Relation Of Christian To Pre-Christian Morality
LANDMARKS
NEW TESTAMENT MORALITY.
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RELATION OF CHRISTIAN TO PRE-
CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
The religion of Christ came into the world rather as a new power than as an absolutely new creed.
It never dreamed of assuming a position of complete and starthng originality; such an attitude would have destroyed it at its birth.
Its preliminary hope of success lay in its possibilities of union with the old faiths of humanity; its greatest claim to novelty was just its power to incorporate these faiths.
From the very beginning of its career its watchword was "reconciliation;" by its own admission it came "not to destroy but to fulfil."
Its proudest boast was, that in Christ it had gathered together all things.
It professed to have found a meeting-place for the divergent views, for the divergent hearts of men, to have broken down the A
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middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, and to have at last made it possible that all might "come into an unity of faith unto the measure of the stature of the perfect man.'
It will not surprise us, then, that Christianity as an intellectual system reveals the fruit of other intellectual systems.
If the religious life, like all other lives, be an evolution, we shall expect to find in the flower the traces and evidences of the seed.
Christianity is by common admission the flower of the religious consciousness, but for that very reason it is related to the earth beneath as well as to the heaven above.
It has grafted itself on the stem of nature, and has thereby become a natural religion.
It professes to be the most natural of all religions, because it claims to reconcile the discords of nature.
It gives expression in one voice to all those instincts of the heart which the old world had expressed in many voices—" in various forms and diverse parts."
It has the Brahmanical sense of mysticism, the Buddhist feeling of present depression, the Parsee conviction of sin, the Confucian hope of a coming kingdom of bin It appropriates the theocratic spirit of Judea, the esthetic spirit of Greece, the legal spirit of Rome, the philosophic spirit of India, and it appropriates them because it claims to have been itself their originator—the light which in the past had hehted every man.
In no sphere is this appropriative power of
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Christianity so distinctly manifest as in the domain of its ethics.
Here, if anywhere, it was essential that the revelation should not be wholly new.
A religion whose primary aim was to commend itself to the natural conscience must of necessity make its appeal to the moral instincts of the natural heart.
Accordingly, there is nothing so easy as to find parallels between the precepts of Christ and the precepts of other masters.
_ It is easy to find His golden rule amidst the teachings of Confucius, His principle that humility is the road to greatness amid the reputed sayings of Lao-T'se.
It is not difficult in the writings of Hillel, of Philo, of Seneca, to lay our hand on passages that will prove the precept of brotherly love to belong to the revelation of nature.
But what then?
In putting our hand upon such parallels we are not depreciating but illustrating the work of Christianity.
We are showing that the work of Christianity has been from the outset a process of incorporation, a process of reconciliation.
We are pointing to the fact that it has achieved its moral greatness by reason of its moral adaptation, and that the secret of its regenerative power is its power to re-create without destroying.
Christianity has not overridden the moral systems of the past ; it has only overridden their antagonisms.
In the life of the old world these moral systems refused to coalesce.
Each held itself to be the absolute truth, and each denied the right of existence to the other.
Christianity came with a new
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life, and the hostile elements ran into unity.
'They ceased each and all of them to be absolute truths, but they became the component parts of an absolute truth, and the strength which in days of old was thought to lie in their isolation was found to consist in their reconciliation and their union.
Such has been the moral work of Christianity in the world.
It has done for the ethical systems of the past what the vital force has done for the elements of the physical structure—kept them together in 'unity.
It has given them a new reason for their existence, a new claim on the suffrages of mankind.
They no longer ask to be judged by their contrast, but by their relationship.
Hach claims to be viewed as the member of a great whole, and finds the justification of its being in the fact that it subserves an universal interest.
It is to the exhibition of this union between the new life of Christianity and the moral elements of the old world that we purpose to devote this opening chapter.
At the time when Christianity rose on the world there were in existence three great moral systems, which may be taken as the types of all morality— the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Platonic.
The Epicurean proposed as the basis of all action the love of self—the happiness of the individual agent.
