings of them are not of so great worth to Christian science as are those years when comprehended in certain and solid history. These new facts of Christian history constitute a positive contribution to the revelation of God's purpose concerning his kingdom. Over all the prophets and apostles we have an advantage in our study of the mystery of redemption, — as an observer who has determined by new observations the dis- tance between the earth and the sun or some near star, has a decided advantage over the astronomy which before him had only a conjectural base line for its heavenly computa- tions. By this truer base line which Christian history has determined, Ave are enabled to measure with larger compre- hension the work of Christ, and to understand better its universal relations. Christian history is itself an ever increasing fact of divine revelation. It is a fact of divine teaching added to the Bible. It is new teaching, although continuous with the old. Moreover, from the mastery of the laws of God which our sciences are gaining, new data are brought within the circle of Christian light both to receive Christian interpretation and to lend themselves, also, to further interpretations of Christianity. New knowledge of God's thought is thus added to his Word, and the Bible is put in a larger setting of truth. New facts, however made known, are revelations of God in his universe. They are to be harmonized with all preceding revelations. They shed their light back upon that special divine revelation which was finished in the Christ. He Himself is the Light in which we are to discover the highest and final relations of all laws and sciences ; but, on the other hand, our increasing knowledge of the universe, of the natural processes of the ascent of the creation to life and consciousness, of the growing spiritualization of matter up to the mind of man, and of the prophetic significance of the whole order of the crea- REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 69 tion beyond man's present imperfect attainment of spiritual being, — all the new facts, the larger groupings, the pro- founcler sacredness and spiritualness, which we are finding out in nature, shed light back upon the wdiole Christian order of the creation, — the eternal purpose of God in Christ Jesus.^ We hold, therefore, that Christian theology, although proceeding from a special revelation, which is final and authoritative within its own limits, is nevertheless to be regarded as a progressive science because God was not through with man when the last of the apostles died, but God in history has been add- ing new facts and disclosing further processes of his Spirit for our Christian education. To suppose that theology is a closed system of truth, incapable of further expansion, ignores the, two following considerations : First, God has reserved some of his thoughts of grace to become better known as men shall become intelligent and Christian enough to perceive them. To believe that cer- tain essential truths have been supernaturally disclosed, does not prevent us from hoping that we may learn still more of God through further natural processes of Chris- tain life or universal history. Secondly, God has left important and interpretative truths of his kingdom to be discovered, and to be brought to the knowledge which is given in the Bible, through the scientific acquisitions which may be gained from time to time. By such additions of new facts of history, and from such contributions of fresh materials of knowledge to Christian theology, progress is to be expected until the end of this world-age. Indeed, the last day of the world will itself be a still further revela- tion, a new and a final addition of history to the volume of the Word, and to the science of Christian theology. (2) The other open way of progress in theology lies through the better appropriation and interpretation of the contents of revelation, which are given in the Scriptures. It is needless, however, to argue that this subjective way of improving our theology is ever open to us ; the possi- bility of it is generally admitted. 1 Eph. iii. 11. 70 CHRISTIAN ETHICS It has been necessary for us to devote this much of our space to a vindication of the chiims of Christian theology to a position among the progressive sciences, because Christian ethics in its intimate relation with theology will share in any gain or advancement of theology, and Chris- tian ethics must claim to be also a progressive science of morals. Indeed, historically, Christian theology and ethics have advanced on parallel lines ; and, when a step forward is taken by the one, the other cannot lag long behind. Any freshening of men's Christian ideas of God will be attended by a quickened sense of their Christian obligations. And more ethical conceptions of religion react powerfully upon theological systems.^ We have reached at this point these two results: (1) There is a continuous energy of the Christian Ideal in history. We may trace the positive continuity between the Christian Ideal which was first given through the Christ, and its present light and influence in Christianity. Having once entered into human life in Jesus Christ, it has been always with us, and is a present and living force of the Spirit of Christ in the world. (2) There has been also a progressive development of the Christian Ideal in the Christian life and consciousness. It has not been a stationary, or a dead, but a living and growing ideal of Christianity. The Christ is more and means more, for the world to-day than he has ever before been known by his own to be for mankind. These two characteristics of continuity and progressive- ness belong to Christianity both in its theology and in its ethics, both in its apprehension of God, and in its understanding of duty. The dispensation of the Spirit alike in faith and practice is a dispensation of life, and growth, and movement towards some perfect truth and good. We are now prepared to resume the question con- cerning the relation of the authority of the Scriptures to 1 The epistle to Philemon might be cited as an instructive example of religious-ethical proo;ress. The new conception of the relation of man and God in Christ — the theological truth underlying the epistle — passes at once into an ethical application to the relation of the slave and the master. The new theology of Paul was the beginning of the abolition of slavery. REVELATION OF THE CHKISTIAN IDEAL 71 our Christian consciousness, which needs to be cleared up in our ethics in order that we may find, if possible, some certain moral guidance. § 3. THE RELATION OF SCRIPTURE AND FAITH What is the relation between the continuous and pro- gressive Christian consciousness and the inspired Scrip- tures ? What are we to regard as the sufficient rule of faith and practice ? Obviously, as already observed, we cannot admit two independent rules, two final authorities. AVe cannot hold that both the Bible and the Christian consciousness are courts of final appeal. Yet we have granted that each has truth and authority. To Avhich shall we go when pressed to choose a final ethical authority ? It is an easy answer to reply at once, and with ecclesias- tical confidence, the Scriptures alone are normative, the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. But this answer, like most easy solutions of profound spiritual problems, needs to be followed but a little way before it will be seen to plunge into difficulties, and to lose itself in hopeless confusions. For (not to raise the point that the Bible has not shown itself to be a clear, decisive infalli- bility with regard to many doctrines or duties concerning which its most submissive readers have not been able to come to an understanding) these questions are left unan- swered in this ready-made solution, — To what is the authority of the Bible addressed ? From whence does it receive its credentials ? Is its authority to be regarded as unlimited over conscience ? Would a clear text of Scrip- ture be enough to make right wrong? Would a plain grammatical rendering of some accredited word of an apostle warrant us in thinking evil of God ? In what respects, if any, must conscience reserve to itself a final and supreme authority? Moreover, what is the relation of the Holy Ghost out of the Bible to the Holy Ghost within the Bible? Is it a relation of dependence, or of independent efficiency ? of entire subordination, or of free 72 CHBISTIAN ETHICS co-workinof? What is the relation of the work of the Spirit in the Church, through which the canon of Scrip- ture was determined, to the influence of the Spirit by which the Scripture was inspired? ' 1. We shall take a step out of many perplexities of belief, if Ave are willing to start from a clear recognition of the principle of divine revelation that the Sj)irit woiks in divers ways and manners. The same Spirit may work in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and in leading the mind of the Church into the truth. These two, therefore, the Christian Scrip- tures and the Christian consciousness of man, are not to be held apart, or regarded as though they were inde- pendent forces and factors of faith, one of which must be lowered in order that the other may be exalted. If we isolate the Scripture in its authority from the whole work of the Holy Spirit in history, we shall only succeed in exalting it to a perilous supremac}^ We cannot take God's special word out of its general relation to our humanity without destroying its power. Whatever special or unique authority Scripture may have, it cannot have it apart from the Church to which the Holy Ghost has been given. The Scripture cannot maintain its authority in independence of the whole work of the Spirit of Christ; it cannot keep it as a living law except in vital relations to the Christian mind of an age, and all the conditions of man's growth in grace and knoAvledge. No doctrine of sacred Scripture can hope to maintain itself under the tests of critical studies und in the light of Christian ethics, if it fails to recognize this correlation of the work of the Spirit in the Bible with the work of the Spirit in the life and growing consciousness of the Christian Church. 2. We reject, therefore, as onesided, and perilous alike to faith in the Scriptures and to the Christian law of con- duct, any view of inspiration which either puts the Bible in absolute supremacy above conscience, or, on the other hand, subordinates entirely the Scriptures to the Christian consciousness of men. The true relation between faith and the Bible is not REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 73 to be found in a hasty answer, which subjects either one without qualification to the other. Rather we hold that the two are harmoniously related, and that we are to endeavor to understand the just province and au- thority of each, and the unity in which the same Spirit works through both. If it has been the active error of Romanism to exalt the infallibility of the Spirit in the voice of the Church above the infallibility of the same Spirit in the written word, it has seemed to be the passive error of Protestantism, since the Reformation, to forget too much the interdependence of the written Scripture and the living witness of the Spirit in the mind of the whole Church. Yet the two testimonies of the Spirit are complementary, and the authority of the one requires the witness of the other. If we separate these two factors of the spiritual life of man, we can have no sufficient rule, and consequently no infallibility. Further- more, neither of these two is of itself source of authority, but only means for the impartation and reception of supreme truth. There is but one original source of authority; it is the Truth itself, — the truth which came by Christ. There is only one final and supreme authority in Christianity, either for its theology or for its ethics, — that is the Christ, the mind of Christ, the Spirit of Christ. The Holy Ghost is the final authority ; the teaching of the Holy Spirit is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. 3. Hence the question of authority in religion, when reduced to its Christian simplicity, is resolved into this inquiry, — How is the one teaching of the Holy Spirit imparted ? How is the teaching of the Spirit of Christ to be discerned in its doctrinal and moral infallibility ? The answer to this inquiry we may find, not when we separate Scripture and faith, but when we hold them in close correspondence and reaction. The Scripture is law to the Christian consciousness, — to it, not independently of it. The Christian conscious- ness, ^ all the knowledge and experience, that is, which Christianity has gained of its Christ, — becomes also in its turn law to the Scriptures ; — law of their interpretation, 74 CHRISTIAN ETHICS of their criticism, of their verification, of the selection and completion of their canon. The Scripture is the outward, fixed, formal norm or authority to faith ; faith is the veri- fication, the Christian criticism and interpretation of the Scripture. The Scripture finds both reasons for, and limi- tations of, its authority in the knowledge and experience which man has of Christ, and the Spirit of Christ. A Scripture which should plainly and palpably deny the Christ in the best, most developed, and purest understand- ing of him, would thereby be judged to be unworthy of a place in a canonical Bible. The early Church would not have admitted into the canon any writing, though it had claimed to bear the signature of an apostle, if it had been found to contain an evident contradiction of the whole conception of the Christ which the Church had gained from all its Scriptures, and through the continuous witness of the Spirit in the life of believers from the beginning. In other words, a Scripture must be Christian in order to be accepted as canonical. The two answer each to the other, the word and the Spirit, the Christ and the faith of his Church. Faith is as essential to the searching and testing of Scripture, as the Scripture is necessary to the guidance and support of faith. 4. In this view of the relation of faith and Scripture, we are not setting a human authority over against a divine, or subjecting an inspired word to an uninspired judgment. Rather, we are setting things spiritual in their mutual relations. Tliis view approaches more nearly the original Protes- tant conception of the Bible, as Martin Luther appre- hended the word of God through his great spiritual experience of justification. Post-reformation doctrines of the inerrant inspiration and unconditioned authoiity of the Scriptures have not only led the Church into manifold critical perplexities, but they have departed from the instinctive and wholesome apprehension of the word of God which characterized the original Protestant faith in the Bible. Faith in its ever fresh and living oneness with Christ is the material principle of the reformation, wliile REVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAX IDEAL 7t) the Scripture is the formal principle of it. Neither should be separated from the other. Each of these principles is related to and dej)endent on the other; faith finds its objective rule in the inspired Scripture, and the Scripture finds its inward verification in faith. Each is independent in its own sphere and within its own limits ; but neither is made perfect except through the other. The sole and ultimate Christian authority is the Holy Spirit whom Christ has sent. The special and chosen outward means of the communication of the mind that was in Jesus is the testimony of the apostolic Scriptures ; the necessary inward judge of what is Christian, — that is, of what is the teaching of the Spirit, — is the common Christian con- sciousness, or the continuous and ever-renewed testimony of the Church.^ 5. This original Protestant conception of the mutual dependence of the Scripture and faith is in general accord- ance with the ideas of the relation of the Bible and tradi- tion which may be gathered from the early fathers. They recognized the work of the Spirit in the inspiration of the apostles, and also his guiding presence in the continuous life of Christ's Church. We do not find in the early Christian literature that arbitrary and mechanical separa- tion of the two spheres of the Spirit's operation, the canon and the Church, which has been emjDhasized in later Prot- estantism. And the recovery of this doctrine of the sole authority of the Spirit of Christ in its divers ways and manners of manifestation, and according to its differing degrees of inspiration, illumination, or impartation of spirit- ual discernment, may be regarded as one of the distinct gains of modern theology. Deliverance from an uncriti- 1 For a thorough discussion of the original Protestant view of the relation of faith and Scripture see Dorner's Geschichte der prot. Theologie, ss. 212-251. Modern Biblical criticism is happily compelling us to return from the unten- able post-reformation theories to the original Protestant standing-ground. Dorner's exposition of this subject is worth careful study on the part of all who would engage in present discussions concerning the authority of the Bible. Dr. Martineau, in his Seat of Authority in Religion, fails to grasp this earlier Protestant co-ordination of Scripture and faith. His subjectivism is to be met by a better synthesis of the outward and the inward factors of Christian certainty. 