tates the rooted aversion and contempt with which the world is regarded. How can the friendship of the world be other than refuse and filth? How can the principles of worldly prudence, repaying injuries, resisting evil, refusing forgiveness, be other than criminal folly, when even to think of them is to harbour disloyalty and treachery to God and to God's order? It is hate alone which is hated: scorn alone which is despised. Pride, insincerity, treachery: these are the ever-deepening circles which lead to the ice of some Dantesque abyss, the three vices against which the most terrible of the New Testament woes are hurled. Meekness, sincerity, endurance are the successive steps to the very rose of heaven, the dwelling of God the Father, who so loved the world that He gave to it, through His son, the great secret of sonship and brotherhood.

VI. Righteousness, it was said, is the mark of the Old Testament and New Testament alike, and we have seen that there is really no reason to doubt or alter that statement. God's covenant love is at the foundation of both. Yet there is a difference between the righteousness of the Old Testament and that of the New. The emphasis is changed. It is laid in the New, not so much on the things to be done, as on the way in which they are done, or on the man who does them. Christian ethics is not a certain view of right conduct between man and man: it is rather the principle of right conduct of one Christian to another, or to those who are meant to become Christians. The progress involved in Christian ethics is not "from status to contract," but from contract to status. The Covenant itself rests on status rather than contract.

And S. Paul never wearies of urging that Christians "are not under the law but under Grace." Now S. Paul,

equally with Christ himself, repudiates the idea of doing away with either law or the law. Christ said with perfect definiteness, "I am come not to destroy the law but to fulfil it." Still, Christianity does recognise a difference. The law, as fulfilled or to be fulfilled, by the Christian, and in Christ, is no longer a code: it is transformed to a privilege whereby those who love him shall keep his commandments as proof of their love, take his yoke upon them and so find rest to their souls. Even to the Jew, law is not simply a matter of codes: it is "Torah," instruction, intended, as Psalm 119 abundantly shows, to point out the way of blessedness. The Jew had the "Torah" of Jehovah; the Christian had the "nomos" of Christ. But to the Jew "Torah" came first; by the "Torah" was Jehovah approached: to the Christian, Christ came before the law as well as after it, and in rapt contemplation of Christ the law faded out of sight altogether.

Is the law, then, to be regarded, by Christian ethics, as antiquated? On the contrary, "So act as men that are to be judged by a law of liberty." The life of the Christian exemplifies the paradox of a service, a slavery, which is perfect freedom. To this paradox all obedience, as it grows perfect, invariably tends. A law that is "heteronomous," imposed from the outside, can never be perfectly obeyed. As soon as obedience is perfect, from the heart, the law ceases to be heteronomous and becomes self-imposed: the obeyer of the law becomes his own dictator, and is, as such, a free man. His law is a law of liberty. Freedom means not deliverance from law, which would be anarchy, but voluntary acceptance of law, self-identification with law. Hence, Christ makes his followers free, not by releasing them from restrictions, but by making them members of his

own body, joint heirs with himself, making his own attitude to the law, which is the same as his Father's, their attitude also. This conception of freedom is not, as is sometimes supposed, confined to S. Paul among New Testament writers, though it is S. Paul who most carefully elaborates it. The mere fact that S. James also glories in the idea makes it difficult to believe that Christianity is here a debtor to Stoicism. True, the Stoic prided himself on his freedom: but on freedom itself, and also on the way to it, there is between Stoicism and Christianity fundamental disagreement. The Stoic's freedom consists in aloofness from all the entanglements of a busy and passionate world, an àrάdea: the Stoic is above law because he condescends to acknowledge no law which can command him. He gains his lofty pinnacle through unremitting practice, constant cultivation of habit: if the entanglement is too clinging, he has the desperate remedy of suicide. The Christian is not without law he glories in being under the law, but under the law to Christ. Freedom, to the Christian, does not consist in being unbound, but in being bound completely. A man may seize my hand with his and bind it fast, that is slavery. Another may seize my will with his and hold it fast, so that with his mine moves inevitably and with perfect contentment,—that is freedom.

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Now, in what system of human relationship is this attitude of the subjects of law to the law itself and to the lawgiver carried out? To a certain extent in any free state where the body politic legislates for itself, or where the acts of the legislative body are freely and heartily accepted by the whole nation. Yet this at best is an approximation. In practice, a minority will always exist to find fault with the majority; and

some laws will receive at best but a forced and un

willing obedience. But in the system for which we are in search nothing that is enforced can be tolerated: perfect love must cast out fear and unwillingness alike. Not in the civic or political realm, but only in the ideal family relationship can we reach our object. It is there alone that we have in its completeness the relation, not of contract, but of status, where law itself is forgotten by the side of the unity of the personal will existing between the parents and the children. And this is precisely the conclusion to which, as we have said, we are led by every page of the New Testament. The family indeed is the end, as it is the beginning, of human society. The relations of father and son have been from everlasting and shall be to everlasting. Here in our human life nothing nobler is known than the devotion, affection, sacrifice and unity of the perfectly welded family; and Christ's clearest descriptions of the relations of men to God and to their fellows which he came to found, imply and rest upon the perfect understanding, based on obedience and love, that lives between the Father and the Son. Nowhere in the New Testament

is there a completer expression of the ideal of the 66 new creation" to which all the other books bear their witness, than in Christ's "high priestly," or more correctly, filial and brotherly prayer, consecrating the whole family to God-" that they may all be one: even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee; that they also may be one in us . . . that the world may believe that thou didst send me."

CHAPTER II

ETHICS OUTSIDE THE BIBLE

I. ALL this may be conceded as true of the Biblical

view of conduct; but most people will feel that the Biblical view of conduct is very different from that of ordinary ethics. Ethics, as that branch of philosophy which deals with right or proper conduct, has to take into consideration everything about conduct except the one thing which to the Bible is central, namely, God. Now by this we do not necessarily intend anything disrespectful to ethics; ethical investigation, in its universal appeal, is perfectly justified if it can "do without that hypothesis." And there is this further reason for the neglect of God. In the preceding chapter we have been constantly referring to the Hebrews; ethics as a whole points back rather to the Greeks; it derives its inspiration rather from the Athenian academy than the lake of Galilee; and to Greek thought, as distinct from Greek religion, God was at best a shadowy being, about whom it was as well not to speak with too much confidence or detail.

This attitude has characterised ethics throughout its history. No writer on ethics, even in the last century, was distinctively Christian. Martineau came nearest to being so; but the tone of the "Types of Ethical Theory" is different from that of the "Study of Religion"; piety is there; but it is held in leash.