It does not follow from this that the Epicureans were of necessity sensual.
They might or they might not be so; it depended on their individual ideas of happiness.
The first men of the school
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were the reverse of sensual.
Their idea of happiness was moderation, an equable calm, a mind undisturbed by any excitement either of grief or joy.
To the founder of the sect himself, and to his immediate followers, the greatest boon of life was a balanced intellect—an intellect in which each mode of thought and feeling had its legitimate amount of exercise, so much and nomore.
Such a doctrine is indeed very far from sensualism ; it is one which could only be exemplified in the restraint of the sensual impulse.
Nevertheless in its very root and essence the creed of Epicurus was the religion of self-interest.
In its best and purest form it did not teach that self-interest lay exclusively in sense ; but it never ceased to teach that a man's individual interest ought to be the motive of his actions.
It never ceased to proclaim that the rule of my conduct should be its effect upon myself, that the cuide of my life should be the search for personal pleasure and the avoidance of personal pain.
Men in this school, as in all schools, might differ as to what constituted personal pleasure, or involved the highest degree of personal pain; that was a question to be variously determined by the various grades of culture and of character.
But in the meantime the broad principle was laid down that every man's ideal should be himself—his own interest, his own welfare, his own happiness.
In the glass of the universe he is to behold no other glory than his own, and no other image than his reflected
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shadow.
In looking into that glass he is to experience a process the opposite to that of which St. Paul spoke.
The Apostle of the Gentiles had his image transfigured into the forms on which he gazed; the Epicurean is to transmute all forms into his own image.
He is to measure everything by its power to serve Aim; that it may have power to serve the universe also is an irrelevant fact.
As Professor Wallace *. points out, the Epicurean is not an utilitarian; he is an individualist.
He looks upon the world as his oyster, which he is to open.
It makes little difference to him whether there be, or be not, ends to be compassed by human life beyond his personal control, and irrespective of his personal existence.
He does not deny that such ends may exist, but he denies that they have any right to influence ham; there may be gods above us, but the individual man has nothing to do with them.
The individual man has to do with nothing but his own individualism—his private wants, his personal desires, his conscious appropriation of the benefits of life.
His motive is happiness, his aim is self-preservation, and his highest philosophy is self-contemplation; within the limits of the world of self he must live and move and have his being.
At the opposite remove from this Epicurean individualism is the system called Stoicism.
If the Epicurean placed the value of life in the ministra- * Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth ed., vol. viii. p. 475.
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a tion of the race to the individual, the Stoic placed its value in the ministration of the individual to the race.
'The object of the Epicurean was the one; the object of the Stoic was the many.
The Epicurean set before him the thought of self, and to the furtherance of self he sought to use the lives of others; the Stoic set before him the thought of others, and in the furtherance of their interest he strove to sink himself.
He is popularly represented as a man whose philosophic aim was to reach the contempt of pain and pleasure.
The popular notion is a half-truth, and the other half is much more distinctive of Stoicism.
That the disciples of this philosophy did strive to obtain a mastery over their individual feelings of pain and pleasure is a fact undisputed and indisputable, but they strove for it as a means, not as an end.
They desired to conquer the sense of individual pain and pleasure, not for the sake of the conquest, but for the sake of that benefit to the world which they deemed the conquest would bring.
They thought that if a soul could get above a sense of its own interests it would be better able to realize the interest of the community at large, better able to consult the public welfare and to seck the common good.
If Stoicism had been no more than a wish to free the soul from perturbations of feeling, then Stoicism would have been only Epicureanism under a new name; it would have been simply a renewal of the effort after a balanced mind.
But here lay the
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difference of the two creeds.
To the Epicurean even in his purest days a calm mind was only desirable as a source of selfish rest,—something which would enable a man to hold aloof from the struggles of life.
To the Stoic, on the other hand, the calm mind was an object of desire for a precisely opposite reason; he sought it as an aid to the struggles of life, as a means of making him more helpful to the cause of humanity.