76 CHRISTIAN ETHICS cal, and even superstitious veneration for the letter of Scripture, and a larger faith in the Holy Spirit in the Church and in the Christian renewals of the thoughts of men, as well as belief in the special work of the Spirit in the in- spiration of the sacred Scriptures, are essential alike to the maintenance of the normative authority of tlie Bible and to the preservation of Christian life. Should Christian ethics be held to post-reformation doctrines of the inspira- tion and inerrancy of the Scriptures, it would prove a dif- ficult task, through such literal subjection to the Scripture, to bring the moral problems of modern society under the law of the Spirit of Christ. Christian ethics must apply truth to life in the freedom of the Spirit,, yet in honest and loyal dependence on the apostolic testimony to the teach- ings of Christ. III. SIGNIFICAXCE FOR CHRISTIAN ETHICS OF THE PROGRESSIVE MANIFESTATION OF THE MORAL IDEAL The conception which we have gained of the continuous and progressive unfolding of the Christian Ideal in human consciousness, puts ethics into right relation to history. 1. We are enabled by means of this conception to dis- tinguish better between a false and the true conservatism. Since the ideal is still in the process of revelation, and will continue to manifest itself in larger and higher reali- zations of good until the end of this world-age, it is folly to wish to brinof back the moral standards or conditions of any past age. History has increasing worth as a con- tinuous work of the Spirit. The stream may not rise above the fountain; but it would be absurd to suppose that the river a hundred miles down its course could be poured back into the brooks from which it has flowed. Equally foolish would it be to think of putting present and increasingly complex social conditions back into some primitive simplicity. To restore an early form of Chris- tianity would not be to make progress in the realization of the Christian Ideal. Reversion is not conservatism. A KEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 77 Christian etliic for tlie variegated conditions of modern society could not be reduced to the Pcedagogiis of Clement of Alexandria, or the Siimma of the great medioeval doc- tor. As apostolic Christianity could not be compressed into Judaism, or kept to the one type of the first Jewish- Christian worship in the temple ; as the apostle to the Gentiles reached a broader application of the gospel to the world than St. James had found necessary for the dis- ciples in Jerusalem ; so Christian manners and morals in our age cannot be reduced to the pattern of former days, or measured by the rules of any earlier social conditions. The dream of restoring piimitive Christianity either in faith or morals is impracticable not merely because our theories of life have changed, but also, as Mr. Green has observed,! because the facts of life have changed. New social conditions confront our Christianity. New indus- trial problems are forced upon our ethics. The exten- sively ramified and fruitful tree of modern life cannot by any social magic be reduced to its primitive root, or be caused to revert suddenly into its earlier and simpler shoots. We shall have occasion all the way through our practical ethics to notice and to avoid that false and impracticable conservatism which would restore ante- cedent forms rather than develop richer life. Two illustrations may suffice at this point to indicate the insufficiency of this method of moral restoration. Some years since a book^ was written in England to show that a person who should take the precepts of the gospels literally and seek to apply them with conscientious exact- ness to present conditions of life, would fall successively under the condemnation of all the parties and powers of modern thought and society, and finally be rejected even by the people for whom he would live and must die. Without denying the clever satire which such a picture of an imagined literal Christian life presented, we do not hesi- tate to say that a character so conceived must fail because it ought to fail ; that its idea of Christianity is a misappre- hension of the progressive revelation of the Christian Ideal; 1 Proleyomena, p. 278. 2 Joshua Davidscn. 78 CHRISTIAN ETHICS and that consequently in its moral endeavor it falls to the ground because of the error which it carries in it. For in consistency with the truth of the continuous work and teaching of the Holy Spirit we may not suppose that the Son of man himself would live to-day in England or in the United States, or in Japan, precisely as he dwelt of old in Judea and Galilee. We must believe rather that he who knew what is in man would form his life in con- stant spiritual adaptation to the conditions and the tasks of any age or people ; that while in his love and truth the Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, he would fit his manner of life and apply his doctrine to the social, moral, and religious requirements of every age with as much wisdom as he displayed while he walked among the people in Judea of old, or answered the questions of the scribes and Pharisees of his day. The Christ comes always to fulfil not to destroy; and Christian faith and ethics are the fulfilments of spiritual processes of life. We have a more difficult task to perform than simply to strive to repeat the beliefs or the manners even of primitive Christianity ; the harder, more manifold and only Chris- tian task is to organize present life in all its spheres of industry and thought in the spirit of the Christ. That task can be accomplished by no restoration of the Jeru- salem that was, but by the coming of the Jerusalem which is above. ^ The other illustration of false conservatism is to be found in the thought of securing the unity of the Church through reversal to the ecclesiastical type of the first centuries. Although we admit that much Church history since the earlier ecumenical councils has been a departure from the simplicity of Christ rather than a true develop- ment of Christianity, nevertheless it contradicts the law of the continuous, progressive revelation of the Christian 1 In this sense the striking remark of Schnltz, is to he understood: "Jesus can ho our model only for the disposition in which we have to carry through our calling with its limitations and sacrifices. He is not model and example, but original and ideal of the Christian morality. Not to copy after him, but to let his life take form in us, to receive his Spirit, and to make it effective, is the moral task of the Christian." — Grundriss der Evany. Ethik, s. 5. PwEVELATION OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 79 ideal, to suppose for a moment that the future good can be found in any past. The unity of the Church cannot be reached through Christian reversion to some earlier type ; it is to be gained, if at all, as the result of further spiritual growth ; it is to be won as another victory of the Spirit. That such unity may yet prove possible, and that we should dream of it and long for it, we would not ques- tion : but the way to the kingdom lies before us, and its promise is to be greeted by faith ; ^ it is not to be obtained by looking and longing for a vanishing past. Such future unity will be truly conservative of all the fruits of the Spirit which have been ripening on the separate branches of Christ's true vine. It will be, Avhen it comes, a unity of Christian comprehension and fulfilment. The truly conservative mind Avill go back into the past and sight, as it were, over its chief events, along its great epochs, in order that it may mark the line of historic progress, which runs on into the future. The worth in this respect of the past, and especially of the world's Christian ages past, consists in their prophetic significance. We discover from history the direction in which the Spirit, who ever goes before the Church, has been moving, and on w^hat lines we are to expect to be led forward. Take any one of our advanced moral ideas, as the idea of toleration, or liberty, or social obligation, or human brotherhood, and trace through the past the historic course of that moral idea, and thereby we shall be enabled to estimate more intelligently the worth of it in relation to other truths and factors, and also to apply it more confidently to present movements, and to predict the further course of its empire among men. True conservatism, in short, is progress which takes direction from the past and fulfils its good ; false conservatism is a narrowing and hopeless reversion to the past, which is a betrayal of the promise of the future.^ 2. This principle of the continuity and progress of the 1 Heb. xi. 13. 2 The ethical law of progress, both in relation to the past and the future, is given in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Philippiaus. 80 CHRISTIAN ETHICS realization of the highest good, or Christian Ideal, gives value to our hope. " The idea of development," as Mr. Mackenzie has well said,^ " has made it scientific to hope, by exhibiting life not as a mere process of perpetual change, but as a growth towards a definite goal." The ethical motive of hope has secure root in this law of progress through Christian history towards a divinely intended goal. Christianity is preemi- nently the expectant religion. The Church could not be the church militant were it not the church expectant. Christian ethics is the hopeful science. It is optimistic not because it fails to see the evil of the present world, or to fathom the sinfulness of sin, but because it is ideal- istic ; and even this world-history of sin, since it is also a history of redemption, follows a course of Christian ideali- zation, which shall be continuous and progressive until the kingdom of heaven shall come.^ 3. We may observe the contrast at this point between Herbert Spencer's outlook from the conclusions of evolu- tionary science, and the prospect which is opened by the prophecy of Christianity. His ethics, because evolutionary, cannot avoid a tone of ultimate optimism. One who be- lieves in the evolution of the creation can hardly help holding to its growing good, and hoping for its ultimate best. Nevertheless a dark prospect of universal equilib- rium, which is equivalent to universal death, stares our evolutionist in the face. " Alternate eras of Evolution and Dissolution" are suggested by the argument. Herbert Spencer, however, in reply to the seeming inference of the ultimate reign of ''Universal Death" from his evolutionary premises, deems it '' legitimate to point out how, on carry- ing the argument still further, we are led to infer a subse- quent Universal Life." ^ But the principle of spiritual continuity and develop- ment, which, as we have seen, lies at the basis of Christian 1 Introddction to Social Philosophy, p. 124. 2 Notice in this connection the ethicfii idealism of St. eTolin's epistles. He regards life and death not merely in their present conlusious.. but in their clear, worked-out results. 3 First Principles, p. 483. EEVELATIOX OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 81 ethics, and which runs all through the Christian interpre- tation of history, forbids the thought of such aimless alter- nation of life and death. For spiritual gains are permanent gains; what is acquired by the Spirit is acquired in eternity. It belongs to an order of being which is not held in subjec- tion to physical change. Sin may break into this spiritual order and drag it down to the plain of mortality and cor- ruption ; but except through the moral death of sin there is no natural return of Spirit to chaos and primeval night. There is no reversion of the spiritual order through its own processes to the natural order. Life born of the Spirit is life born into the eternal. Spiritual life is by its own nature persistent force, in itself undecaying and independent of the outward processes of corruption. Such, at least, is the immortal assurance, which the true, the eternal kind of life, so far as we have any present experience of it, seems to contain wdthin itself, and to assert with all the positiveness of self-conscious worth and love against the appearance of death and our subjection to it. Spiritual life and love are to themselves immortal. The more thoroughly spiritualized one's life becomes, the stronger grows the inward conviction of immortality. No outward proof, nor visible miracle, can make a soul sure of itself, and of its deathless worth, if it is not sure within itself of its spiritual being. If pressed for the proof of this prospect of ethical and spiritual immortality, of the final reign of true life over all death, we may find much in the analogies of nature to help us, and a historic foun- dation also for faith is given in the supernal life and glorious resurrection of Jesus ; but the ultimate resort of the argument, and the first and last word of our faith in immortality will be found in the spiritual life of man; — this great faith will have power with us in proportion to our personal sense of the spiritual worth of our self-conscious life, and our super-temporal and super-sensible being. In- deed the outward historic evidences of tJie Christian reve- lation, the witness to the supernatural life of Christ, and his poAver over death in his resurrection, need to be read, not merely in the light of historical criticism, but S$tS 82 CHRISTIAN ETHICS also in the light of their ethical contents and revelation, in order that they may be estimated at their true value, and understood in their higher naturalness — their harmony, that is, with the whole nature of the universe and its spiritual laws. From this ethical-spiritual point of view, and in affirma- tion of the principle of the spiritual continuity and pro- gressive realization of the supreme moral good in the spiritual world, we gain prophetic outlook towards a land of promise in which there shall be no more death, and the living God shall be all and in all. CHAPTER II THE CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL Having thus surveyed the processes through which the Christian Ideal is communicated and known, we turn next to a determination of the contents of the supreme good, so far as it has yet been realized or exists in any possible prophetic anticipation of it before the eye of Christian faith. ^ The contents of the Christian Ideal are in general the good which it is Christian to desire as the supreme end of life. Every moral act implies a reference of con- duct to some end to be desired or gained. Every moral state, in distinction from a condition which has no moral character, implies that something has been chosen as a good or end of being. The first and perpetual question of moral philosophy is: What is this supreme good? How is this moral end to be determined and delined? One's idea of the good, whatever it may be, will be the morally dominating idea of his life. The end of human existence has been regarded by many moralists as pleasure ; and the pleasure which is to be desired as the supreme end of life has been further rare- fied, purified, and exalted, until a very moral kind of pleasure has been obtained from the distillation of utili- tarian ethics, — a pleasure which becomes palatable and stimulating to a healthful moral taste. The end of exist- ence is pleasure, yet, it is added, not separate and isolated pleasure. The moral object of life is amplified and ex- alted into the greatest good for the greatest number, or 1 While Mr. Green, Prolegomena, p. 204, rio^htly insists that the imconditional good cannot be defined because we cannot know our capabilities until they are realized, yet so far as the good has been realized, it is known, and partial knowledge is true knowledge. 