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remembrance of the founder's opposition to Jewish legalism. Indeed the influence of this opposition, as fantastically understood and exaggerated by some of the Gnostic sects of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., led to a dangerous depreciation of rules of external duty;-sometimes even (if the charges of orthodox opponents are not entirely to be discredited) to gross immorality of conduct and a similar tendency has shown itself at other periods of Church history. And though such "antinomianism" has always been sternly repudiated by the moral consciousness of Christendom in general, it has never been forgotten that "inwardness," rightness of heart or spirit, is the special and pre-eminent characteristic of Christian goodness. It must not, indeed, be supposed that the need of something more than mere fulfilment of external duty was ignored even by the later Judaism. Rabbinic erudition could not forget the repression of vicious desires in the tenth commandment, the stress laid in Deuteronomy on the necessity of heartfelt and loving service to God, or the inculcations by later prophets of humility and faith. "The real and only Pharisee," says the Talmud, "is he who does the will of his Father because he loves Him." But it remains true that the contrast with the "righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees" has always served to mark the requirement of "inwardness" as a distinctive feature of the Christian code,-an inwardness not merely negative, tending to the repression of vicious desires as well as vicious acts, but also involving a positive rectitude of the inner state of the soul.

In this aspect Christianity invites comparison with Stoicism, and indeed with pagan ethical philosophy generally, if we except the hedonistic schools. Rightness of purpose, preference of virtue for its own sake, suppression

of vicious desires, were made essential points by the Aristotelians, who attached the most importance to outward circumstances in their view of virtue, no less than by the Stoics, to whom all external things were indifferent. The fundamental differences between pagan and Christian ethics do not depend on any difference in the value set on rightness of heart or purpose, but on different views of the essential form or conditions of this inward rightness. In neither case is it presented purely and simply as moral rectitude. By the pagan philosophers it was always conceived under the form of Knowledge or Wisdom,-it being inconceivable to all the schools sprung from Socrates that a man could truly know his own good and yet deliberately choose anything else. This knowledge, as Aristotle held, might be permanently precluded by vicious habits, or temporarily obliterated by passion, but if present in the mind it must produce rightness of purpose. Or even if it were held with some of the Stoics that true wisdom was out of the reach of the best men actually living, it none the less remained the ideal condition of perfect human life; though all actual men were astray in folly and misery, knowledge was none the less the goal towards which the philosopher progressed, the realisation of his true nature. By Christian evangelists and teachers, on the other hand, the inner springs of good conduct were generally conceived as Faith and Love. Of these notions the former has a Faith. somewhat complex ethical import; it seems to blend several elements differently prominent in different minds. Its simplest and commonest meaning is that emphasised in the contrast of "faith" with "sight," where it signifies belief in the invisible divine order represented by the Church, in the actuality of the law, the threats, the promises

of God, in spite of all the influences in man's natural life that tend to obscure this belief. Out of this contrast there ultimately grew an essentially different opposition between faith and knowledge or reason, according to which the theological basis of ethics was contrasted with the philosophical; the theologians maintaining sometimes that the divine law is essentially arbitrary, the expression of will, `not of reason; more frequently that its reasonableness is inscrutable, and that actual human reason should confine itself to examining the credentials of God's messengers, and not the message itself. But in early Christianity this latter antithesis is as yet undeveloped; faith means simply force in clinging to moral and religious conviction, whatever their precise rational grounds may be; this force, in the Christian consciousness, being inseparably bound up with personal loyalty and trust towards Christ, the leader in the battle with evil that is being fought, the ruler of the kingdom to be realised. So far, however, there is no ethical difference between Christian faith and that of Judaism, or its later imitation Mahometanism; except that the personal affection of loyal trust is peculiarly stirred by the blending of human and divine natures in Christ, and the rule of duty impressively taught by the manifestation of His perfect life. A more distinctively Christian, and a more deeply moral, significance is given to the notion in the antithesis of "faith" and "works." Here faith means more than loyal acceptance of the divine law and reverent trust in the lawgiver; it implies a consciousness, at once continually present and continually transcended, of the radical imperfection of all

erely human obedience to the law, and at the same time of the irremissible condemnation which this imperfection entails. The Stoic doctrine of the worthlessness of ordinary human

virtue, and the stern paradox that all offenders are equally, in so far as all are absolutely, guilty, find their counterparts in Christianity; but the latter, while maintaining this ideal severity in the moral standard, with an emotional consciousness of what is involved in it quite unlike that of the Stoic, at the same time overcomes its practical exclusiveness through faith. This "saving" faith, again, may be conceived in two modes, essentially distinct though usually combined. In one view it gives the believer strength to attain, by God's supernatural aid or "grace," a goodness of which he is naturally incapable; in another view it gives him an assurance that, though he knows himself a sinner deserving of utter condemnation, a perfectly just God still regards him. with favour on account of the perfect services and suffering of Christ. Of these views the former is the more catholic, more universally present in the Christian consciousness at all periods of its history; the latter claims to penetrate more deeply the mystery of Christ's atonement, as expounded in the Pauline epistles.

But faith, however understood, is rather an indispensable Love. pre-requisite than the essential motive principle of Christian good conduct. This is supplied by the other central notion, love. On love depends the "fulfilling of the law," and the whole moral value of Christian duty,—that is, on love of God, in the first place, which in its fullest development must spring from Christian faith; and, secondly, love of all men, as the objects of divine love and sharers in the humanity ennobled by the incarnation. This derivative philanthropy, whether conceived as mingling with and intensifying natural human affection, or as absorbing and transforming it, characterises the spirit in which all Christian performance of social duty is to be done;

loving devotion to God being the fundamental attitude of mind that is to be maintained throughout the whole of Purity. the Christian's life. But further, as regards abstinence from unlawful acts and desires prompting to them, we have to notice another form in which the inwardness of Christian morality manifests itself, which, though less distinctive, should yet receive attention in any comparison of Christian ethics with the view of Greco-Roman philosophy. The profound horror with which the Christian's conception of a suffering as well as an avenging divinity tended to make him regard all condemnable acts was tinged with a sentiment which we may perhaps describe as a ceremonial aversion moralised, the aversion, that is, to foulness or impurity. In Judaism, as in other—especially Oriental-religions, the dislike of material defilement was elevated into a religious sentiment, and made to support a complicated system of quasi-sanitary abstinences and ceremonial purifications; then, as the ethical element predominated in the Jewish religion, a moral symbolism was felt to reside in the ceremonial code, and thus aversion to impurity came to be a common form of the ethico-religious sentiment. Then, when Christianity threw off the Mosaic ritual, this religious sense of purity was left with no other sphere besides morality; while, from its highly idealised character, it was peculiarly well adapted for that repression of vicious desires which Christianity claimed as its special function.1

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When we examine the details of Christian morality, we Distinctive find that most of its distinctive features are naturally conparticulars of Christian nected with the more general characteristics just stated; Morality. though many of them may also be referred directly to the

1 I here understand "purity of heart" in its wider sense:- as opposed to vice in general, not merely to sexual vice.