The real object of the Stoic's contemplation was the sphere of universal being—the family, the nation, mankind, the Universe.* His interest was not limited even to the human; it ranged over the whole creation, animate and inanimate.
It took in bud and flower and tree; it embraced reptile and bird and beast.
One sphere alone it sought to ignore—the pleasures and pains of the spirit that contemplated them, but in ignoring that sphere it was actuated by the hope that the spirit, oblivious to its own grief or joy, might better identify itself with the will of the Universe.
The third system of the old world morality is Platonism.
Ideally, though not historically, it is to be regarded as an attempt to unite the two opposite tendencies which found expression in Epicureanism and in Stoicism.
Kpicureanism was self-interest, or the interest of the one; Stoicism was universal interest, or the interest of the many; Platonism was the attempt to unite in a new idea the interest
* A qualification to this statement, however, will be found in Chapter IX.
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mre of the many with the interest of the one.* The new idea by which it was sought to join them was a spiritual conception of God as the Supreme Good.t
The true interest of every man was the indwelling of God in his soul, and the indwelling of God in his soul would be best promoted by living together with his fellow-men in the interchange of virtuous relations ; the one would become the many and the many would become the one when it was seen that each had a life common to the other—the being of God Himself.
Here, then, was a third fragment of the old world's ethics.
Let us live for self, said the Epicurean ; Let us live for others, said the Stoic;
Nay, said the Platonist, let us live for the one other who is not another—God!
Is not this last the sum of all possible morality?
In words, it certainly is.
If the Platonic notion of God were coextensive with our modern notion of the universe, Platonism would have antedated Christianity by four hundred years.
But Plato's notion of God was not coextensive even with the notion of the Universe of his own day.
His God had nothing to do with what is called matter.
Matter was the symbol of the finite, and the finite was unworthy of God.
The only things which were really worthy of interest were eternal and immutable ideas; the senses had no place in the kingdom of regenerated souls.
'To enter that kingdom the senses must be * See the Dialogues, particularly the Purmenides.
+ Republic, Bk. vii. pp. 514-518.
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crucified, the personal affections extirpated, the love of the finite expunged.
Men must cease to love men; they must fix their hearts upon love itself.
Not the beautiful but their beauty, not the true but their truth, not the good but their goodness, must be the object of human affection.
God was Thought, and the love of God was the love of thought.
Things were but shadows, forms were but illusions, colours and sounds were but fleeting and perishable appearances ; but the abstract ideas of the intellect were eternal and immutable.
They were eternal because they were unseen, they were immutable because they were immaterial.
We need not say that such a conception of the love of God was destructive of what is called the love of man.
It only reached its goal by the mutilation of human nature.
To become absorbed in God was in a measure to be annihilated ; it was to lose all knowledge, all remembrance of worldly things.
But to lose such knowledge was to lose the spirit of philanthropy.
If in the life of God I am to forget the claims of my own physical nature, | am bound also to forget the physical claims of my brother-man.
This world as a world can be nothing to me.
Looking down from the Platonic height the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers, and their wants are as the wants of grasshoppers.
The existence of cold and hunger, of poverty and pain, of war and pestilence, is not worthy to be named.
'These are already non-exis-
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It tent; they are shadows, appearances, unsubstantial _ forms which live only in the imaginings of sense, and which shall vanish with the death of sense. That was the legitimate conclusion, and the only legitimate conclusion, from the principles of the Platonic philosophy.
Its doctrine of the love of God was to all intents and purposes an extension of the sphere of |
Kpicurus.
It tended to paralyze all interest in aught that was human.
Whatever patriotism it may have kindled for a Divine and impossible Republic, it awakened none for the vulgar wants of a commonplace earthly soil.
'The Platonic love of God, lke the Epicurean love of self and the Stoic love of universal nature, ended in representing only a frag- | ment of morality.
Tor here we must observe that not one of these systems is even professedly commensurate with the} whole of human nature ; every one of them in truth professes to be at variance with a part of the nature | of man.
None of them is wholly false; but each | of them insists on holding one side of a truth to the exclusion of its other sides.