83 84 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the largest attainable or conceivable human pleasure. When the idea of pleasure is thus socialized and human- ized, happiness as an ethical good assumes at once nobler proportions. The moral is identified with the useful, but the standard of usefulness is not to be narrowly con- ceived, or limited to individual calculation, or to private happiness ; it is to be elevated into a standard of univer- sal welfare, and this general human utility is to be meas- ured and determined not by the short rule of any individual life, but by the prolonged experience of mankind. When the methods of evolutionary science are employed by utilitarian moral science, it becomes possible to give a still ampler and more plausible form to the empirical determination of the idea of the summum honum^ or the happiness which is morally desirable. The good for any form of life is the realization of its type in adaptation to its environment. Increasing good for being as a whole consists in the development of the inner organic forces, their increasing specialization, in harmony with the out- ward conditions or environment of life. In other words, life, as it advances on the earth, becomes richer in special- ized forms, and better adaptations to its environment. The sum of these specialized adaptations is at any time the index of the amount of good which living being has attained. Man is the highest animal, the most richly specialized organic form of being on earth, having in him- self manifold and wonderful powers of self-adaptation to the world without him ; his good is to be realized, in conformity to his type, through the acquisition of the fullest and most harmonious life which is possible to a being so highly organized. There may be other worlds, it will be granted, where still higher organization and greater consequent good may be possible than our posi- tive science of man can conceive ; but such future possible development and still more spiritualized powers of being, though they may be matters of faith or dreams of hope, do not yet enter, it is said, into any experience which we have of known utilities, and must be excluded therefore from any scientific formula for man's highest good. CONTEXTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDExVL 85 Empirical (in distinction from transcendental) ethics, by the enrichment of utilitarianism through evolutionary methods, is thus enabled to escape from the narrow limita- tions of mere hedonism, or the simple ethics of pleasure, and to define the summum bonum^ with moral largeness of yiew, as the development of the whole life of humanity in harmony with its environment; as the greatest possible social efficiency; or as the realization of the powers and capacities of the type or idea of the human organism. In all such utilitarian determinations of the good we must recognize a relative truth. It is an ethical gain which we owe to the naturalistic ethics of our day that we are able to trace farther, and to see much more clearly, the coin- cidence between the right and the useful in the moral world. But coincidence is not necessarily identity; and the fact that honesty is good policy does not prove that good policy is honesty. As the laws of beauty and the laws of utility are found to have many interesting corre- spondences in natural history ; as a seeming principle of economy in nature uses for the protection of birds and the increase of the flowers the same processes of selection and adaptation which secure also the adornment of their plu- mage and the variegation of their hues ; so one and the same principle in moral history may issue in results which are at the same time useful and morally pleasing, and pro- duce from the same spiritual process both the utilities and the excellencies of the moral world. Certainly the good proves to be in the end, on the large scale, the humanly useful. Transcendental ethics, the ethics of the higher law, does not escape the necessity of proving and filling out its abstract conceptions of moral good by means of the science of moral utilities. The useful is a measuring rod for the ethical. Indeed we cannot understand the relig- ious ethics of the Old Testament, if we do not allow room and need for utilitarian measures in the providential moral ordering of the world. The God of the Old Testament proceeded often as a utilitarian teacher of morals in Israel. That which in different ages was morally possible, which was morally adapted to further progress, was permitted in 86 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the law and made known to the prophets. What heavenly light can shine down between the clouds or through them, is suffered to fall upon the earth ; and the moral world of old was not left in utter darkness because the whole tran- scendentalism of heaven could not in the early ages be poured into the bright noon of Christianity. The princi- ple of moral adaptation, or accommodation in revelation, is utilitarianism in the divine ethics ; and we cannot refuse to admit this principle of relative right in Christian ethics without rejecting some of the evident indications of the patience of the God of Israel in the moral education of the race. Moreover, evolutionary, utilitarian conceptions of the morally good approach very closely at one point to the highest transcendental idea of the supreme good. For scientific ethics finds life itself to be a good ; it is desirable to be born. Any being, according to the possibilities of its type, is well-being ; and for man especially life accord- ing to the capacities of a man is good, is moral well-being. That is moral which tends at any time to preserve the life of man in its largest capacity and efiiciency. This last teaching of evolutionary ethics draws very near that idea of his kingdom on earth which Christ declared when he said, *' I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." ^ We have already indicated ^ reasons for our dissent from the utilitarian analysis of conscience, and its reduction of the moral worth of life to terms of pleasure. All such accounts of man's moral being and growth, we hold, either unconsciously assume at the beginning, or dexter- ously suffer to slip in somewhere into the process from which conscience emerges, the distinctive moral elements which we find differentiated from all others at the end of the evolution.^ We recognize throughout the ethical evo- 1 John X. 10. 2 pp. 33_43. 3 Herbert Spencer, Data of Ethics, p. 46., asserts that " no school can avoid taking for the nltimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling, called by what- ever name, —gratification, enjoyment, happiness." He says also, that pleas- ure "is as mnch a necessary form of moral intnition as space is a necessary form of intellectual intuition." We may admit the latter statement, and CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 87 lution a transcendental fact — a potency and promise in man which is moral, spiritual, of God ; and this unfolding life and consciousness issues in a sense of righteousness, and the obligation of our being to the right, which cannot be resolved into anything other than itself, and which justifies itself in its effects of harmonious happy life. We w^elcome the contributions of modern naturalistic ethics, so far as they serve to mark definite standards of duty and to enrich with specialized determinations of good the contents of our distinctive and inalienable idea of right. But we have assumed from philosophic ethics as a fundamental postulate the truth that there is something which man may know and obey as of absolute moral worth ; that there is a supreme good wdiich is not pleas- ure, although its realization is pleasurable ; which cannot be reduced to a catalogue of calculations of utilities, although it also serves a principle of utility ; and that this moral worth in its commanding authority, and its determined contents of righteousness, constitutes the end or supreme good of man's being. The idea of the highest good has been the crucial test of philosophic ethics. It may be helpful to the student to append a condensed statement of the different definitions which have been given of it by German philoso- phers, with references to the pages in JodPs Ethik, vol. ii., which I have used in tabulating these philosophic ideas of the good, and where they will be found carefully discussed. Kant. — The proper object of the moral estimation of worth is the good will ; good in itself not through what it works or effects, not through its usefulness or attainment of any end which is put before it, but good only through the willing, i.e. in itself good. The good will is determined only by the idea of the moral law and pure reverence for it (p. 14). Schiller. — The beautiful soul — the beautiful morality. Reason tyid sensibility, duty and inclination coincide (p. 52). Fichte. — The last aim of the individual is perfect reconciliation with himself and perfect freedom from all inclinations which do not lie in the tendency of a reasonable self-lawgiving. This is likewise the goal of society, the completed reign of reason (p. 75). The end is not happiness, but the absolute self-contentment of the reason, the entire freedom from apply it against the reduction of the moral intuition to pleasure. Pleasure may be the /o?-m, but it is not the substance of the moral intuition. We charge that utilitarianism makes unwittingly this mistake of confusing ethi- cal form with ethical substance. It confuses the formal and material princi- ples of the moral judgment. 88 CHRISTIAN ETHICS all dependence, which is the essence of the moral (p. 83). The end to be attained is no enjoyment, but the affirmation of the worth which belongs to the reason (p. 80). Krause. — The good is the essence (Wesentliche) of life to be formed in time, the peculiar, self-living determination of a being. Knowledge of this good is not possible without knowledge of the being of God in which all finite beings are contained. Ethics is a subordinate part of the general science of being — the science of God. Goodness is to do what is essential to life. God is the one good, the highest good, the original idea of the end which the moral man in a finite way imitates in himself (p. 94) . Hegel. — The realization of will as free intelligence (p. 108). The rec- onciliation of God with himself and with nature (p. 15o). Schelling. — The removal of the dualism between being and thinking, nature and spirit (p. 145). Schleiermacher. — The naturalizing of reason and the rationalizing of nature. The mutual fashioning {Lieinanderhildens) of nature and rea- son. The highest good is the organic connection or summation of all goods ; consequently the whole moral being is to be brought under the conception of the highest good (p. 173). Herbart. — Good and evil are not conceptions of knowledge, but of the estimation of worth ; not predicates of existence, so far as it is, but of the manner in which a possible or real object will be apprehended by a spectator standing opposite it (p. 199) . We have claimed above that we must recognize this rational element, which all these definitions grasp after, as an original, simple element of the good ; but the transcendental ethical element is to be filled with con- tents, the good to be differentiated into the goods of life, through experi- mental ethics, or the wisdom of the moral utilities. The task next awaiting us is to bring this general con- ception of the supreme good to further interpretation in the light of the Christian revelation. We have further to define what the chief end of life is, and to describe the realizable contents of the moral ideal, in the light of the revelation of God, who is the Good, which is given us through Jesus Christ. Christian ethics, in a word, has before it the task of Christianizing the idea of the summum bonum, the supreme good. I. THE BIBLICAL DOCTRINE OF THE HIGHEST GOOD § 1. THE OLD TESTAMENT CONCEPTION OF THE SUPREME GOOD It is marked by its social rather than individualistic character. The individual Hebrew has no conception of salvation apart from the blessing of the people of Israel. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 89 The psalmist prefers Jerusalem above his chief joy.^ This social conception of well-being among the Hebrews appears in the early prominence which was given in the Old Testa- ment to God's promise to the family, and the hope of a family name and inheritance forever. The family life and its blessing came first in the divine order of salvation.^ Moreover, the family hope and blessing are to be realized in the covenant of God with Israel and the consequent prosperity of the nation. The original promise to Abra- ham was the promise of a blessing through his seed to all the nations of the earth; not to individuals, but to the peoples of the earth. The conception arises, and takes permanent form, of a holy people. A people chosen of God is to enter in and possess the land of promise. Indi- viduals are not to seize the promise with solitary hands, and to keep it as their private possession ; but the people of God, keeping His covenant and walking before Him in truth, are to inherit the blessing which the Lord their God shall give them. The supreme good in Israel is to be a national good. So when the prophets with their more ethical concep- tion of religion, begin to think of God as a father, they regard Israel collectively as His son; the divine Father- hood, so far as it is conceived of in the prophetic litera- ture, is His fatherhood over Israel.^ In a twofold sense Israel is called God's son ; God is his creator, and the Lord has made Israel the special object of His choice and care. So David the king, as representing the nation, is called a son of God.^ The remnant at least of the people is destined to perpetuate the true Israel as the object of God's choice. In the religious service of the temple, and in the hope of the blessing of the covenant, the indi- vidual Israelite is never separated from the organic whole of Israel ; the welfare of the just will be his participation in the prosperity of the people of the Lord. The good which all the children of the promise are to pray for, and 1 Ps. cxxxvii. 6. 2 Morality of the Old Testament, Smyth, p. 42. 3 Ex. iv. 22, 23 ; Deut. xxxii. 6, IS ; Is. Ixiii. IG ; Hosea xi. 1. 4 Ps. Ixxxix. 26-27 ; 2 Sam. vii. 14. 90 CHRISTIAN ETHICS to desire above their chief joy, is the restoration of Jeru- salem and the return of the ransomed of the Lord Avith singing to Zion. This social conception of the supreme good marks the -whole prophetic doctrine of election. It is not the soli- tary individual soul, but Israel who is the elect servant of God. " Yet now hear, O Jacob, my servant ; and Israel whom I have chosen." ^ The grand idea of a people elected for the service of God inspired the prophets of old. Elec- tion is national rather than individual ; for service rather than for happiness. The law of service for social good, and ultimately for the blessing of all nations, is the prin- ciple of the divine election according to the Old Testa- ment prophets. Tliis is certainly a larger and nobler conception of election than the intensely individualistic conception of it with which our Protestant theology has made us familiar. No man, according to the Old Testa- ment doctrine of election, is chosen privately and per- sonally for the sake of his own enjoyment, but as a member of a holy society and as a citizen in the great common- wealth of Israel ; and as the consequence of election for service and royal anointing for the work of the Lord, the elect servant shall see the Messianic glory and final triumph of the kingdom of God. If in the later Isaiah the concep- tion of the divine Servant assumes a more personal Messi- anic form, still the divine election of the one is for the sake of the many — the chosen Servant represents the people: "with his stripes we are healed"; "by his knowl- edge shall my righteous servant justify many." ^ This social conception of the chief good not only per- vaded the prophetic hope of the Messianic kingdom, but it moulded also and colored the manners and morals, the laws and the worship of Israel. We cannot find the true point of view from which to judge much of the morality of the Old Testament, or to understand many features of the Mosaic legislation and the priestly code, unless we constantly recur to this socialistic character of the hope of Israel, and remember how foreign our accentuated indi- 1 Is. xliv. 1. 2 Is. liii. 5, 11. CONTEXTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 91 vidualism is to the entire conception of life and its bless- ing in which the Hebrew thought moved. The faith of the Hebrews was national; their prayers were national; their religious days were consecrated in the memory of national deliverances ; their festivals were rejoicings in the harvests which filled the whole land with plenty. Their sin-offerings were in atonement for the transgression of the people ; their whole ritual and worship moved on the broad lines of public obligation and the covenant of the. people with the Lord. There are recorded in the Old Testament instances of solitary wrestling with God for the blessing, and also penitential psalms occur of appar- ently most personal confession of sin ; but even these are experiences of patriarch or king who represent the national dependence on God, or who confess as their own guilt the sin of the people. Even the more personal expressions of the sense of injured righteousness in the psalms, and the cries of individual souls for divine deliverance, do not cease to have a certain representative tone ; they transcend the bounds of personal indignation ; the voice of national justice speaks in them ; they can at times be morally understood only as expressions of the spirit of a people in the great crises of its warfare. The virtues, as well as the faults of Israel, are to be estimated in this social conception of good. Abraham's faith was a social trust. He went forth seeking not simply his own ease or personal prosperity^ but he looked for a better country ; he sought for a city whose builder and maker is God. The first pilgrim followed in faith God's promise of blessing for the nations. And the-\ morality of the Old Testament kept in the front rank/ those virtues which were necessary to secure some family S permanence and social stability. It is marked by the limitations and defects of a moral system which is intent^ upon this first task of securing a social basis for human progress, and in which the sphere and rights of the indi- f vidual have not come to clear definition. Heroic surgery ■ of foreign elements (Amalekites and idolatries) which might cause the disintegration of the national bodj^, if suf- ^ 92 CHRISTIAN ETHICS fered to grow within it, became consequently one of the early providential social necessities in the history of IsraeL It should be remarked further that the idea of the high- est good which is to be derived from the prophetic litera- i;ure of the Old Testament is the summation, in the king- dom of God, of all those material goods — such as plenti- ful harvests, springs of Avater, increase of cattle, a vine and fig tree for every man, peace and prosperity within all the borders of a land flowing with milk and honey, — which make a people contented and prosperous. The ideal Mes- sianic good of the Hebrews was the fulness of all earthly goods. The prosperitj^ of Zion, however, is to be gained through obedience to the law of God. The prophetic conception of Messianic good, although often depicted in images of earthly fruitfulness and worldly splendor, was saved from materialism by a thoroughly ethical insistence upon right- eousness as the condition of permanent prosperity for the chosen people. Although it was not yet a refined spirit- ualized conception of the future life of man in a realm of unearthly perfection, still a pure religious light was thrown into its worldliness ; the splendor of the new Jerusalem, wdiich the prophets foresaw, was the abiding presence in it of the glory of the Holy One of Israel. In the last days there was to be a moral religious reunion of the purified nation with its king, and a personal reign of the God of righteousness of Zion.