On the other hand, it is pointed out that with S. Paul the condition of salvation is faith; but the faith that saves is emphatically the faith that works, and that without works is dead. This is made abundantly plain in the ethical sections of every one of the longer epistles. Only one to whom conduct and belief were in thought inseparable could have written, while introducing a detailed list of duties, "be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind; that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God"; or, "for this ye know of a surety, that no whoremonger or unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God"; and immediately afterwards, "ye were sometimes darkness; but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light." This can only mean that duties to men are service to God. Whenever law is mentioned in the New Testament, even in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the merely ritual side is entirely neglected, vulnerable as it was; it is the moral side which is attacked for its imperfection, and then reaffirmed and exalted in him who came to fulfil it.

But far more convincing than any array of texts is the consideration of the general attitude of Old Testament and New Testament alike to God and the law of God. The belief in God never receives any philosophical or metaphysical justification. It is rooted, not in the intellect but in the conscience. What corruption is that when it is corrupted, man demands of Godt hat in return for his sacrifices and prayers, God should fulfil his desires— should become the servant of a man; whereas according to true faith, man feels that God demands of him, a man, the fulfilment of His will, -demands that man should serve Him."

1 Rom. 122; Eph. 55 8.

differentiates Jehovah from other gods is his righteousness; and the demand for righteous dealing in his people, and the appeal to his own righteous dealing with them, are sufficient credentials for his messengers. For a speculative religion the Semites had no genius; and the refusal to accept the allegiance of ritual observances, which occupied the field of religion for other Semites, was pressed home on the Hebrews by prophet and even by priest, as the supreme vindication of Him who claimed to be above all gods. In the New Testament, the credential of the gospel is the single assertion, "this one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see"; and this seeing, for Nicodemus as for the woman of Samaria, means beholding and obeying a Saviour from sin, the Christ who came to restore men from systems (whether Jewish or pagan) which neglected ethics but respected observances, to a system whose only sacrifice was that of a broken and a contrite heart.

II. We may take it, then, that right conduct is the beginning and end of Biblical religion; the beginning, because God comes to man first of all with a law; the end, because it was to fulfil the law that Christ himself was sent into the world. But what is the standard of this right conduct? Is it the same in the Old Testament and in the New? Does it not seem as if in actual fact Christ supplemented rather than fulfilled and reaffirmed the law as laid down in the Old Testament ? Job, ch. 31, may be taken as a picture of the Hebrew conception of the moral ideal; and we cannot overlook its large and inclusive majesty. It embraced the mutual relations of mankind in their widest application; it affirmed the universal worth of justice, truthfulness, and sincerity, though it had little

to say of bravery or self-sacrifice; it made much of personal purity and self-control, and exalted patriotism from being the discharge of a duty to one's fellowcitizens, into the rendering of an honour to the national God. Nor can we withhold our admiration when we find the Hebrew ideal extolling the man who could stand proud and unreproved in the gate, saying nothing of the mortification of the saint, though commending the position of the man who has no riches either to abuse or to enjoy; passing over love, as a general attitude to mankind, in the attention it pays to a large-hearted hospitality, especially to the needy and the stranger within the gate. We are conscious of moving within a narrower world when we turn to the moral ideal of the Sermon on the Mount and the Epistle of S. James.

This is true. Passing from the attractive picture of the Hebrew, clothed in his varied robes of righteousness, to the John-the-Baptist-like figure, clothed in skins, and wandering, as it were, with no abiding city here, in deserts and mountains and caves, we seem to enter a moral atmosphere at once cramping and austere. Christianity has raised to a pre-eminence which many have called vicious the virtues of humility, longsuffering, self-abnegation; bidding its followers to "bear the reproach of Christ," as its phrase is; actually to count as gain the hatred of that world which "lieth in the evil one"; to despise, forsooth, all that makes for right conduct in the forum or on the battlefield; "a religion for women and slaves"! In a word, Christianity, it is urged, preaches self-denudation, not self-realisation. Unlike the Hebrew, the Christian must empty himself, we are reminded, of one recognised and admired virtue after another, till there is no

form or comeliness that men may desire; only the bare frame-of love.

All this is apparent when we turn to the short lists of virtues permitted to the Christian; these lists, indeed, are few as well as short, since so much of the ethical teaching of the New Testament is devoted to cautions against the wrong-doings of paganism. The "fruits of the Spirit" include long-suffering, kindness, meekness, self-control, and goodness or beneficence; they do not include patriotism, justifiable self-assertion, and "reasonable self-love." The man whom Christ pronounces blest is the man who would gain nothing but contempt or amused toleration from a pitying world-poor in spirit (poor-spirited, as his neighbours would immediately call him), merciful, eager only for that unprofitable thing, goodness, and welcoming every scorn and rebuff, like "a lamb led to the slaughter." The would-be follower of Christ must sell all that he has, must hate his own parents and family, and even his own life-" else he cannot be my disciple"; he must crucify the flesh with the affections and lusts thereof. It was the Son of thunder who considered that hatred shut the heart to the light of God as effectually as murder; it was the Pharisee of the Pharisees, the fiery and passionate Saul, who warned against all bitterness and wrath and clamour, who gloried in tribulation, and counted all on which the Jew most prided himself as refuse, and was willing to regard himself and be regarded by others as the filth and offscouring of the world.

The same ideal of self-renunciation, of stooping to gain what seems at best a problematical conquest, of non-resistance to evil, of willingness to endure suffering and wrong, is to be met with in the rest of the New

"1

Testament. The disciple who, to avoid the contumely of an unpopular connexion, said of his master, " I never knew him," is found urging that "when you do well and suffer for it, ye shall take it patiently," adding poignantly "for hereunto were ye called, because Christ also suffered for you"; or in other words, recalling the Beatitudes, "if ye shall suffer for righteousness' sake, blessed are ye"; or again, "inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings, rejoice." " The whole duty of man, according to New Testament ethics, might be summed up in the significant words of S. James, "the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." And this was precisely the aspect of Christian conduct that impressed the heathen. Beneath the caricatures of Celsus and Lucian, we can distinguish the zeal for hospitality,—that strange hospitality which had excited the world's hostility to "the friend of publicans and sinners," the suspicion of wealth or influence, the meekness which gave the other cheek also and did not resist evil.

2

III. The world has not erred in regarding this ideal of conduct as distinctively Christian; alien alike to the Old Testament and to paganism. Where then shall we look for its source?

In the environment of early Christianity, some have replied. The circumstances of the church in its beginning made such an ideal inevitable. The Old Testament was inseparable from the religion of a nation, and of a nation which had constantly to assert itself and its God before the Gentiles. Self-repression there would have meant annihilation. All the morality 2 James 317.

1 I Pet. 220 21 314 413.