Self-love, the love of | others, the love of God—these are all good things. | But they are good things in their unity, not in their) isolation, not in their mutual antagonism.
Tate, reanism said, Self-preservation is a law of nature.
- Epicureanism had a perfect right to say that, for it was true.
But when Epicureanism went on to say, Sclf-preservation is the law of nature, it changed its truth into a falsehood.
It denied that others
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as well as self had a claim on every man.
It set up the love of the individual as an antagonist to the love of the race, and by that act it lost its claim to interpret the whole heart of man.
Stoicism said, 'The preservation of the race is a law of nature.
Stoicism too had a perfect right to make that assertion; it was founded on the moral instincts of the soul.
But when Stoicism went on to say that the preservation of the race was the law of nature, it became one-sided, and therefore untrue.
It proposed to crucify the individual, to ignore the natural cravings of the heart, to dry up the well-springs of personal joy, and in so doing it became itself unnatural, a contradiction to the Universe it meant to serve.
Platonism said, The love of God is the law of nature, and besides it there is no other law.
And truly in saying thus Platonism spoke well, for to love that which is at the summit of the Universe is to have the key to all love.
But when Platonism went on to say, that God had nothing to do with the perishable shows of earthly things, it denied
Him to be at the summit of the Universe.
It narrowed Him into a corner, it excluded Him from all participation in the finite, it made the love of Him incompatible with the love of toiling millions.
It placed the circle of His life in a region outside the lives of men, and he who would enter the precincts of the Divine temple must drop at the threshold all sympathies with the human.
Here, then, are three ideas whose isolation, whose
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Ty mutual antagonism prevents any one of them from being true—self-love, brotherly love, Divine love.
Is there anywhere to be found a bond that can unite these fragments?
Is there anywhere in existence a system that can recognize the truth of each in an unity that embraces all?
Such a system Christianity professes to be.
Whatever may be the view taken of the relation of Christian theology to the creeds of the past, there can, we think, be no doubt as to the relation of Christian morality to the moralities of the past..
Christianity has put its design in this matter beyond a doubt by giving in a single sentence the sum of all it means to teach: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, this is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
Let us examine this remarkable passage as a contribution to the science of ethics.
Leaving out of view in the meantime all reference to Judaism, let us try to see what bearing such a precept had on the moral creeds of Gentile ages.
Are we in the presence of a moral revolution?
Are we about to witness the annulling of all former verdicts of conscience?
Is the new doctrine of the blessed life to be one which sets at naught all the old doctrines, and ushers the human soul into an untrodden field?
Such are the questions that meet us on the threshold.
In part they are answered as soon as asked.
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It does not take long to see that we have not here the elements for a revolution.
''Love thy God;" "love thy neighbour;" 'love thyself'"— these are the component parts of the moral law of Christianity.
But every one of these precepts has already met us in the old world.
'" Love thyself" was the creed of the Epicurean; "love thy neighbour" was the creed of the Stoic; "love thy God" was the creed of the Platonist.
It is the elements of heathendom that meet us in the moral code of Christendom.
Christianity rears a new temple, but it is from the scattered stones of ancient ruined structures.
Within her moral Pantheon she finds a place for the three great representatives of Greek humanity ; nay, it is on the union of these that she proposes to base her ethics.
She proposes to construct a system in which the barriers to all other systems shall be broken down, in which selflove shall no longer be the antithesis to the love of our neighbour, in which neither shall any longer be opposed to the love of God.
In this sacred temple of reconstructed truth the pleasure of the individual is to coexist with the development of the race, and the spirit of religion is to be furthered by both ;
Kpicurus, Zeno, and Plato are to stand side by side.
Here is a scheme of very striking originality—an originality which lies in the very power to gather and appropriate old materials.
But we are as yet only on the surface of the inquiry.
We have seen that Christianity claims for herself the three frag-
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TS ments of Greek morality, and proposes to unite them into a great whole.
The aim is good, but how is it to be achieved?