^ From this brief survey of the Old Testament doctrine of the highest good we gain this general result: it is primarily social welfare to be realized in righteousness in the reign of the Holy One of Israel. Any ideal, therefore, which is chiefly individualistic, which does not contain as essential to its content the conception of the welfare of human society, falls short of the ancient HebrcAv ideal, and is less than the pattern that was shown Moses on the holy mount. No individual of us is to be made ultimately happy, no single solitary soul can win life's largest bless- 1 *' The conception of a society organized on the basis of ethical religion was peculiar to Jewish thought." — Toy, Judaism and Christianity, p. 338. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 93 ing, apart from his brethren, except through his mem- bership in the human race, and his participation in the final redemption of the workl for which Christ died. This moral ideal of the possible perfection of the indi-T vidual only in and through the final consummation of the kingdom of redemption, is significantly implied in a verse ' in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the original Hebrew conception of social salvation underlies the Chris- tian hope of the perfect life : " That apart from us they should not be made perfect " ^ § 2. THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF THE HIGHEST GOOD In the gospels we have the direct reflection of the moral ideal which was revealed through Jesus Christ. In the epistles we find that ideal as it was taken up in the lives of his disciples, and applied in many directions to the conditions of the first Christians in the world. But in order that we may apprehend Jesus' teaching concerning man's chief good in its distinctive purity and originality, w^e should seek to behold it against the background of the contemporary Judaism, across which it shone as a revela- tion from God. We should not only trace the connection between Jesus' moral teaching and the more spiritual words of the prophets, but also we should note, if possible, the points of contact and of contrast between the teachings which Jesus gave to his disciples and the common opinions taught in the school of the synagogue. In the Messianic ideal, which was cherished by the Judaism contemporary with the time of Christ, amid some diversity of traditional coloring, certain definite lines may be traced. One characteristic of it was a " violent supernaturalism," a conception of the promised good as something *' externally transcendent," in contrast with this present world.^ Both in its conception of the heavenly Jerusalem, and its expectation of the signs and means by which the kingdom of heaven was to descend to earth, the Messianic hope at this period was super- 1 Heb. xi. 40. 2 Schiirer, History of the Jeioish People, Div. ii. vol. ii. p. 134:. 94 CHRISTIAN ETHICS naturalistic rather than ethical; a hope of supernatural interference and judgment rather than of moral progress and consummation. Another line, which had become hard and fixed in the Judaic hope, was marked by the idea of the national privilege. In the older prophetic lit- erature a purer spiritual light had imparted even to the local coloring of the Messianic hope a certain humanness and universality. Israel also in its later subjection to the world-powers had been brought into a larger contact with cosmopolitan tendencies of thought and life, and had con- sequently been compelled to gain some broader knowledge of the relation of Israel to the great kingdoms of the world ; but still its Messianic view had failed to reach a true ethical universality. Tlie existence of a Messianic hope in the heart of Israel, and its revival and persistence in any form, is an historical sign of the divine working in the world; but in Judaism this higher hope had clothed itself ill too political forms, and had become the expecta- tion, not of a universal reign of love among men, but of the restoration of the true Israel.^ The Messiah was to appear as the world-ruler, and Israel was to have in his kingdom unquestioned and glori- ous primacy. He was not conceived as a Messiah Saviour, who through vicarious suffering should reconcile the world to God, but as a Messiah King, in whose righteousness indeed as well as power his chosen people should be re- stored to God's favor and glory. At his coming the four winds of heaven should bring back the faithful Israelites from the ends of the world to their promised inheritance.^ Through judgments and by acceptance of the Jewish relig- ion, others than Israelites might indeed gain participation in the Messianic kingdom, but the glory of that kingdom was not spiritually and largely conceived as the promise of a redeemed humanity. The picture of the Messianic age 1 "The kingdom of God is understood in a purely national way; and while the whole view of the future involves the ordinary ethical elements, the Messiah is in himself not specifically an ethical power," — Toy, Judaism and Christianity, p. 327. 2 The hope of individual resurrection was develoijed also with this expec- tation of a future Messianic world-age. CONTENTS or THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 95 on wliich Judaism looked with patient expectation, was a representation of the exaltation of Israel, rather than of the salvation of the world. ^ To this feature should be added the dogmatic character of the Judaic Messianic expectation. Even their hope, as well as their law, had become, as Schiirer remarks, "increasingly dogmatized." The "poetic picture" of the prophet had become the learned dogma of the scribe .^ The later Rabbinical literature abounds in gross material imagery of the future glory of Zion.^ Doubtless the old Hebrew liope still held its supremacy in the days of Christ among many devout Israelites, and a profound national sense of the need of moral reform appears unmistakably in the preaching of John the Baptist ; but the Messianic expectation which Jesus found among the scribes and teachers of the people was chiefly a hope of polit- ical deliverance and national dominion to be ushered in by signs from heaven, through supernatural power and judgments, rather than a pro- foundly spiritual and ethical, and a broadly human hope of redemption. In seeking to recover the contemporaneous Jewish idea of the kingdom of God in the time of Christ, we should note also the legalization of the Judaic idea of God. The growth of Judaism and the Judaic veneration for the law, after Ezra's reformation, shows some marked resemblances to the growth in post-reformation Protestant theology of the legal conception of salvation, and particularly the ten- dency to formalize and almost to deify the literal inspira- tion and authority of the Scriptures.^ Similarly the devel- opment of Judaism was distinctly marked by the tendency 1 Edersheim, Life of Christ, vol. i. p. 164. 2 Schurer, Ibid. 134. 3 See Weber, Die Lehren des Talmud, s. 356 f. It was described for nistance as an age " in which all should eat cakes and dress in silks." Caution, how- ever, should he exercised in inferring the opinions contemporary with Christ from the later Rahbinism. 4 This has been often characterized as Bibliolatry. An example of it is to be found in the discussion which Avas raised among the Lutheran scholastics of the seventeenth century over the question whether one may call the Holy Scripture a creature. It was held that there was a mystical union of the Spirit with the word of God {verbum dei esse aliquid dei); that the Holy Scripture is not simply an instrument {instrumentum inanimatum). The doctrine of the com- munication of the divine idioms was carried over to the conception of the Holy Scripture. Dorner justly characterizes this tendency in the Lutheran ortho- doxy as " a deification of the Holy Scripture." See his Geschichte der protest. Theologie, s. 553 f . 96 CHRISTIAN ETHICS to lay the whole stress of religion on the law and its observ- ance, while the freer, more prophetic elements of spiritual faith were withdrawn from the teaching of the schools. The law gains a position above everything else in Judaism. 'MJpon three things," said Simon the Just, ''stands the world ; upon the law, the worship of God (Temple-service), and well-doing." In this Rabbinical order the law is put first, worship second, and morality last. The law as the source of true life and condition of blessing was the high- est good. The chief end of creation, according to the Rabbis, was the creation of the law. Many of the more extravagant sayings concerning the law which may be gath- ered from the Rabbinical literature are of. a later date than the time of Christ; but they illustrate the tendency of Judaism to a legalization even of the idea of the living God, — a tendency which was already evident in the teach- ings of the scribes and Pharisees of our Lord's day.^ Already in the heroic age of the Maccabees the law had become the war cry of the people, as it could not have been in the prophetic age.^ In the later Judaism the law seems almost to have taken tlie place of God himself. Heaven became a high school for the study of the law ; and God is represented as busied daily with the study of the law.^ The centre of the true religion is transferred from the per- son to the law of God. The kingdom of heaven is the rule of the Law. Where His Law is, there God is. Such was the revolution which Judaism finally wrought in the religion of the prophets. Jerusalem had killed the prophets ; and it worshipped the letter which killeth. We turn now from this brief survey of contemporary Judaism, which forms the background of the teaching of Jesus, to the moral ideal which we may discover shining in his gospel. I. Jesus' Moral Ideal as disclosed in his doctrine of the Kingdom of God. 1 See Schiirer, Ihid. p. 93. 2 1 Mac. ii. 27; iii. 21. "And Mattatliias oried throus^hout the city with a loud voice, saying, Whoever is zealous of the law, and maintaineth the cove- nant, let him follow me." " But we fight for our lives and our laws." 3 Weber, Ibid. s. 154. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 97 The gospel of the kingdom of God which Jesus came preaching was not wholly a new gospel, without points of continuity with the prophetic teaching, and historically unintelligible, like a revelation in a foreign language, to the common people of Judea. Jesus spoke in the vernac- ular of men's hearts, and his truth needed no scribe to interpret it to the villagers whom he met in the way, or the throngs who crowded him as he taught by the shore of the lake. His idea of the kingdom of God took root in the common ground of the Israelitish hope of the restora- tion of the throne of David. His doctrine of the kingdom continues the broader lines of the prophetic teaching con- cerning the Messianic age. As the loftiest mountain stands on the common earth, and springs from the habit- able fields, so Jesus' moral ideal is human, and does not hang in mid-air like some gorgeous imagery of cloud. But no sooner do we recognize the familiar ideas on which Jesus rests his preaching of the gospel of the kingdom, than we perceive also how directly, and with what higher purpose, Jesus' teaching lifts itself out of the confusions of the Rabbinical traditions, and springs at once into a loftier and purer revelation of God's design ; in its unique and unapproachable grandeur it dwarfs all the lesser heights to wdiich the prophetic hopes had risen, and remains to this day the transcendent and commanding ideal of the possible exaltation of our humanity. 1. A peculiarity of Jesus' preaching of the gospel of the kingdom which immediately arrests attention is his an- nouncement that it is now and here on this earth. It had been begun in the Old Dispensation, and it was to be com- pleted in the future ; but Jesus taught with remarkable insistence that it was an immediate and actual presence and reign of God among men.^ To the common thought of the people the Messianic age was the world-age to come. The Baptist indeed, in immediate anticipation of Clirist, had preached its near coming. But Jesus' announcement of its presence on this earth was different even from John the Baptist's proclamation that it was at hand. For Jesus 1 Matt. iv. 17; x. 7; xii. 28; Mark i. 15; Luke xvii. 20-21. 98 CHRISTIAN ETHICS proclaimed the actual existence of the kingdom of heaven on this earth as the reason for the discipleship which he required. He had not come, like the Baptist, to bring a new moral demand merely, or to enforce a stern require- ment of rej)entance as a preparation for the coming of the kiiigdom ; in Jesus' gospel the kingdom of God is already here ; and because it is a present reality, the Lord asks for repentance and invites faith. The real presence of the power of heaven on earth is the joyous reason for Chris- tian life and hope. " Make ye ready the way of the Lord," John the Baptist had cried in the wilderness. The voice of the last of the prophets was still a call for preparation for the coming of the kingdom. " The time is fulfilled," said Jesus, when he came bidding men repent and believe in the gospel. The Christian conception of life and its supreme good rests on this fundamental fact which Jesus announced, that the kingdom of God is not something wholly future, or remote from our present participation in it, but it is a real power and an actual reign of God already begun on earth, — a kingdom of heaven into which we may now enter, and which offers through citizenship in it some immediate possession of the highest good and present part in the eternal life. 2. Consequently Jesus' moral idealism was at the same time a moral realism, so far as he preached that the king- dom of heaven is already come. The ideal life of man is the life in Christ which is already begun. The ideal good is something here and noAV to be striven for and possessed. It was no dreamer speaking of strange, beautiful, far-ofp things, who spake as never man spake in Galilee ; the Son of man carries indeed ever with him, in his inward consciousness of heaven, a vision of God and the blessed life, surpassing all prophetic conceptions ; ^ yet Jesus, though having light supernal in his own inward being, does not separate himself from publicans and sinners, but graciously announces everywhere, and to whomever he meets, that this kingdom of God is at hand, and may be found among men, that it is a present light and a practi- cable truth for every man's life. 1 See the remarkable declaration of John iii. 13. CONTEI^TS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 99 The Christian conception of the highest good is, ac- cordingly, both ideal and real; it is an ideal which is transcendent and at the same time immanent ; an ideal ^Yhich surpasses all known good, but which is also realized in any virtue and in any praise. ^ 3. Resembling this feature of Jesus' doctrine of the kingdom, and equally surprising, is his positiveness of thought and word concerning it. The moral positiveness of Jesus' ethical teaching, — this sunlit sureness of his moral ideal, — is something unexampled and superlative. None of our doubts hang mistily over his lofty ideal of the kingdom; our human questionings have sunk into silence in the " Yerih^, verily I say unto you " of his daily speech; his gospel of the kingdom of heaven from beginning to end, and around the whole broad circumfer- ence of it, lies before us like so much clear, sunny cer- tainty. There is not a cloud in the Master's sky; there is no shadow over all his prospect. This spiritual positiveness is unique in its kind. It is not like the blind confidence of the dogmatist, which is a too familiar folly among us ; nor is it the self-assertion of spiritual ignorance, the vain superficiality of minds that do not feel the mystery of existence, nor know the deep things of God. Jesus' sureness of the Father's truth bears more resemblance to the quiet and reasoned confidence of positive science. It seems like the calm certainty of knowl- edge. This one man speaks from his experience of the unseen world, as other men will speak from their experi- ence of the things that are seen. We cannot fail to be impressed with this objective tone of Jesus' language con- cerning things spiritual and eternal. This objectiveness, moreover, of his thought and words was a general spiritual characteristic of Jesus' whole teach- ing, as the disciples received it and bare witness to it. So marked is this characteristic, so powerful was its spiritual effect upon those who were with him, that the disciples themselves ere long caught the Master's positive tone, and with a confidence begotten of his Spirit apostles speak 1 Phil. iv. 8. 