1. The question of motive is a primary one in Ethics. {153} If, therefore, we ask, What is the deepest spring of action, what is the incentive and motive power for the Christian? The answer is: (1) the love of God, a love which finds its highest expression in Forgiveness. Of all motives the most powerful is the sense of being pardoned. Even when it is only one human being who forgives another, nothing strikes so deep into the human heart or evokes penitence so tender and unreserved, or brings a joy so pure and lasting. It not only restores the old relation which wrong had dissolved; it gives the offender a sense of loyalty unknown before. He is now bound not by law but by honour, and it would be a disloyalty worse than the original offence if he wounded such love again. Thus it is that God becomes the object of reverence and affection, not because He imposes laws upon us but because He pardons and redeems. The consciousness of forgiveness is far more potent in producing goodness than the consciousness of law. This psychological fact lay at the root of Christ's ministry, and was the secret of His hope for man. This, too, is the key to all that is paradoxical, and, at the same time, to all that is most characteristic in St Paul's Gospel. What the Law could not do, forgiveness achieves. It creates the new heart, and with it the new holiness. 'It is not anything statutory which makes saints out of sinful men; it is the forgiveness which comes through the passion of Jesus.'[12]
(2) Next to the motive of forgiveness, and indeed arising from it, is the new consciousness of the Fatherhood of God, and the corresponding idea of sonship. This was a motive to which Jesus habitually appealed. He invariably sought not only to create in men confidence in God by revealing His fatherly providence, but also to lift them out of their apathy and thraldom by kindling in their souls a sense of their worth and liberty as sons of God. The same thought is prominent also in the epistles both of St. Paul and St. John. As children of God we are no longer menials and hirelings who do their work merely for pay, and without {154} intelligent interest, but sons who share our Father's possessions and co-operate with Him in His purposes.[13]
(3) Closely connected with the idea of Sonship is that of life as a Divine Vocation. Life is a trust, and as the children of God we are called to serve Him with all we have and are. The sense of the vocation and stewardship of life acts as a motive: (a) in giving dignity and stability to character, saving us, on the one hand, from fatalism, and on the other from fanaticism, and affording definiteness of purpose to all our endeavours; and (b) in promoting sincerity and fidelity in our life-work. Thoroughness will permeate every department of our conduct, since whatsoever we do in word or deed we do as unto God. All duty is felt to be one, and as love to God becomes its motive the smallest as well as the greatest act is invested with infinite worth. 'All service ranks the same with God.'
(4) Another motive, prominent in the Pauline Epistles, but present also in the eschatological passages of the Synoptics, ought to be mentioned, though it does not now act upon Christians in the same form—the Shortness and Uncertainty of life. Our Lord enjoins men to work while it is day for the night cometh; and in view of the suddenness and unexpectedness of the coming of the Son of Man He exhorts to watchfulness and preparedness. A similar thought forms the background of the apostle's conception of life. His entire view of duty as well as his estimate of earthly things are tinged with the idea that 'the time is short,' and that 'the Lord is at hand.' Christians are exhorted, therefore, to sit lightly to all worldly considerations. Our true citizenship is in heaven. But neither the apostle nor his Master ever urges this fact as a reason for apathy or indifference. Life may be brief, but it is not worthless. The thought of life's brevity must not act as an opiate, but rather as a stimulant. If our existence here is short, then there is all the greater necessity that its days should be nobly filled, and its transient opportunities seized and turned into occasions of strenuous service.
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(5) To the considerations just mentioned must be added a cognate truth which has coloured the whole Christian view of life, and has been a most powerful factor in shaping Christian conduct—the idea of Immortality. It is not quite correct to say that we owe this doctrine to Christianity alone. Long before the Christian era it was recognised in Egypt, Greece, and the Orient generally. But it was entertained more as a surmise than a conviction. And among the Greeks it was little more than the shadowy speculation of philosophers. Plato, in his Phaedo, puts into the mouth of Socrates utterances of great beauty and far-reaching import; yet, notwithstanding their sublimity, they scarcely attain to more than a 'perhaps.' Even in Hebrew literature, as we have seen, while isolated instances of a larger hope are not wanting, there is no confident or general belief in an after-life. But what was only guessed at by the ancients was declared as a fact by Christ, and preached as a sublime and comforting truth by the apostles; and it is not too much to say that survival after death is at once the most distinctive doctrine of Christianity and the most precious hope of Christendom. The whole moral temperature of the world, says Jean Paul Richter, has been raised immeasurably by the fact that Christ by His Gospel has brought life and immortality to light. This idea, which has found expression, not only in all the creeds of Christendom, but also in the higher literature and poetry of modern times, has given a new motive to action, has founded a new type of heroism, and nerved common men and women to the discharge of tasks from which nature recoils. The assurance that death does not end existence, but that 'man has forever,' has not only exalted and transfigured the common virtues of humanity; but, held in conjunction with the belief in the divine Fatherhood and human brotherhood, given to life itself a new solemnity and pathos.[14]
2. But if these are the things which actuate men in their service of God and man, can it be legitimately said that the Christian motive is pure and disinterested? It is {166} somewhat remarkable that two opposite charges have been brought against Christian Ethics.[15] In one quarter the reproach has been made that Christianity suppresses every natural desire for happiness, and inculcates a life of severe renunciation. And with equally strong insistence there are others who find fault with it because of its hedonism, because it rests morality upon an appeal to selfish interests alone.
(1) The first charge is sufficiently met, we think, by our view of the Christian ideal. We have seen that it is a full rich life which Christ reveals and commends. The kingdom of God finds its realisation, not in a withdrawal from human interests, but in a larger and fuller participation in all that makes for the highest good of humanity. It is a caricature of Christ's whole outlook upon existence to represent Him as teaching that this life is an outlying waste, forsaken of God and unblessed, and that the world is so hopelessly bad that it must be wholly renounced. On the contrary, it is for Him one of the provinces of the divine kingdom, and the most trivial of our occupations and the most transient of our joys and sorrows find their place in the divine order. It is not necessary to endorse Renan's idyllic picture of the Galilean ministry to believe that for Jesus all life, its ordinary engagements and activities, had a worth for the discipline and perfecting of character, and were capable of being consecrated to the highest ends. There are, indeed, not a few passages in which the call to self-denial is emphasised. But neither Christ nor His apostles represent pain and want as in themselves efficacious or meritorious. Renunciation is inculcated not for its own sake, but always as a means to fuller realisation. Jesus, indeed, transcends the common antithesis of life. For Him it is not a question as to whether asceticism or non-asceticism is best. Life is for use. It is at once a trust and a privilege. It may seem to some that He chose 'the primrose path,' but if he did so it was not due to an easy-going good-nature. We dare not forget the terrible issues {157} He faced without flinching. As Professor Sanday has finely said, 'If we are to draw a lesson in this respect from our Lord's life, it certainly would not be that
"He who lets his feelings run
In soft luxurious flow,
Shrinks when hard service must be done,
And faints at every woe."
It would be rather that the brightest and tenderest human life must have a stern background, must carry with it the possibility of infinite sacrifice, of bearing the cross and the crown of thorns.'[16]