It is clear that in the Christian system the three Greek elements cannot arise simultaneously.
No doubt they are intended ultimately to exist together in the same mind and at the same time, but that is the goal, the final stage of their being.
To reach that stage the Christian consciousness has to pass through a process in which one or other of the three elements seeks the undivided empire of the soul.
The question is, In what order do they claim this empire?
Conceding that there is in Christianity an Epicurean element, a Stoic element, and a Platonic element, which of them comes first in "point of time?
Do we begin with the love of God and then pass down to the love of men, and end at last with the love of self?
Or, do we follow the opposite course?
Do we begin with the love of self, and rise up into the love of men, and culminate in the love of God?
These are the alternatives; which shall we pursue?
Let us see whether the Christian code itself can help us to a decision.
Now in that sum of Christian morality to which we have referred there is one point which is very distinctly indicated ; it is implied beyond all controversy that in the development of the individual mind self-love must precede brotherly love.
The grounds on which we base this conclusion are the words: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: '
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'The idea clearly is, that a man in the act of benefiting his brother-man can have no other standard than this: What would I like done to myself under similar circumstances ?—in other words, an application of the Golden Rule.
The very fact that I wish to give pleasure to my brother implies that I have already experienced the sensation in myself, and would not object to experience it again.
What is the impulse that impels me to save a man from drowning ?—is it not the sense that life is dear?
If I never at any moment had felt life to have been a source of personal joy, it would be impossible for me to be stirred to pity by the prospect of a man losing life.
The essence of all human love is sympathy ; that is to say, it is the power to feel yourself in the place of another.
Sympathy in its intellectual aspect is the imaginary appropriation of another's grief or joy.
But before a man can imagine he must feel.
If you have never felt that pleasure is sweet and that pain is bitter, if you have never known the personal joy of individual possession, if you have never experienced a thrill of delight at the moment when you have received a stroke of good fortune, how is it possible that the good or bad fortune of your brother-man can be fraught to you with any sympathetic interest ?
How is it possible that you can attribute to another a sense of pleasure or a sense of pain which you. yourself have never felt within your own soul?
It is not possible, and therefore one
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part of the problem is already solved.
No man can seek the interest of another until he has learned in experience the meaning of self-interest ; the Epicurean element of self-love must precede in _order of time the Stoic element of brotherhood.
"Love thy neighbour as thyself" is the doctrine inscribed upon the porch of the Christian temple, and it has not been effaced by the hand of time.
It is the watchword of modern science at this hour.
That self-love must be prior to all other loves, that the appreciation of personal interest must be anterior to enthusiasm for the interest of others, is a truth which the spirit of evolution bas appropriated as its own, but it has appropriated it from that very source which is superficially supposed to be its opposite—the religion of the Son of man.*
What, then, is that process of transition by which the love of self passes into the love of others, by which the rule called Number One is transformed into the Golden Rule?
It is that very power of sympathy of which we have been speaking.
There is in the human mind, in all its phases and in all its stages of development, a power of conceiving how another would be affected by experiencing its own pleasures or its own pains.
We say, in all stages of its development.
'The statement may appear absurd to those who hold the doctrine of Hobbes, but in reality it is no less compatible with * See the chapter of Herbert Spencer, entitled, Zyoism versus Altruism.
— Data of Ethics, p. 187.
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that doctrine than with any other.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that men were originally in what Hobbes calls a state of nature—a state of mutual enmity.
Let us suppose that at first the only principles which regulated the actions of men were a spirit of aggression on the one hand and a desire for retaliation on the other; we say that even from such seemingly discordant elements we can educe the fact of man's power to sympathise with man.
For, have we ever considered what is implied in the desire for retaliation ; nothing less than a man's power to put himself in thought into the place of another.
What a man says under the influence of the revengeful spirit is this: My neighbour has done to me that which has given me pain; if I do the same to him I shall give him pain!
What is this thought but an act of intellectual sympathy?
The man is under the influence of a spirit of revenge, but that spirit itself implies as the very condition of its existence that he has the power to think of his own pain as if it were not his own pain but the suffering of another.