100 CHRISTIAN ETHICS and write of those high and eternal things which they have seen and known. It is for theology to inquire whence this spiritual positiveness of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven had its source, and in what revela- tion of God its sufficient cause is to be discovered ; but Christian ethics will show that the conception of the highest good, which is embodied in Jesus' gospel of the kingdom, possesses a positiveness, and has exercised a power of impressing itself upon generation after generation of men, which surpasses all the ideals of the ancient faiths and philosophies, and their influence ; and which remains a present commandment and inspiration of virtue unequalled and unconquerable in the world. The rnoral conception of the kingdom of heaven in Jesus' first realization of it and through subsequent Christian experience of it, con- tains the materials of an unfinished jet positive science of the ideal. Still as of old they who hear his voice and who are of his truth, will say with a faith which may pro- voke denials, but which abides amid all doubts, as the mountains stand while the clouds pass, — ' The kingdom of God is here, and we know something of its power and its peace in our inmost souls ; here, near at hand, known to us in our best moments and most Christian deeds, yet stretching far away into the unknown eternity around this world-age, is the reign of Christ and the love of God.' 4. Besides these more general truths and aspects of Jesus' revelation of the kingdom of heaven, we may ob- serve in his gospel of it these particulars of his doctrine of the supreme good. (1) It is personal good. To the Jewish mind the expectation of the kingdom of God had become too pre- dominantly, as we have seen, a political hope ; Jesus taught that the beginnings of the kingdom of heaven lie in personal character, and its good is to be realized through the new life and spiritual victory of the individual man. Jesus called his disciples by name, man by man, into his kingdom. He sought immediately for personal following rather than national restoration. He taught the Pharisees that the kingdom of God should not come with outward CONTENTS OF THE CHPwISTIAN IDEAL 101 pomp and observation ; that it already was in the midst of them ; ^ looking at the very souls of men he had said, " Blessed are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." ^ His gospel of the rule of God became an intensely personal message. The kingdom of heaven among men is a temper of mind, a spiritual disposition, a state of heart. To enter into the kingdom is not to make a pilgrimage, or to go up through the gate into the holy city ; but to come into, a certain willingness of mind, to be of a certain spirit, to have a new heart. One is to contiuue a member of that kingdom, having the rights of its celestial citizenship, and being an heir of its promise, not by observing any outward ceremonial, but by abiding in the heavenly spirit of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is constituted of persons, and has its glory in personal worths and fidelities. The kingdom is to be built of persons having Christ-like characters. Once, by an act of memorable ethical teach- ing, and with his wonderful power of making the least incidents disclose the largest truths, Jesus showed to his disciples the only good which should be the object of their ambition, when he took a little child and put him in the midst of them, and said, " Verily I say unto you. Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." ^ In that simple, divine way Jesus revealed what essentially and eternally the kinofdom of heaven is : it was not to be a restored Hebrew commonwealth wdth its thrones of dominion; not a glorified earthly city which shall exercise lordship over the nations, and in which worldly ambition may still find empire ; it is not the supreme political good which the Sadducees covet, nor the reign of the law which the Pharisees exalt above the claims of humanity and the fatherhood of God. Jesus' teaching of the nature of the supreme ethical good, when he put a little child as the greatest in the midst of the disciples, was the idealization of the pure heart and the loving, trustful spirit. We must be born anew of the Spirit to see the kingdom;^ it can only be seen by those who have hearts to see it ; for 1 Luke xvii. 21. 2 Matt. v. 3. 3 Matt. XAiii. 3. ^ John iii. 3. 102 CHRISTIAN ETHICS the essential reality and the eternal blessedness of it con. sist in having the Spirit of Christ. (2) The kingdom of God is a human good as well as an individual attainment. It is, as has just been remarked, a reio-n of God in the personal life, and a good to be acquired through individual character ; yet it is likewise a kingdom or societ}^ of men, and its good is to be secured in the larger life of humanity. The prophets had gained some conception of the human universality of the coming Mes- sianic blessing; but Jesus' gospel of the kingdom for all nations went far beyond the broadest lines of the prophetic thinking in its pure and absolute humanness. He brought this feature of his moral ideal into the sharpest contrast with the current Judaism of his day by his quiet, bold word that the Sabbath was made for man. He thus selected the one institution which was the sacred heritage of Judaism, and which the law had hedged about with painstaking punctiliousness, and he freed that most relig- ious institution from its Jewish exclusiveness, and brought that treasure of the kingdom forth for man's common use, making its divine obligation consist in its serviceableness to man. The kingdom, whose gospel he came preaching, was thus proclaimed in the most unmistakable manner to be throughout a kingdom for man, — the reign of God which shall be also the true reign of man on the earth. This humanness of Jesus' gospel corresponds to his personal identification with humanity. The Messiah who has come to establish the kingdom of heaven as an ever present and continuous spiritual reality on earth, Himself belongs to humanity, sums up our humanity, represents humanity before God. The highest good, then, as it is presented to our thought and desire in Jesus' doctrine of the kingdom, more than in the broadest conceptions of any of the prophets before him, is social, human good ; it is no ideal of life to be attained by men individually, apart from the perfection of humanity, and without participation in the great human wliole of being and its redemption. The harvest is not the individual ingathering, but the end of the workh The CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 103 Christian conception of good is to be realized in the con summation of the ages of our one human history; it is good for man, God's love for the world.^ We are to receive our personal part and to share indi- vidually in this human weal and perfection through lives bound up dutifully with the lives of others, and in the ful- filments of our common human relations, obligations, and destiny. The Christian Ideal of the coming world-age and its blessedness is no proud philosophic hope of some spiritual attainment of the rare and favored few ; all men's paths run by the open doors of the kingdom of heaven ; we are to be made perfect as w^e shall enter into one sal- vation, and have fellowship in one great redemption. It is true, but it only serves to bring out more signally this ideal of Jesus' gospel for the world, that the disciples at first were far from comprehending his ideal of a saved humanity. It is a striking evidence of the originality of Jesus' teaching that the disciples in whose narratives the life of Christ is immediately reflected, did not always understand the simplicity that was in Christ, nor know what spirit he was of. It is true, and it shows Jesus' unique superiority to all the teaching and thought then current in Judea, that his departure from his own, and the day of Pentecost, and the lessons of their work in preaching his gospel, were needed in order to bring to their knowledofc the universal elements of truth which had from the first been present, dimly apprehended by them, if understood at all, in the daily teaching of their Master. Even now, after centuries have passed, the Church has much to learn of the breadth and the pure sunny humanness of Jesus' gospel. Where is there to be found a social ideal like this Christian Ideal of humanity, and the salvation of humanity, which Jesus came preach- ing in the gospel of the kingdom of heaven ? (3) While this kingdom belongs thus to humanity, and in its idea and purpose is for man, it is also something 1 Whether any individuals may througli persistent sin fall out of this true humanity and its consummation, is another question ; the point ahove is that no man can attain to tlie supreme ,2:ood, can have everlasting life, except by ha\iug part in man's redemption from evil. 104 CHRISTIAN ETHICS superlmman. It is the kingdom, that is, of God for man — • the kinofdom of heaven established and advancino- on earth. Jesus' ideal for man had its centre of licrht and racUant power in God. The coming of the kingdom is a revelation of God. This good comes from above, and is to be gradu- ally naturalized in the Christian life and institutions of humanity. It does not come of flesh and blood, but of the Spirit. We must not disguise this contrast between the Christian ideal and the best scientific hope of humanity at the very point where the two bear otherwise the closest resemblance. There is a scientific humanitarianism, very like the Christian, which our age has won. The supreme ethical good is conceived in terms of the worthiest happi- ness of the greatest number. The ideal which all our sciences should serve, is the largest possible fulfilment of the life of humanity. This is also a Christian conception, and herein evolutionary and Christian ethics are looking in the same direction. But the resemblance is framed in a larger contrast. Christian humanitarianism is the hope of the glorification of man through the Spirit of God. Jesus' gospel of the kingdom of heaven is not the same as a gospel of some possible better kingdom to spring up from the earth. It is the annunciation of a spiritual power in man working for a good which is here and now to be real- ized, but which is not to be limited by the conditions of present environment, and which has in itself the potency and the promise of higher spiritual life and perfection. As the sky is to be found at every point when we lift our eyes to the horizon, and the whole earth has its existence in the sky which encompasses it ; so when we look to the end of any human effort, and reach in our thought the horizons of all earthly perfection, Christian ethics beholds this good of humanity contained in a larger prospect, and having its place and order as a part of the whole kingdom of heaven. We belong to this kingdom of heaven as men who are immortals. We receive these present beginnings of character and its moral good as the heirs of an eternal inheritance. In the teaching of Jesus two phrases for the reign of CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 105 the perfect good occur, — the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven. The redeemed and perfected society of men is the kingdom of God, because it is of God and from Him in its origin, its conservation, its growth, and its promise of final consummation. It is the kingdom of heaven, because it is heavenly in its spirit, and celestial also in its hope of life bej^ond all death.^ (4) A further characteristic of Jesus' ideal to be ol> served in his doctrine of the kingdom of God, lies in his teaching concerning the manner of its coming, or the law of the realization of the ideal good among men. This characteristic becomes striking when we compare the teaching of the gospels in this respect with ideas of the Messianic time which became current among the Jews in the early days of Christianity. According to a popular Jewish belief, at the time of the Babylonian captivity, when the holy city had been laid waste and the temple destroyed, the tabernacle and ark of God, the two tables of the law, the altar, all the holy vessels, and the insignia of the high priest, were carried off, and safely hidden in the earth either at Mt. Nebo, or, as the Samaritans affirmed, in their holy mountain of Gerizim.2 The recovery of these sacred vessels from the earth in which they were hidden was to signalize the restora- tion of the kingdom. Pilate had lost his office and been sent in banishment to Gaul, not because he had refused Roman justice to Jesus whom he delivered to be crucified, but on account of his cruel massacre at Mt. Gerizim of Samar- itans who had gone in triumphal procession to dig up the hidden glory of the Messianic kingdom from the graund.^ That was one Jewish way of praying for the coming of the kingdom ; — restore the past ; give us back the former power ; recover the sacred vessels ; dig in the past 1 By the Rabbis the expressions kingdom, kingdom of God, and kingdom of heaven, seem to have been used interchangeably, but to have been distin- guished from the kingdom of the Messiah, or future Messianic world-age. Heaven was often used instead of the name of God. See references in Eder- sheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, vol. i. p. 267. 2 See 2 Mac. ii. 2-8; Apocalypse of Baruch, vi. 7-10. ® Ewald, Hist, of Israely v. p. 69. 106 CHRISTIAN ETHICS to find the future. So the Jews guarded the tombs of the prophets, and hoped that the signs of the nation's glory might be exhumed from some cave of the earth. Many looked also in an opposite direction for the Messianic world-age. In the days of tribulation they had imagined that the glory of the kingdom was transferred bodily to heaven, and they expected that at the time appointed it would descend with sudden and supernatural power from heaven. According to one tradition, the sacred vessels had been taken up into heaven, and were there kept until they should be restored at the coming of the Messiah. While the Samaritans were digging for the sacred treas- ures at Mt. Gerizim, the Pharisees in Jerusalem were look- ing for a sign from heaven. In this expectation of the Rabbis the national hope had been celestialized,^ but not sj)iritualized. The heavenly Jerusalem they thought had stood originally in paradise before Adam fell. Later it had been shown to Abraham in a vision of the night. Moses also saw it on Mt. Sinai. Ezra also saw it in a vision. It exists still in the heavens. In the Messianic day this heavenly city is to descend to earth and to take the place of the Jerusalem which now is. Schiirer, opus cit. Div. ii.vol. ii. p. 169 ; Apocalypse o/Baruch, iv. 2-6. By some supernal means, according to this mode of expectation, the final and supreme good in the coming world- age is to be brought down ready-made from heaven. Jewish teachers, it is true, regarded the Messianic age as delayed by the sins of the people; the Rabbis said, " If all Israel should together for one whole day offer a common repentance, redemption through the Mes- siah would follow. If Israel should keep only two Sabbaths, as is fitting, they would at once be redeemed." Weber, opus cit. s. 334. Beyschlag says with truth that in the sensuously formed expectation of the people the material was the substance, and the spiritual was the accident. Leben Jesu, i. s. 325. Neither of these modes of conceivino^ the restoration of God's rule is ethical. No obedience to a law of moral progress enters into such prayer for the coming of the reign of love on earth. We need only point out how striking a contrast is pre- sented by the whole teaching of Jesus concerning the com- ing of his kingdom. Sacrifice is the method of his rule. 1 Ewald, Hist, of Israel, vi. p. 108. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 107 His thought of his own sufferings and death, of the mission of his disciples, of the witness of his Spirit, is profoundly ethical ; and his prophetic discourses concerning the im- pending judgments and the end of the world, as w^ell as his parables of the increase of his kingdom, shovr his reliance upon moral forces, and his knowledge of the pro- found ethical processes through Avhich God's will is to be done on earth as in heaven. The Lord's prayer. Thy king- dom come, is a prayer of moral consecration on the lips of every disciple who repeats it in the Master's spirit, and who would do God's will on earth. The catastrophes which the gospels predict are primarily ethical ones ; the world-age to come is to be preceded by a moral judgment ; the gospel is to pervade humanity as a moral leaven ; both the wdieat and the tares are to grow together until the harvest. Jesus had taught that his kingdom was already present when he stood among men in the power of the Spirit of God. And it was to come to men without observation as they should receive his Spirit. The law of its progress was to be the law of a spiritual coming. The kingdom of heaven is present in any spiritual presence on this earth. It becomes real in the Christian spirit of a society or a nation. Not through the restoration of any sacred treasures of a buried past, not at once with sudden signs from heaven, are we to look for the promised redemption ^ ; but the highest good of which man is capable, and of which prophets have dreamed, is to be realized on earth through the gradual and increasing spiritualization of the life of humanity. In the new hearts of men, in the better spirit of the laws, and the more Christian cast of the social institutions of the world, we are to discern the signs of the growing ful- filment of the prayer which the Son of man has taught us to pray to the Father in heaven, "Thy kingdom come." This process of the gradual spiritualization of life is to be conceived as a purely religious, ethical process ; and as such, Jesus' idea of the method through which man is to attain to the ideal ends of his being, differs by the whole 1 Cf . Matt. xxiv. 27 with xiii. 30-33. 108 • CHRISTIAN ETHICS diameter of the ethical idea from the worldly and super- naturalistic conceptions which were becoming current amid the later spiritual hopelessness of Judaism. The New Testament ideal, then, of the highest good, so far as it is opened to our analysis of it in Jesus' preaching of the gospel of the kingdom of God, is personal and human, yet transcendent and spiritual ; an ideal of human- ity to be reached through ethical processes, to become real as the reign of love and the moral presence of God on earth. II. Jesus' moral ideal is presented to us in another form in his saying, in the Sermon on the Mount, that men should be perfect even as their Father which is in heaven is perfect. The text may be read either as commandment or prom- ise ; and in either case it is one of .the most remarkable of the sayings of Jesus. The moral originality of it ap- pears at a glance the instant we conceive of this single word of the Lord as set in the midst of the thoughts of the ancient philosophers, or try to read it into the traditions of the scribes and Pharisees. We need to recall the scene where this revelation of the Christian ideal for men was first given, and remember to what peo- ple it was announced, in order that we may apprehend its full import, and appreciate its moral origin ality.^ Had these words been spoken by the Master at some moment of moral enthusiasm only to a few choice spirits, they might not have seemed so impossible. But the multi- tudes listened, astonished at his teaching.^ No wonder that even the doctrine of Jesus seemed miraculous to people accustomed to the words of the scribes. For this is the moral wonder of Jesus' ideal that it was held up — • a pure commandment and promise of perfect good — be- fore all men's eyes ; that his heavenly ideal of man was not lowered or abated before any publican or sinner. 1 The exegesis of Matt, v.-vii. fails to interpret Christ's thought almost in proportion as it remains critical. Christ's preaching needs to be translated into sermonic language, aglow with present experience of life. 2 The sermon was for the multitude, although Jesus taught directly the disciples. Cf. Matt. v. 1 with vii. 28-29. CONTEXTS OF THE CHRISTIAX IDEAL 109 The Christian Ideal would seem remarkable enough in its ap^Dlication to men, had the word of the Christ stopped only with the thought of some possible perfection for them ; but it becomes more significant by reason of the moral rule or standard of perfection which is immediately associated with the commandment, — "As your heavenly Father is perfect." ^ In these latter words we find revealed a distinctive sign and excellence of the Christian moral ideal. It is an absolute* ideal ; no law can be more imper- ative than is this commandment of perfection. Kant did not frame a categorical maxim of duty which is at once so simple, so universal, and so authoritative as this word of Christ to the people. Moral philosophy can reach no more exalted or comprehensive generalization of duty. It is high as the heavens. It is pure as light. Viewed as the general form of the moral imperative, nothing can be more comprehensive. Scientific ethics in its induction of the law of good from the numberless particulars of human relations, can find no larger expression for its generaliza- tion of duty as the highest efficiency of the whole social organism than is this commandment of the gospel, — Ye shall be perfect, according to the perfection of the Creator of all. That is perfection of man according to his type, in conformity to the highest idea of his being, for his original and archetypal being is divine ; and such fulfilment of the true type of humanity is the broadest and most compre- hensive idea of the good which any scientific generaliza- tion can compass. While, however, this commandment yields to no moral conception as an abstract form for duty, or universal maxim of conduct, it possesses another quality which such moral generalizations lack, and the absence of which renders them comparatively powerless as motives in conduct. The added words of Jesus take the idea of perfection out of abstract generality, and cold legality, and inspire his com- mandment of perfection with the warmth of personality whose life is to be realized in love. For this is no un- 1 See also Luke vi. 36, where the mercy of the Father is made the standard of human mercy. 110 CHRISTIAN ETHICS human, or vague philosophic conception of the Godhead with which Jesus completes his moral commandment. The image of perfection which he sets immediately before humanity in its imperfection is not impassive law, nor is it exaltation even of divinity in its unheeding absoluteness and awful glory of self-completion. The Father, and the perfection of His Fatherhood, Jesus brings close to man; by his perfect Fatherhood man shall learn at once the measure of his duty and the possibilities of his moral sonship. In the Fatlier's likeness, and according to the Father's manner of being perfect, ye also shall be perfect. The nature of this perfection we may learn as we seek to apprehend ethically Jesus' idea of God. But without anticipating ourselves, it is enough to remark at this point that the context of the teaching in v/hich this moral ideal for the people was given, brings to man a new ethi- cal religious truth, opens a larger, happier revelation of God as love. The Father in heaven, in whose name Jesus blessed his disciples, is not perfect as law, but as love — perfect in love's way and measure, as their Father who knows what they need. In the same way, by the same method, men are to seek for the moral end of their being. The one thing which the best of those Jews, the most righteous among them, had not learned, and which no scribe could teach, was the law and the measure of perfec- tion through love. Jesus' commandment included in its requirement of perfection a method also of its possible ful- filment; — God's Fatherhood was the standard, and life like the Father's in love should be the method of its reali- zation. As it is presented accordingly in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' ideal good for men is not only a conception of some absolute worth which shall command us in the authority of duty ; it is not merely the exaltation of an idea of perfect being conforming to its original type and harmonious in all its functions ; it is not some vague and vast conception of ultimate social good, which shall be attained though individuals fail, and only the few who survive at the end may rejoice in it ; it is the ideal of the perfect person, and the perfect life which is the open pos- CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 111 sibility of the moral universe for all men; the ideal for God's children which has its revelation and its attraction in the sure, central fact of God's perfect personality. The Christian Ideal, according to this teaching of Jesus, is warm and vital as with a personal love. It is the moral ideal for men which is revealed in the Fatherhood of God. III. The ideal of the highest good receives further interpretation in the words characteristic of Jesus' teach- ing, ' life,' ' eternal life.' These words occur in the earlier sources of Matthew's and Luke's gos- pels with sufficient frequency to indicate that they must often have been used in some sense by Jesus. That their peculiar use in the fourth gos- pel reflects an aspect of Jesus' original teaching, is not to be denied sim- ply on the ground that it is characteristic of John : on the contrary, this is to be assumed not only from the general evidence of an original apos- tolic source of the fourth gospel, but also from the agreement of John's conception of eternal life with the whole teaching of Jesus as recorded by the synoptists, and the fitness of this conception to explain the subsequent apostolic development of the idea of spiritual life with Christ. This is well argued by Wendt, Die Lehre Jesu, ii. ss. 196 ff. Without entering into the question, which belongs rather to dogmatics, whether the adjective, eternal, which appears in the gospels in connection with the substantive, life, in- volves or not of itself the idea of everlasting existence, we observe that the two words together contain a moral positive, and are meant to describe the highest end and fullest conceivable good of existence. The two words, as combined in the gospels, are used to signify life at its highest power and in its completest conceivable realiza- tion. An alternative phrase, which occurs, according to an approved reading, in one of the epistles serves to bring out clearly this moral positive in the gospel conception of eternal life : " That they may lay hold on the life which is life indeed." i The love of life is not only an instinct of nature, but it possesses moral significance. Give us life — more life and richer — life of wilder scope — life full as an ocean-tide — life unbounded, limitless, free ; — what mortal man has not felt at times as a moral passion of his soul this hungering and 1 1 Tim. vi. 19. 112 CHRISTIAN ETHICS thirsting after life which shall be life indeed? The Chris- tian Ideal does not ignore nor condemn, nor set aside as insignificant, this more than animal passion of the soul for life. Rather it takes it up, expands and glorifies it in its promise of the eternal life. Our earthly task, according to Christian ethics, is to lay hold on life.^ Life, not death, is good. We may distinguish more particularly certain moral elements which are contained in Jesus' words, " eternal life," " hath eternal life," " hath passed out of death into life." 2 (1) As already suggested the thought is plainly involved in these expressions that life is a good. Personal life is some- thing morally to be desired. Our love of life is a moral love of it. Life, Avhich for us, and in our consciousness of it, means not merely existence, but continued personal being, is itself an object of ethical desire : it is a good will of God to be realized in the preservation of his children. In a certain degree, within the limits of created being, there has been imparted to the moral person the gift of hav- ing life in himself, — a power of life which in its original and creative fulness belongs to the nature of the Godhead.^ To the Son who represents the moral creation and is its end and fulness, God has granted this power of having life in himself. Personal life, once gained, is a good not to be lost. Life so far as it has been realized in conscious personality is to be preserved, and, if morally kept, it shall not fall backwards down the scale of creation. To whatever degree life has been as yet realized in personality, to that measure of at- tainment it is to be held up ; it is not to be suffered to lapse, to fall below itself, to sink from the plane of person- ality to the level of the mere existence from which it has been uplifted into self-consciousness. Life, personal life, is to be regarded as an achievement of spirit, itself the at- tainment of a creative end of being. And this achieve- ment of the spirit is to be preserved in the final good.* 1 1 Tim. vi. 12. 2 Matt. xxv. 46; John xvii. 3 ; vi. 54 ; v. 24. 8 John V. 26. ^ Luke xxi. 19 ; the soul is to be won. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 113 There may be still higher possibilities of life unknown to us through any earthly experience ; but this sure and supreme good of our spiritual experience of life, which has been reached and won at the height of the creation to which we have been exalted, is in its nature an eternal good ; — the Christian ideal may be contained in these two words, eternal life. And in fulfilment of the continual prophecy of life from its first stirring in matter, and of the whole struggle and ascent of life upwards, the Christ might say, " I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." ^ (2) The promise of life contains also, as an element in the Christian conception of the highest good, the hope of life as a good to be delivered from evil. The Christian moral ideal is opposed to death and the dominion of death. Life, which is good in itself, shall be delivered from the power of the evil. Freedom from pain and death, the pres- ent enemies of life, — an ultimate emancipation of life from the grasp of anything unfriendly to it, — is involved in the very idea of life as a good in itself ; that idea requires the hope of deliverance from the law of death which obtains in nature up to man, but which, so far as it has gained power over man, seems to be a denial of the good of wdiich he has become conscious, and an inexplicable contradiction of the freedom of his will. According to these brief gospel phrases, " eternal life," " life indeed," the Christian Ideal of the good is an assurance of the final ascent of life above the lower dominion of death ; it is the assertion that the law of life is superior to the law of death ; that life, and not death, is lord in the realm of moral personality; that moral good shall be held finally in no dependent and fear- ful existence which the least thing in nature ma}^ wound, and a mere breath ma}^ destroy ; but it is to be realized in spiritual independence of suffering and some future pos- session of being above all possible reach or thought of death.2 (3) The idea of eternal life which appears in the gospels is brought into close relation to the further idea of spiritual 1 John X. 10. 2 John vi. 50 ; Rom. vi. 8-9 ; 1 Cor. xv. 22-58. 114 CHRISTIAN ETHICS renewal. It is life not only redeemed from evil, but a new life proceeding from a birth of the Spirit.^ Hence, as we shall have to notice more particularly in subsequent discussions, the truth of a salvation from evil to newness of life, enters into and colors the whole Christian concep- tion of the highest good. (4) The Christian Ideal, as eternal life, involves still further a positive conception of life as the fulness and completeness of personal relationships. There is a vast difference between mere existence and life. A tree exists in the winter ; it lives in every leafy bough of it in the month of June. The New Testament conception of eternal life is existence . in its full blossom and fruitfulness. The prospect of life which Jesus held before the faith of his disciples was no colorless promise, no unsubstantial and meaningless hope of far-off felicity. He revealed life in its fulness and fruition. The idea of the completion of all the familiar good of personal rela- tionships gives glow and home-like cheer to the Christian's hope of eternal life. The supreme good is no philosophic life of pale contemplation, or loss of personal consciousness in some infinite passiveness of being; it is living at its highest, intensest, and fullest, in all that makes life worth living. The eternal life, which is the highest good, is life quickened in all the powers of one's being, and entering with ever fresh and quick responsiveness into the personal relationships in which our humanity is realized. The highest good, in the Christian conception of it, becomes thus in one word intensely vital. It is being, moral being, personality, vitalized to the utmost. That such was Jesus' thought of the eternal life appears from the words which he used in connection with his promises to his disciples. His descriptive words concern- ing the life which he had come to give abundantly, are not borrowed from the splendors of material things. He has little or nothing to say of thrones, and riches, and spa- cious mansions, and a city of golden resplendence ; these common and material images of future felicity rarely 1 Cf. John iii. 3, with iii. 15. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 115 occur, or are touched only by a passing \Yorcl in the Lord's speech concerning the heaven from which he came, and in which his heart ahvays dwelt. But when he would prepare his own for his absence for time's " little while " from them, he drops entirely the splendid imagery in which the prophets had conceived of the future glory of Zion ; Jesus uses the simplest, most personal words as his words of promise ; he chooses vital things as the signs of his presence ; he describes the life into which he should ascend, and in which they too were to have part, in the terms of personal companionship. These relations of living friendship and communion constitute heaven's supreme good; in these relationships of most worth to human hearts its final felicity shall be made perfect : " Because I live, ye shall live also " ; " And again a little while, and ye shall see me " ; "I go unto the Father " ; " Even as the Father hath loved me, I also have loved you"; "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one.''^ So Jesus makes, not all manner of precious stones, but the personal pronouns, his symbols of heaven. The commun- ion of chosen and consecrated friends, for whom the Mas- ter blessed the wine of life, is the prophetic picture, which our Lord has given us, of the kingdom of heaven when he shall come again .^ This positive content of Jesus' idea of the highest moral good as the perfectness of personal life in the communion of men with God, and with one another in God's light, surpasses imagination, yet it comes close home to human hearts ; though it is the ideal of a transcendent perfectness, it is at the same time real and near as the simplest relation- ship of love in which a man may now find his truest and best life. The moral advantage of this Christian Ideal is that it enables us to lay hold of the surpassing thought of perfec- tion by those elements in our experience which are now most real and of known worth to us. This is a positive human conception of good, though supernal, which is brought to us in the promise of eternal life. An image of it near, and 1 John xiv.-xvii. 2 ^Isctt. xx^i. 29. 116 CHRISTIAN ETHICS real, and true, may be found in the human home. In Christian ethics the home becomes itself image and type of the highest good, the sign of heaven on earth. One may look in vain in all other ethics, ancient or mod- jern, for a conception of the supreme good so vital, so human, so home-like as this. Nowhere has life been so thoroughly, broadly, and transcendently, yet humanly conceived as in itself and its completion the very essence and substance of the good. (5) This ideal of the eternal life as the fulness and per- fectness of j)ersonal good involves necessarily as tributary to it, or as elements in which it shall realize itself, the moral ideas of holiness, righteousness, benevolence, love. But it contains more than any of these words alone may express ; it is the substantive of which they are the predi- cates ; it is that fulness and positiveness of good in which all these moral elements consist ; for it is a living good, a living perfectness, a living harmony of being; it is life, conscious, complete, personal, in the communion of life. The nearest approach which can be made to a definition of it is contained in that profound word of Jesus by which life is described as a knowing God ; — " And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ." ^ Life is knowing — not a knowledge of things merely, not a science of the creation ; — to master and possess a science is not to live ; — life, eternal life, is a jcerson^? knowing the only true God, and Him in whom man and God are one. And this thought, which was always in the mind of Jesus, of the true life in oneness with God, finds reflection in the words of the beloved disciple : " This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols." ^ In comparison with this know- ing the true God, and eternal life, all other knowledge is idolatry ; all other goods which are not possessed as parts and elements of this supreme good are idols. 1 John xvii. 3. Wendt argues that by these words Jesus does not declare in what the eternal life consists, but in what lies the means to win it, Lehre Jesn, ii. s. 190, But the words, "This is," etc., imply something concerning the nature of the life. See Weiss, opus cit. §. 208. - 1 John v. 20-21. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 117 (6) In this conception of the highest good as eternal life, is involved also the idea of it as in part a present reality and an immediate possession. This conception of eternal life as a present life of faith, seems peculiar to the fourth gospel. While the other disciples understood Christ to say that the righteous shall go into eternal life (Matt. xxv. 46), John remem- bers that the Master had likewise spoken of the believer as one who hath eternal life, who is passed from death unto life (John iii. 30 ; v. 24) . The synoptists, however, represent Jesus as teaching that the kingdom of God is in part already come (Luke xvii. 21): similarly John speaks of the eternal life, which, in his conception of salvation, had taken almost entirely the place of the idea of the kingdom. See Weiss, opus cit. s. 208 (a). We may have the eternal good in some measure of it in time. We do not yet possess it completely, nor in its moral perfectness above all touch of evil and possibility of loss ; but we may have it now, and have it really, though not fully ; we may have it as we have love, not in its whole purity and power, yet in some living and growing truth of it. In Christian ethics the ideal good is not, as sometimes men have erroneously supposed, a distant felicity only — some crown of happiness hereafter to be received; but it is a life which is already life indeed, — a true, and eternal kind of life to be begun now in the truth and worth of all pure personal relation- ships, to be kept alike in the joy and through the sorrow which falls upon love, and to be made perfect in the com- pletions of futurity. We do not, therefore, fall into a contradiction of speech, or use a meaningless phrase, when we say that we may have now eternal life. A man has entered into the eter- nal life so far as he possesses the love which constitutes its essential good ; a man falls out of the eternal life when he falls from love, and enters into hate which is the denial of all good. Through hate we pass under the dominion of death ; in love we pass into a life of eternal possibili- ties, which is in its own good of an eternal nature, as the true God, who is love, is from everlastinof to everlastincr. Thomas Erskine gave striking expression to this truth when he wrote : " Eternal life is living in the love of 118 CHRISTIAN ETHICS God ; eternal death is living in self ; so that a man may be in eternal life or eternal death for ten minutes, as he changes from the one state to the other." ^ In other words, the positive ethical content of Jesus' -word, eternal life, is not the time-element, but the personal element of life : — eternal life consists, in its essential content, in knowing God Avho is love.^ And this in part may be a present knowledge. We need not wait for death to know wliat true life is ; we have not to pass through some mystery of bodily change before we can begin to live with our fellow-men and unto God in that relationship of love which is already true life, and as such is eternal in its good. The time-element in this conception of eternal life does not belong to its positive ethical contents, but it may to its metaphysical conditions. Finite moral life may possibly never become wholly independent of a metaphysical condition of succession. Time may always be for finite persons the necessary form for the realization of that eternal life which consists in love. Yet in true life we even now grow conscious of a cer- tain relative independence of time. AVe subordinate the element of time to the life itself, and almost at times forget time. Life in its high- est spiritual intensity becomes a certain unconsciousness of time. We triumph over the years in memory ; we leap over the succession of events in hope ; love needs no dates, but is an ever present reality. Time is relative to the thinking mind ; we do not live always by our watches, but often by our thoughts. The hours become as moments in intense thought ; or to anxious love the moments may become as hours, and time in turn gain overpowering mastery. While our experience which lies now wholly in the order of time, does not enable us indeed to con- ceive positively of a spiritual manner of existence which shall be wholly raised out of time, and be timeless life ; yet our present limited indepen- dence of time, our power to make our own time in thought, is sufficient to suggest that some future, higher mode of spiritual perfectness may become possible to us, which shall be far more independent of the flight of the stars, and not be bound in necessity so limiting, and often so impatiently felt by us, to the order of outward successions. Though we must remain always finite, we may become more Godlike in greater spiritual indepen- dence of temporal successions. (7) In Jesus' thought of the highest good as eternal life there is involved also the conception of blessedness as its element and atmosphere. ^ The true life does not con- 1 Letters, p. 425. 2 John xvii. 3; 1 John v. 20. 3 The promise of rewards appears more prominently in the earlier sources than in the fourth gospel: Matt. v. 12; xix. 29; Mark x. 30; Luke xviii. 30; but John notices the joy and peace of the life of Christ : xiv. 27 ; xv. 11. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 119 sist in the happiness of it, yet it is not to be conceived as realized without happiness. Blessedness is both its natural result and its necessary form of existence. Happi- ness is not the material but the formal nature of the true, the eternal life. In proportion as the true life is lived by any moral being, in that proportion it brings happiness, and creates an atmosphere of joy; in propor- tion as the true life shall be lived throughout the moral universe, will the conditions which occasion unhappiness disappear. The two conceptions, eternal life and blessed- ness, belong together, and are necessary each to the other, as matter and form ; as being and the element in which being exists ; or as light and ethereal motion. God, the good, is over all, God blessed forever. Nothing has worked more moral harm in religion than false ideas of this relation and unity, as of matter and form, between true life and its happiness. If the good be held apart from all thought of happiness as in itself above all to be desired, without regard to the conditions under which it may find its perfect realization, then a false asceticism may result, and an unnatural divorce of hajDpi- ness from the moral ideal avenges itself always in a loss of some virtues of the true life. Character was not made to grow in a vacuum, but in a sunny air. The en- deavor to rise above all thought of happiness in morals Quds in a fall from the full idea of moral manhood in the world. The idle cloistered saint, the unclean and uncom- fortable monk, the soul whose moral life has been stunted and starved in the midst of human relations which are good, is the offspring of this illicit sundering of the ideas of virtue and happiness. On the other hand, nothing can be more morally enervating and deadening in religion than a pursuit of heaven for its supposed reward, or from the desire merely to escape hell-fire. Jesus, while on earth, had occasion to rebuke those who sought him for the sake of the loaves and the fishes ; the disposi- tion would be as reprehensible in the disciples if they should seek the Christ for the sake of the heavenly loaves and fishes. To be religious for the purpose of gras]3ing 120 CHRISTIAN ETHICS some future re^\ard while holding on as tightly as possi- ble to present happiness, would prove disastrous, both here and there, to the life of love which is the eternal life. Other-world selfishness deserves all the satire with which it has been visited by the scientific moralists. A healthful and sound Christian consciousness does not neoflect or confound either of these elements of the true, or eternal kind of life. It consists in perfectness of being, and it is moral perfectness rejoicing in the sunshine of God's presence. It is essentially virtue according to the image of Christ; and with Christ it ascends, as to its native element, into heaven. The blessing cannot be realized without the virtue : as the sunshine could not be seen except by tlie eye open to its beams. Scientific morality least of all should find any difficulty or reproach in this correlation in the Christian Ideal of perfect being and final blessedness; for it is only carrying out to full fruition the truth, which runs through and through the whole evolutionary conception of the universe, of the adaptation of being to its favoring conditions, and the reign of each successive species in its fitting environment. The Christian doctrine of heaven, in its conception of virtue and happiness, is the scientific evolutionary optimism car- ried out to the last and highest survival of moral being in its consummate blessedness. Thus far we have been studying the Christian Ideal of the supreme good to be desired as it lies evidently before us in certain words of the gospels. But the ideal which shines from the gospels is not in word onlj^ but in power. It is given to us not in the doctrine only of Jesus, but in liis character. IV. The Christian Ideal is Jesus himself as he was known on earth by those who were eye-witnesses of hii glory, and as he has been glorified through his Spirit in the adoration of his Church. In order to perceive this moral ideul in its personal revelation in Christ we do not need to borrow from the theology of the Church that careful doctrine of his person which was embodied as the result of three centuries of CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 121 thought in the Nicene creed. It is enough if we can draw near the humanly divine character which dwelt with men, — separate from all their sinfulness, and full of grace and truth, — of which the disciples were eye-witnesses. Jesus himself, coming from the Father and going to the Father, living while on earth as one in heaven,^ — known on earth by disciples whose lives were transformed by their knowledge of him, and manifested in the Spirit to succeed- ing generations as theLord and Saviour of men — winning ever as of old the first affections of childhood's innocence, commanding the passions of men, and followed by woman's utmost devotion — Jesus himself is the ideal of Christian history; he is the Light, itself unequalled and unexplained, whose luminous mystery of divinity, shining full in the thought of the world, makes all lesser mysteries of our mortality become bright as with the presence of God. The personal ideal of the perfect life was re- vealed indeed in the Christ under historical conditions and within the limitations of time and space. The his- torical Christ must appear at a definite place and time. He must work the works of God on a single field and among a chosen people. He must needs suffer on earth, and die as a man, before he can rise, and ascend, and come again as the Lord from heaven. Amid these earthly limi- tations, and under these historical conditions, " the Light which lighteth every man, coming into the world," was revealed, and the Highest Good gave itself as example and law of our life ; but once revealed, it abides as the in- spiration of goodness in men. The influence of Jesus is a perpetual influence ; in His Name is named whatever is most worthy our consecration of power, our devotion of heart, our endless endeavor of life. Yet because the Christian ethical ideal is thus personally realized in Christ, and personally operative in the Spirit of Christ, for this very reason it does not admit of complete definition, nor can those who see it most purely, or whose lives imitate it most powerfully, express or describe it to others in any adequate form of words. For there must 1 John iii. 13. 122 CHRISTIAN ETHICS always be something beyond definition in personal life and its virtue. No rich personality has ever put itself wholly into speech. In personal love and influence there is always more of the Spirit than has been measured, waiting to be revealed. Of the supreme Life and the virtue wdiich went out from it, we must still say, as St. Hilary wrote of old, '' We are constrained to extend the lowliness of our human speech to things which are inexpressible ; so that what should be kept in devout contemplation is brought to the peril of human utterance." ^ Thus the Christian Ideal, which was incarnate in the Person of the Christ, goes ever before his Church, in fulness of life and spiritual splendor, as the glory of the Lord still to be revealed in his future coming, surpassing the hope of the apostles, the joy of the martyrs, the vision of the saints. The Christ in the spiritual consciousness of the Church, loved, dreamed of, followed, worshipped, hoped for as the final and full revelation of the glory of God, appears even greater and more divine than the Jesus whom disciples knew and followed on earth ; — an apostle could say, " Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know him so no more." ^ The Christian Ideal in its still unrealized and inexpressible glory and transcendence is the Christ known after the Spirit. Our ideal is the Christ sitting at the right hand of the Majesty on high. Such being in general the Christian Ideal in its historical revelation, we pass next to a description of three of the more important characteristics of its contents which are to be observed in the Christian consciousness. The Christian Ideal, in these aspects of it, may then be compared with moral ideals which have been gained independently of Christianity, or which spring up on the borders of the influence of Christian ideas. 