Now, that is intellectual sympathy, and intellectual sympathy is the root of all sympathy.
True, it is as yet only the feeling with another, not the feeling for another.
It is a higher thing to feel for than merely to feel with.
If I feel for a man [ am on the borders of love, but I may feel with him and be on the borders of revenge.
In certain moods of mind it may give me pleasure to
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imagine my brother affected with my pain; this is just what is called the spirit of revenge, and it is one form of the spirit of evil.
Nevertheless the power which in this case makes for evil is the very power which in other circumstances will make for good.
'To be able to feel that my pain may at any moment become the pain of another is the essential condition to all benevolence.
The first and longest step of the process is already taken even in the state of savage enmity, for the power of sympathy underlies the spirit of retaliation, and the germ of peace is folded in the heart of war.
In the unfolding of this germ Christianity follows a very different method from that pursued by Stoicism.
Stoicism's method is the annihilation of / self to make room for others; Christianity's is the enlargement of self to include others.
'' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" means, in its full acceptation, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as a part of thyself.
It is the doctrine of Christianity, and it is corroborated by modern science, that what a man calls his individual nature is in truth but one member of a great organism.
'No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself,' is the aphorism in which the religion of Christ expresses its sense of the solidarity of the Universe.
The main lesson which as a social being it desires man to learn is the fact that his individual joy cannot be purchased by individualism.
"The hand," says St. Paul, "cannot say to the foot, I have no need
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of thee."
No man is himself without another.
The personal life only reaches its full consciousness when it has identified itself with all life.
The nearer it comes to this identification the nearer it approaches to individual joy.
In its expansion from an isolated unit into the member of a family, in its growth from simple membership into the responsibility of headship, in its passage from the cares of the householder to the cares of the citizen, from the cares of the citizen to the enthusiasm of the patriot, from the enthusiasm of the patriot to the love of the philanthropist, it goes from stage to stage of personal strength, and reaches more and more of personal joy; the Stoic becomes an Epicurean again ; he that loseth his life finds it.
So far, then, the order of the Christian evolution is clearly determined.
We have seen that in the view of Christianity the love of self must in point of time precede the love of others.
But there is a third object of love recognised by Christianity, and recognised more emphatically than either of the others: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart."
In what order is the love of God to come?
Is it to precede, or is it to follow, the love of our neighbour?
To that question Platonism and Christianity both give an unequivocal answer ; but the answer of Platonism is not the answer of Christianity.
Platonism says, Love God before all other things; begin at the head of the ladder, and then descend as far as you can descend without
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losing sight of the Divine Idea.
Christianity, on the other hand, says, Begin with the love of men; start from the foot, and not from the top of the ladder ; enter first into communion with the heart of your brother, and ascend thence into fellowship with the heart of God: " He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?"
And clearly, if the love of God is to form any part of a moral system, it is unquestionable that Christianity is right.
If God is to be to me anymore than an abstraction, He must be conceived by me as the fulness of humanity ;* if He is to be conceived by me as the fulness of humanity, I must already have mastered that conception.
What meaning of Divine Love can I form that has not its root in human love?
When I define God Himself as Love, I merely intensify my imagination of the human feeling.
If I have no human feeling, what meaning can I attach to the Divine attribute ?
When I call God light, I convey to myself a distinct idea; but why?
Because I have experienced the physical nature of light.
When I call God Love, when I speak of His love to me, when I speak of my love to Him, I have again a distinct idea; but why ?. Because in my own person I have learned what it is to love.
We are not here asking whether our notion of personality be or be not adequate to explain the nature of God; that is a question fur
* This is indeed the moral basis of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation.
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the theologian, perhaps still more for the metaphysician.
We merely say that if the love of God be included in the study of ethics at all, it can only be a sublimation of the love which the good man bears to goodness.
If there be any moral value in the love of God, it can only be in the fact that God is a moral being.
There is nothing necessarily - moral in the idea that a man loves; it depends on what he loves.