1 De Trin. ii. 2. 22 Cor. v. 16. CONTEXTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 123 11. THE IDEAL IX THE CHRISTIAX COXSCIOUSXESS I. The Christian Ideal which has been historicaUy given in Christ, as it is to be found in the spiritual conscious- ness of Christians, is an absolute ideal. There is nothing higher, nothing so commanding. It is the absolute moral imperative of Christian character. " But if any man," said an apostle, realizing the absolute inward law of the righteousness of Christ, " hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." ^ All that Kant sought to secure for morality in the abstract categorical imperative of the law is won for the Christian consciousness in the living imperative of the Spirit of Christ. This moral ab- soluteness of the Christian Ideal is not, however, a philo- sophic distillation of the essence of all morality into some single, general maxim, like Kant's categorical imperative. The Christian law has indeed its unsurpassable golden rule ; yet Christian morality is not to be reduced to any general formula of conduct, however excellent ; for the Christian law is a living commandment, a law of the Spirit to the spirit of man.2 As such it has an absolute authority. This unconditional imperative of the Christian Ideal within the soul manifests itself both in the absolute quality of character which it requires, and the absolute idea of conduct which it introduces. It is an absolute Be this, and also an absolute Bo this. 1. The absolute quality of the Christian Ideal of charac- ter is holiness. The Old Testament idea of holiness springs from the conception of a Being who exists apart from the evil and the passion of this world. The Holy One of Israel is the only true God who is separate from the world and its evil, as the gods of the heathen in the popu- lar mythologies had not been kept pure from the passions and the sins of mortals, but had often been conceived of as immersed in the sensuousness of the world, and even bound up in its fate. Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel, is the exalted Lord who dwells in the highest heavens, 1 Rom. viii. 9. 2 Rom. viii. 2. 124 CHRISTIAN ETHICS self-contained and almighty, perfect and wanting nothing in his own majesty and power. Holiness is the spiritual transcendence of God. It signifies the very godhead of the Deity. - But sacredness, or apartness of life from evil, while it is a primary element of holiness, does not fill out the whole Old Testament conception of the Holy One of Israel. Holiness does not remain a negative and fruitless idea in the religion of Israel, as the abstract idea of a passionless good remained morally inoperative and inert in the phi- losphy of Greece. The idea of the divine holiness became a purifying and consecrating power in the religious thought and moral conduct of the people of Israel who felt them- selves called to be a holy nation, even as the Lord their God was holy.i Their thought of holiness was not simply a con- ception of pure Being dwelling apart in some unapproachable light, but also the consciousness of a present and peculiarly sacred covenant relation of Jehovah with his people, any violation of which on their part was condemned as the sin of national adultery. The holiness of the Lord their God in its revelation to lawgiver and prophet, was a pure will of God to be done on the earth. 2. With this positive conception of holiness at the heart of the true religion there sprang up also the passion for righteousness which flames and glows in the prophets, and which even in its later rigid congealment in Juda- ism became the moral firmness of the nation. The absolute moral quality of being, or holiness, requires as its expression, or outward consequence, an absolute moral worthiness in conduct, or righteousness .^ The word right, in its root idea in the Old Testament, runs back into the idea of physical straightness ; to walk in righteousness is to walk in straight paths. Righteousness is moral straight- forwardness. Straightness or rightness of conduct imj)lies some rule by which conduct is to be measured ; the word righteousness in the Old Testament seems to have con- tained the moral conception of conformity to some norm ; it 1 Deut. xiv. 2, 21 ; JLev. xi. 44-45 ; xvii -xxvi., — the " Law of Holiness." 2 See Is. V. IG. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 125 was a forensic term ; indeed, in the earlier conception of it righteousness was " not so much a moral quality as a legal status." ^ This rule of righteousness the Hebrew man found in the law of God. Righteousness became synonymous with obedience to the law of the Lord. The conception of this law of righteousness grew more ethical and spiritual in the prophetic consciousness of religion; and we have seen also how it passed in later times into the external and oppressive legalism of the scribes ; but the original con- ception of a law of conduct was not lost; it was cleared of the overgrowth of baneful observances, and thor- oughly ethicized, in the Christian Ideal of righteousness. In the New Testament righteousness is still an absolute law of life ; but it is a righteousness whose measure and rule is to be found in no merely external authority and in no maxim of the scribes ; its law is inward and spiritual, for it is the righteousness of faith in Clirist. The Christian rule of conduct is the perfect Character. The standard of righteousness by which conduct is to be made straight, and in comparison with which conduct shall be finally judged, is the law of the Spirit within the heart. Hence the attainment of Christian righteousness, amid the change- ful moral relations of a human life, becomes no more a ser- vile act of obedience as to some foreign rule, but is a free and glad fulfilment of love in the spirit of a son in the Father's house. And there is and can be no higher con- ception of rightness in all personal relations of men than is given in this Christian idea of righteousness as the ful- filling the ideal law of love, or having in daily life the Spirit of Christ. Thus the idea of righteousness, instead of remaining, as in our moral systems it too often does, a cold, impassive, and hard requirement, which goes against our blood, is itself warmed up, made attractive, and filled with a spiritual light ; duty itself in the ethics of Chris- tianity becomes free and hopeful as a gracious act. The Christian Ideal as absolute, both qualitatively and quantitatively — in spirit and in conduct — as holiness and righteousness — is the Christian law of conscience. The 1 W. Robertson Smith, The Prophets of Israel, p. 72. 126 CHRISTIAN ETHICS moral law in the Christian consciousness is the authority of the Christian ideal-good. As God is the good, realizing in his own fulness of life the moral good, so the divine Jaw is the will in which God's moral being finds expression of its absolute Avorth. The fullest historic expression of His good will is the life of Jesus Christ. Hence the Christ is revelation also of the law of God. He manifests the law in its spiritual perfection, and consequently his authority is final as the law of the Spirit in the Church of God. II. The Christian Ideal is extensive over all spheres of activity. It is an ideal coextensive with life. Man exists in a great variety and complexity of rela- tions, some of them changing, some of them constant : the ideal of man must extend to all these relations, and touch even the temporary and most transitory conditions and moods of his existence. If the moral ideal, which we have chosen, fails to reach any of the actual relations of our life, if it has to be stretched beyond its natural elas- ticity, or pieced out from other sources, in order that it may be made to extend over some new relation or include special circumstances of our experience, it is so far a defective ideal, and can no longer be regarded as the absolute human ideal of good. Coextension with hu- manity, and the whole life of humanity, is a necessary con- dition of the true ideal. That ideal must be adequate, moreover, to the full possibility, to the whole possible development, of the life of humanity. The human ideal must fit life naturally and by virtue of its own elastic correspondence to it, as the atmosphere fits the earth, sur- rounding every least blade of grass as well as enveloping the Alps, covering all plains, and resting over the ocean's expanse. To discover at any point of life the non-exten- sion of our ideal, would be to prove the ideal deficient. But to find our ideal expanding over life in any larger development of it, availing for every new and intricate social complication of it, is to gain fresh evidence of its divine- ness. Real life has the right to challenge the ideal of Christianity, and to press all its points of striving and of want upon it, and to ask, Does the ideal of the Christ answer these ? CONTENTS OF THE CHPwISTIAN IDEAL 127 This adequacy of the Christian Ideal to life, it will remain for us to discover and to test in its particulars in our subsequent discussion of practical ethics. At this point we are content to assert its extension as a necessary deduction from its absoluteness, and to affirm its sufficiency for life as a probable consequence of the vital fulness and power of i", which have already been observed in the gen- eral description of its contents. III. The Christian Ideal is comprehensive of all objects and aims that are good. Its comprehensiveness follows from its extension, yet the one quality is to be distinguished from the other. For the true ideal is not only extensive over every sphere of life, but it will comprehend also all the goods of being. The one absolute good must include all particular and indi- vidual goods, or comprehend in its unity the whole king- dom of human worths. Each sphere of being or kind of activity has its own good or end. There is a good of the senses, a good of each special sense, — beauty for the eye, harmony for the ear, pleasure for the taste, a genial glow of sensation for the comfort of the body. The intellect has its good, cor- responding to its rational nature ; and there are pleasures of the imagination as Avell as the '' splendid treasures of memory." The lieart has its kingdom of satisfactions ; and the spirit of man seeks the beatitude, for which it was made, in the vision of God. The true human ideal in its coex- tension with life, must comprehend these separate goods, and unite in its supreme conception all the worths of life.^ In this organic comprehension of the ideal, the social w^el- 1 The highest good, as Schleiermacher rightly apprehended it, is the organic connection of all goods, consequently of the whole moral being, under the con- ception of the highest good. Rothe says: " The highest moral good is not an individual special moral good, hut that moral good in which all individual moral goods are included, consequently the organic, united totality of the same." — Theol. Eth. § 104, 2. On the contrary, Marheineke maintains that the absolute good is not to be identified with the idea of a highest good to which other goods as lower may be relative: " The absolute good (Gute) . . . is the only real; it is not beside or for other goods (Giiter), as the last indeed, and as the highest, but it is the good (Gute) itself," etc. — Theol. Moral, ss. 137 ff. But this is an abstraction of the form of the absolute good from its contents. The particular goods of being are the contents which fill up the idea of the good as absolute. 128 CHRISTIAN ETHICS fare, together with individual attainments of good, is to be included. All natural ends of being are to find scope and to be harmonized and justified in it. All arts may con- tribute to it. The supreme good can exclude only that ^vhich is destructive of life, or contradictor}^ of being. Its trueness or holiness requires it to be exclusive of evil as it is inclusive of all good. But for such objects of desire or endeavor Avhich are not in themselves contra- dictory of the ideal, or unholy, an adequate human ideal must have space and freedom. To this test of comprehensiveness as well as extension, the Christian Ideal is rightly to be submitted. Any ideals which may be proposed are to be searched and verified by these tests of real life : Do they reach along all lines of activity, and comprise all goods of being? Is the pattern shown on your mount of vision large enough and rich enough to serve as an ideal for the people in the complex relations of society ? Let the least child, or the humblest man, or the loftiest and most aspiring spirit feel an im- pulse, or be capable of a motion, which is left out of our ideal, which cannot find free play and happy adjustment within its lines (so far as that is not an unmoral or de- structive impulse), and by that failure to comprehend it, the ideal itself would be condemned, the pattern be proved untrue to life. The comprehensiveness of the Christian Ideal, together with its extension, follows directly from its absoluteness ; yet its claim to these supreme qualities is to be verified in its continuous applications to real life. The conditions now proposed we shall keep in mind throughout our dis- cussions of practical ethics. Ideas and rules of conduct entertained in Christian communities are to be searched under these test questions. Other ideals or conceptions of the good should be brought to these same ethical requirements ; and we 2)i'oceed next to inquire how far some of the chief moral ideals which are un-Christian in their form, or anti-Christian in their spirit, will conduct themselves when subjected to exam- ination under these tests of extension and comprehension. CONTENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 129 III. COMPARISON OF THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL WITH OTHER IDEALS 1. The ideals which may be derived from the classic ethics, when compared with the developed Christian Ideal, will be seen to lack both extension and comprehension. They hold in general ver}^ much the same relation to Chris- tian ethics that the religion of Israel sustained to the teach- ing of Christ — a preparatory, educational relation; but even in the best products of the classic ethics much remains to be fulfilled. Individual utterances of the great ethical teachers of antiquity may be found which rise to noble conceptions of the ends of man's life ; and sentiments worthy of the saints may be culled from the writings of the Stoics. Plato dreams of divinest things, and Aristotle sometimes rises above his level of commonplace practical virtue, and speaks for a moment almost like a moral seer. A sentence like this in the Nicomachean ethics lifts us, at once, out of the mundane morality of prudence and tem- perance into a higher and purer atmosphere : " One ought not, according to the ordinary admonitions, to think as a man because one is a man, or as a mortal because one is mortal; but as far as possible one should make himself immortal, and do all in order to live according to that which is most excellent in him, for although it is little in quantity, yet in power and worth it is far exalted over all things." ^ We may admit with pleasure and contemplate with satis- faction the skilful portrayal of the happier features of the Roman morals which Mr. Lecky has drawn from many fine passages of antiquity.^ But Neander reminds us of "the shadowed side wliich we observe generally in the ancient ethics." ^ Careful historians of morals will not fail to see the sunny side of the classic literature ; yet the shadows and the chill of the darker side are known to all thorough students of the ethical conceptions of the ancient world. 1 Nic. Ethics, x. 7. ^ /^/,ia.^ The contrast is profound between the Christian idea of life as fulness of eternal good, and the prevailing thought in Buddhism of escape from suffering through the extinction, at least, of all desire of life. The determinative idea of salvation through deprivation natu- rally ended, if it did not begin, in the thought of the high- est good as the rest of an eternal death. Christianity in its final hope proclaims eternal life ; Buddhism in its final hope points to personal extinction.* 1 Sutta-nipdta, v. 843. 2 Ibid. p. 302. " Naturally this, like all other quietism, has its limits " : as mere scepticism ultimately must affirm its principle of denial. 3 Max Miiller thinks that in the conception of Nirva?ia, although not gener- ally, the earlier teaching of Buddha is to be distinguished from the later philo- sophical dogma of annihilation. — ^'cze/ice of Eelif/ion, pp. 138 sq. Passages may be quoted from the canonical literature of Buddhism to show that the word Nirva//a sometimes meant extinction of all desire, or absolute peace, and not necessarily annihilation of being ; but the existence, and hence the possibility of a continued existence of the individual soul, was not one of the affirmations of Buddhism. Perhaps the truth concerning the different con- ceptions, which are contained in the word Nirva??a, is hit in the opinion of Professor De La Saussaye {Science of Belif/ion, p. GOl), that official Buddhism hesitated to choose between the ideas of Nirvana as extinction of being or cessation of suffering. 4 For example, in the Buddhist book entitled The Foumlation of the King- dom of Rif/JitPOiij