There have been men who have fixed their heart upon a false ideal of heroism, and whose love has made them immoral.
What makes it a good trait in any man to love God is the fact that God is conceived to be good.
The' love of God is the love of morality personified ; that is the reason why we praise the pious.
But before a man can love morality in God, he must love it in man; his thought of the Unseen must be modelled on his image of the seen.
Morality must precede religion.
If to me virtue is not already beautiful, it will not be made so by the mere fact that it dwells in God ; rather must God become God to me because it dwells in Him.
By the steps of the finite must I climb to the source of the Infinite beauty.
By the path of the Stoic I must reach the joy of the Platonist.
By the service of my brother, whom I have seen, I must find the love and the loveliness of God whom I have not seen.
We have thus tried to indicate in brief compass our view of the relation which the morality of the Christian religion bears to the morality of the pre-
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Christian Gentile world.
We have exhibited the three great types of the Hellenic mind—the Epicurean, the Stoic, and the Platonist.
We have selected these, not so much because they were the forms of thought which were brought into closest historic contact with Christianity, as because they are the forms of thought which embrace all possible types of morality.
The distinctions comprehended in the names Epicurean, Stoic, Platonist, are by no means merely Hellenic distinctions; they will be found in all lands, and in all ages.
Other foundation for the conduct of life can no man lay than one or other of these—the love of self, the love of humanity, the love of God; and the religion which unites these has become the foundation of absolute morality.
That honour we have claimed for Christianity.
We have tried to show that the morality of Christ derives its originality from the fact that, alone of all ethical systems, it has proposed a scheme of moral reconciliation.
In the eighteenth century it was held to be a reproach that the elements of its teaching were as old as the creation.
We venture to think that in the nineteenth century —a century which values all things in proportion to their powers of adaptation—that which was a reproach has become a glory.
The modern conception of originality, and the glory of originality, is in some respects the reverse of the ancient one.
We no longer seek nor desire to see the advent of a phenomenon which has no connection with aught
CHRISTIAN AND PRE-CHRISTIAN MORALITY.
that has gone before ; we should not now think such an advent a grand thing.
That which commands the admiration of our age is the appearance of a force which manifests itself in the incorporation of other forces, of a life which can gather up and appropriate the scattered elements of bygone lives: that is our modern ideal of creative power.
And that is the ideal we find in Christianity.
Coming into the world as a new moral force, it has availed itself of the old moral materials, and in the combination of these materials it has taken a position which is unique and unparalleled.
It has offered a bond of union to elements which in all the ages of the past had existed in a state of isolation and antagonism, and in assigning to each a function of life within itself, it has vindicated before the world its eternal right to be.
Hach system of moral thought has been justified by the cross of Christ.
Things waxing old and ready to vanish away have in Him received their youth once more.
Elements which Paganism itself had discarded, have in Him been found to have their legitimate place in the life of man, and their legitimate use in the world of being.
The birth of Christianity was the resurrection of the fading hopes of nature ; the Gentiles came to its light, and the leaders of ancient thought to the brightness of its rising.
KELATION. OF FEWISH TO CHRISTIAN
MORALITY.
Ir may seem a strange thing, that in our survey of the relations existing between Christian and preChristian ethics we should have taken no account of that system, which beyond all ancient codes is entitled to the name of moral—the religious creed of the Jews.
Our omission was no oversight ; it had its ground in the fact that neither in the view of the rationalist nor of the supernaturalist is Judaism admitted to be essentially pre-Christian.
Alike to the rationalist and to the supernaturalist Judaism and Christianity are one; to the former
Christianity is the flower of Judaism, to the latter Judaism is the seed of Christianity.
The author of Ecce Homo tells us on the very first page of his work that Christianity had its root in a movement which did not begin with Christ; and Mr. Hardwick, approaching the subject from the standpoint of an exclusive orthodoxy, is not afraid to say that if the originality of Judaism be sacrificed, the originality of Christianity must fall.* * Christ and other Masters, 2nd ed. I. 81.
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